Author: Mrs Ferguson

As part of our on-going Eco Schools work, Leswalt and Kirkcolm teamed up to rid the streets of litter today!

As it turned out, we live in a beautifully kept environment and so there wasn’t too much in the way of litter – good news all round I’d say!

The pieces we did find were safely disposed of by our intrepid team of rubbish busters who were rewarded with a few minutes playing in the park.

Many thanks to our parent helpers who came to lend a hand – Mrs McHallum came with our bunch!

We all know what to do with litter – recycle what you can and safely get rid of the rest. Happily it looks like our local area are pretty good at that too!

Take Two – and the rain steered clear, the midges behaved and Leswalt’s Sports Day was game on! We were delighted to welcome back family and friends to cheer all pupils on as they donned their running shoes and gave each event their all. So good to see such sportsmanship on display – we really do have a great wee team!

All staff were assigned to their positions and the afternoon flew by. From skipping races to jumping sacks; egg and spoon to flat races; beanbag throw to the obstacle race – it wasn’t long until everyone was smiling and hoarse from cheering!

Huge thanks to Kaiden’s mum Natasha for very kindly supplying tasty refreshments! Those ice lollies were most welcome!

Full results to follow but, in the meantime, enjoy the happy snaps below of our sporting superstars. From those embracing their first primary sports day to those relishing their last; it was smiles all round!

Well done to each and every one of you!

This afternoon, Leswalt Primary ventured into Stranraer Academy; joining several other primary schools at the fabulous Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s production of Gaspard’s Foxtrot. This performance was having its Scottish school tour debut today – they will also be visiting Langholm, Aviemore, Inverness and Kirkwall over the coming weeks.

The orchestra delivered an afternoon of story-telling through music. The book had been written by Zeb Soanes and illustrated by James Mayhew, with an orchestral score by Jonathan Dove and an accompanying film directed by Dougie Irvine and produced by Laura Penny.

Lucy, a member of the RSNO, led the pupils through a fun warm-up using the body to create music and introduced them to the different sections of the orchestra and the conductor. We all then settled back for 35 minutes of escapism – following Gaspard the Fox on his adventures through the city of London.

Here are some of the highlights from the pupils:

“The fact that the music really described the thoughts and feelings was great!”

“Lucy’s warm-up was great fun!”

“Lucy’s story-telling went really well with the music and film!”

“I enjoyed doing Lucy’s music-making exercises. They were great fun!”

“I loved being able to see the instruments and what they were doing!”

“It was a cool story and the music went really well with it!”

All in all, it was a lovely afternoon out!

Today we we dedicated our learning to all things regal in honour of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations for our Queen, Elizabeth II!

Would you believe she even popped in for a visit?! She met some of our pupils to say hello and joined in some lunchtime fun and class activities!

After watching an information video which covered every decade the Queen has been on the throne, we challenged one another to a Royal-themed quiz. Some of the questions really got us thinking!

Leswalt village has lots of Jubilee activities planned; from a concert on Friday night to a street party on Sunday so we decided to design some red, white and blue themed bunting which could be used to decorate the streets! We also made some paper chains to add to the party look too.

We got our thinking caps on for an activity which asked  what we might do if we were King/Queen for a day as well as some Royal research questions. Did you know the youngest ever reigning monarch became King of Oyo of Uganda  at the age of just 3 years old! And the longest ever reigning monarch was Louis XIV of France who reigned from May 14th 1643 until September 1st 1715- a whopping 72 years and 110 days!

Lunchtime had a celebration vibe with a picnic enjoyed by all in the sunshine.  We combined our lunch with an annual One Planet Picnic, minimising our use of single use plastic for our take-away lunch.  Michelle provided compostable spoons for our yogurts.  We recycled our pots in our new council plastic collection bins.  We also used paper bags instead of plastic.  Those that brought in their own lunches used re-usable snack pots and water bottles. (see photos below)

After a delicious feed, we designed some fantastic artwork combining the Union Jack; the Queen’s love of Corgis and the Royal Crown Jewels! We took home our masterpieces to display in our own homes this Jubilee weekend. We think the Queen would most definitely approve of them!

To round off our Royal-themed day, we learnt the words to the National Anthem; God Save the Queen and our very own adapted lyrics to join in a whole school Grand Old Duke of York. We sang these with gusto to bring our school day to a regal end!

The lyrics went something like this:

“Oh, Queen Elizabeth the 2nd

She rules well over us all

She’s sat on the throne for 70 years

Lets’ celebrate and have a ball!”

Happy Platinum Jubilee Queen Elizabeth II – the longest reigning monarch of Great Britain ever.

Enjoy your Jubilee Holiday everyone!

Having received 20 fantastic free Microbits for our school, Mrs McKnight’s P1-4 and Mrs Ferguson’s P5-6 decided to join a Code Along Live Lesson today hosted by Education Scotland! What better way to learn than by working together, learning by doing and being guided step-by-step?!

As the P7 pupils were enjoying their S1 Stranraer Academy transition day, P1-6 decided to buddy up and find out more together.

The Digital Leaders , Rose and Thomas (along with their helpers Breagh and Hamish) got busy setting up the microbits so that we were ready to go at 11am! This involved inserting battery packs, connecting them to the laptops and logging on to the makecode website.

Microsoft MakeCode for micro:bit (microbit.org)

Joining up in the P1-4 classroom, the eager coders followed the live lesson by programming their Microbit to guide them through calming breathing exercises – all very cool stuff!

Following this, our intrepid teams explored the coding tools and created a range of different programmes: from their microbit displaying their names to playing music and all sorts in between! Some pupils were able to share their tips with their classmates too!

Hands-on learning together and lots of fun!

Today, P5-7 recapped on their term 3 French Food and Drink topic by hosting their own mini cafe for their classmates!

Having created some French themed table decorations, designed menu cards and created handy phrase cards to be placed on the tables – the pupils were all ready to say Bonjour!

With some background French cafe style jazz music playing, the pupils took it in turns to role-play as the waiter/customer and order from the delicious menu including pain au chocolat, croissant avec buerre ou fromage ou confiture, brioche et crepes au chocolat. There was also jus d’orange and jus de pomme to wash the tasty snacks down!

A fun way to reinforce our French learning.

Merci beaucoup!

Tattie Report – By Aidan and Rose 

On the Thursday the 12th of May, we planted potatoes with Mrs Richardson. We planted the potato seeds in tyres that used to have flowers in them – reusing and recycling! We needed to make sure that we covered them up in soil. We also watered them so they didn’t dry out. We really enjoyed it and it will be great to help in our mission to be more eco-friendly. Hopefully we get a great crop of tatties to enjoy when we harvest them! 

It is Schools’ Week at Logan Botanic Gardens! Leswalt Primary ventured there today. Read the fabulous blog reports below to find out more…

Logan Gardens Trip by P1-4

P1-4 enjoyed a fun morning at Logan Gardens with ranger Kate.  Our activity was called The Teddy Bear’s Picnic and we had to take along with us our favourite stuffed toys.  We learned about something called S.W.A.F.  This stood for Shelter, Water, Air and Food, all the things our bears needed for survival.  We then enjoyed some fun activities using our senses including Musical Trees, a Rainbow Nature Search and building an island for our bears to live on.  

Logan Gardens Trip by Hamish McGregor

This morning, the whole of Leswalt Primary went to Logan Botanic Gardens. The P5-7 class found out about the Science of Plants (Botany). We started by learning about the different parts of a flower (stem, stamen, pollen, stigma) and the class did a roleplay of the lifecycle of a plant – I dressed up as a bee! After this, we were handed out hand lenses and we looked really closely at plants, petals, flowers and leaves. The lenses made each thing 10x bigger! We did lots of other fun activities too like; wearing blue or red lens glasses to see the plants as birds or bees do; hiding raisins as a squirrel would and pretending to be flying seeds for seed dispersal. It was a really fun and enjoyable trip!

Logan Gardens Trip by Alfie Baker

Today our whole school went on a bus to Logan Gardens. When we got there, we lined up and a leader took us to find out about the life cycle of a plant. The wee ones had a teddy bear’s picnic. We got to use hand lenses to magnify plants and bugs – we could even see the tiny hairs on flowers! We saw two geese (the mum and dad) and seven goslings walking about the gardens and swimming on the pond. For lunch, we sat on a big tarpaulin and ate our packed lunches and chatted. We headed back to school after a lovely morning.

As part of our Eco work this term, Mrs Richardson suggested we grow cress and then use what we’d grown! A great lesson in sustainability.

Over to…. our three intrepid Blog reporters; Faye Adams, Rose Santangeli and Carys McHallum  for more information!

We started growing cress with our class. Mrs Richardson helped us. We grew the cress on a paper towel on a plate in the portacabin. We did this on the 21st April and, on the 5th May, we harvested it and ate it in egg and cress sandwiches. I’m not keen on egg so I tried just cress but I wasn’t too sure of it! By Faye

Two weeks ago, we started growing cress in our classroom. We put the tiny seeds on a paper towel on a plate and kept them wet. The cress was kept in the classroom, in the middle of our desk. Mrs Richardson guided us on what to do, how to look after them and how not to drown them! Our table was doing really well with their cress growing – though on the 12th day it did look a bit squashed! We tried to revive the cress with more water and this did help to bring it back to life. We cut it up (harvested it) on the 5th May and added it to egg mayo (eggs brought in by Hamish and Malcolm) to make egg and cress sandwiches. I enjoyed the cress; it had a peppery flavour. This taught me that I could easily grow cress at home!  By Rose

We started growing cress on the 21st April. At first it grew the tiniest bit but it was still growing! Don’t worry we did water it and that helped it to really grow! Because we weren’t at school last Monday, it went an extra day without water and so it looked as if it had died. But a good water really helped it. We mixed it in with egg mayo from eggs from the McGregor’s chickens. Everybody helped to make sandwiches and tried the egg and cress – or just cress sandwiches. I LOVED it! Thank you Mrs Richardson! By Carys