Author: Mrs Ferguson

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

 

The sun shone, the pupils listened and the presentations were informative and fun – safe to say the North Rhins Partnership Safety morning was the most resounding success!

This term’s Health and Well-Being focus for the upper primaries was centred on Risk-Taking Behaviour; in short, what to do if faced with an emergency situation. Having discussed this as a staff, it was felt there was no better plan than to get as many local emergency services as possible together to offer the pupils a first-hand experience directly from those who dealt with such situations. And what a response we got from the community! No less than seven presenters offered their time covering RNLI, Police, Ambulance, Fire Service, Coastguard, Scottish Power and Farming!

Working in small groups and armed with a clipboard for note-taking; the pupils moved round each station in 15 minute slots. Listening to the presentations, finding out about the kits carried by each service and asking their pre-prepared questions – the groups collected a wealth of information.

Summing up the morning, Mrs Baillie led the group in talking about these jobs based in their local community, considering the many employability skills required and discussing whether the jobs were paid careers or voluntary. It was interesting for the children to understand the value of volunteer work and giving back to their community.

All in all, it was an excellent morning of learning in the sunshine with friends. And, they are all a great deal more safety savvy now too!

A huge thank you must go to all of the services for giving up their time – one having come of their fourth night shift! Their input was most welcome by us all.

Enjoy flicking through the photos below to see for yourselves.

Alexander Clark  – our term 3 reading raffle winner was presented with an Easter egg by our House Captains Malcolm and Breagh.

To be in with a chance of winning the reading raffle, you need to read a book, take a test on the book and score 100%! Your name is recorded on  the 100% Readers wall and then it is entered into a raffle at the end of term. So the more books you read, the more chance you have to win and today that very winner was Alexander Clark!

Alexander said “I really enjoy reading lots of books. I school, I choose books from the library and read them in Chill n’ Read time. At home, I read the Oor Wullie books  and the Scottish Farmer to check  the prices of the livestock!”

Reading is a great skill to have! Who will be the Reading Raffle Champion in term 4!

 

Pupils from P5-7 boarded the bus this sunny Wednesday morning to head to Green Valley for the Rhins Primary Cross Country Challenge!

A LONG overdue event, there was such an air of excitement as the schools met up!

Carys and Brandon got together to write up this blog report – Breagh lent a hand too. Read all about their morning below…

Cross Country was at Green Valley. There is lots of other stuff at Green Valley too like the driving range, cafe, bar, function room and golf course.

We had to leave at 9:30am from the school as the buses needed to do double runs between schools. There was 15 people at cross country from each school. The Active Schools team led us all in a warm-up then our first race was at 10:45am.

The hardest part about cross country is the actual running but we all kept on going and had a great time. All the schools were cheering their team mates on.

Every one did one race – P5s did 1/2 mile and P6 and P7 had to do a mile around the Green Valley course.

Everyone took part and did really well! In fact, Fraser was 4th for the P6 boys and Murray was 2nd for the P7 boys!

Thank you so much to Alison Murray, the Active Schools team and  Green Valley for hosting this great event!