Author: Mrs Ferguson

Primary 6/7 enjoyed some more technology fun this morning using their laptops and the Scratch Coding website! We joined an online Teams session with lots of other schools to create our own Christmas Wonderland adding coding to make our chosen sprites (with a Christmas theme so we had lots of polar bears, reindeer and snowflakes!) dance, sing and even clone themselves! Daisy worked out how to record Ellie speaking and add that to her talking polar bear too! It was great fun to see so much creativity on show!

 

UNCRC – Article 29 Aims of Education

Article 31 Rest, Play, Culture, Arts

This morning, both classes at Leswalt Primary enjoyed Financial Education online workshops with Lisa Cope the Financial Wellbeing Officer with Money Advice Scotland. We joined with Kirkcolm for our sessions which had been organised by Mrs McHarg.

P1-4 found out about budgeting for a day out by first of all imagining the very best day out with no budget at all! Lisa then gave them the costings for the zoo or aquarium for example and the pupils then needed to try and stick within their budget of £100 by maybe sacrificing lunch in the cafe for a good old homemade packed lunch! Life lessons indeed!

P6/7 followed next with their lesson based on budgeting for a birthday party. They planned their ideal party choosing from lists for venues, entertainment, decoration packs, food and a birthday cake. After they had chosen, they were given the costings for each and then …. the moment of truth as they found out about the budget they had at their disposal! Had they kept within the budget or were their some savings needing to be made?! Real-life situations as I am sure you’ll agree!

Many thanks to Lisa for such a fun and engaging session this morning – and to Mrs McHarg for organising it.

 

As we had the chance to meet up with our Kirkcolm buddies today for the Ross MacKenzie or Chae Strathie visits – we decided to make the absolute most of this opportunity by enjoying some STEM/topic learning fun with our friends!

P1-4 had fun together at Leswalt looking at Victorian toys from their Toys topic and playing with them in and outside. They also learnt how to play Hopscotch – a forgotten art!

P5-7 tried their hand at some STEM activities with Microbit Coding, Spheros Coding and tackling some Engineering challenges using K’Nex. Such fun to do this together – and particularly good when we have Lockerbie Manor and transition activities coming up soon and the P7s can get to know just a few more faces! 

A fun morning learning together with our buddies from around the coast. Hopefully we get to work together again soon!

 

We had the BEST morning! Not only were we visited by two award-winning authors – the fabulous Chae Strathie and amazing Ross MacKenzie – but we also got to buddy up with our good friends from Kirkcolm Primary to enjoy the experience!

P6/7 Leswalt hopped on the bus and travelled round the coast – whereby P1-4 Kirkcolm jumped aboard and headed back to Leswalt. It was a switchover!

The older class enjoyed listening to Ross Mackenzie talk about his journey to becoming an author – from being a young P5 pupil with not much interest in reading to having his world opened up by his class teacher reading the classic ‘The Witches’ by Roald Dahl! Young Ross decided then and there he wanted to be a writer – and safe to say, he’s never looked back!

As a class, we had enjoyed The Nowhere Emporium as a class novel last session. It was a fantastic read of mystery and magic and one which was developed into a trilogy of Emporium books. Some of us pre-ordered copies for Ross to sign. Ross has 9 published books and has just completed his 10th book – he encouraged us all to dream big! 

P1-4 from both primaries had a morning of fun and giggles with Chae Strathie) author of Dear Dinosaur and Gorilla Loves Vanilla to name just two). Listening to stories, chatting and drawing some fabulously funny ice-cream and dinosaur illustrations were the order of their day.

These visits were secured by Mrs McHarg and Mrs McKnight which was no mean feat as these authors are in high demand! How lucky are we that they agreed to visit our wee schools?!

As part of our Democracy and Government topic, we enjoyed a chat with MSP Finlay Carson to find out more about his role in representing us in Dumfries and Galloway!

He joined us via Microsoft Teams from the car as he travelled through to Castle Douglas. He’d had a busy morning of meetings in Stranraer at the Millennium Centre about a proposed new site for the railway station, a visit to the Riverside Centre in Newton Stewart and was heading home to deal with about 70 emails before heading up to Edinburgh where he is based midweek!

Mr Carson told us about the teamwork involved in his job – he works with 4 others who help him with speeches, research and organisation of his week. He meets with people in his local area on a Monday and a Friday and works at the Scottish Parliament Tuesday to Thursday working on committees, discussing issues in the Debating Chamber and meeting with cross party groups. He is the Convener of the Rural Affairs Committee which ties in well with his farming background and they discuss agriculture, wildlife, the countryside and , more recently, have been involved in looking at dog welfare in relation to the puppy smuggling and puppy farm news reports. These committees are set up to make a difference – and they really do!

Ben G, Ben T, Roman and Ewan were our Confident Individuals who asked questions which were sensible and well thought-out. We learned lots about the life of an MSP. Perhaps one day, it might be one of us representing our area!

UNCRC Article 13 Sharing Thoughts Freely

Article 24 – Health, Water, Food, Environment

Article 29 – Aims of Education

Today is Odd Socks Day – a day when we remember it’s cool to be different, it’s ok not to be the same as everyone else and, in fact, life is much more interesting when we don’t all look the same, like the same, do the same and believe in the same things! We celebrated our differences by wearing odd socks to school – a clear sign that we are all different and that’s a good thing!

Odd Socks Day kicks off Anti-Bullying week when we take the time to emphasise what bullying is and strategies for how to deal with this. The theme this year is ‘Choose Respect’ so we had a chat about what this means to us. As we are proud holders of our Gold Rights Respecting Schools Award, we had lots of ideas as to how to show respect towards ourselves and others and ways in which we can help to overcome bullying! This all links into our UNCRC learning with a focus on Article 2 No Discrimination and Article 19 Protection from Violence. All explored through teamwork and co-operation within our happy wee Leswalt team!

This term, P6/7 are finding out more about Democracy and Government. We started with a chat about this yesterday which tied in some interesting History and Current Affairs which both linked to politics and government – the story of Guy Fawkes and the US elections!

Today, we enjoyed an online session with the Scottish Parliament. We joined the Teams meeting and met Isabel who led us through a very interesting PowerPoint all about the Scottish Parliament building, how laws are made, the difference in powers between the UK and Scottish parliament and MSPs who represent us in the Scottish Parliament.

Isabel shared lots of information with us and we participated in a quiz which really got us thinking too.

FUN FACTS

Did you know?

Anyone can take an issue to the Petitions Committee who will listen to the viewpoints and this can then be taken forward. The youngest petitioner has been a 7yr old who raised a petition to make using renewable water bottles mandatory at school!

Every ‘bill’ is an issue which is brought forward. This is then discussed by committees. If it goes on to become a LAW (this usually takes about a year) it is finalised by the stamp of Royal Assent from the King. The wax used to seal the Royal Assent is made from the beehives at the Scottish Parliament!

The Scottish Parliament has 129 MSPs.  There are 62 SNP members, 31 Conservatives, 22 Labour, 7 from the Green Party, 4 Liberal Democrats, 1 Alba representative and 1 independent member. The First Minister is John Swinney and the Presiding Officer (who takes on a role a bit like Mrs Baillie!) is Alison Johnstone.

We are really looking forward to finding out more about this topic – watch out for our own parties, campaigns and election!

 

P6/7 welcome Robert McCrorie, a Community Safety Advocate for the Fire and Rescue Community Safety Team who talked to the pupils about how to keep themselves and others safe around fireworks and Bonfire Night.

He talked about fireworks, sparklers and bonfires and the issues we might come across. Ellie demonstrated how to hold a sparkler safely – at arms length and not being waved about, and Colin showed us how to Stop, Drop and Roll if any clothing caught fire.

We also discussed items which definitely shouldn’t be added to a bonfire and why not, and some of the rules and regulations which surround buying and setting off fireworks.

This was a really useful safety input and we hope it helps everyone to look after themselves this November 5th.

 

It’s back to school and a spooky one at that! P6/7 have enjoyed exploring all things pumpkin this week..

The week kicked off with group work as they named their pumpkins and scooped them out in preparation for soup making.

Tuesday was a busy day as groups worked with Mrs Kyle to chop ingredients and cook their Spicy Pumpkin soup, roast the pumpkin seeds and use wholemeal bread to make croutons to add to their finished dish.

Wednesday was design and carving day as each group worked together to give their pumpkin’s some added character! The class also tried their soup and shared their cooking with P1-4 too.

Thursday led to experiment day – with a chemical reaction of Hydrogen Peroxide, washing up liquid, food colouring and yeast being used to make each pumpkin puke! Delightful!

And that leads to tomorrow’s Halloween Party!

 

This afternoon, P6/7 joined a live lesson working on the use of Adobe Express. Each pupil worked on an iPad to create a multi-media collage with a spooky theme. They selected a background, added design elements, assigned animations to each object and layered sound effects over the top! What fantastic results!

The pupils then screenshot their work and emailed them to me (another handy computing skill) for me to upload them to the blog. You can’t quite get the full multimedia effect of sound and movement – but it does give you a glimpse of just some of the super computing skills in use.

Well done all – superbly spooky stuff 🙂