Author: Mrs McHarg

We were delighted to head to Leswalt Church this afternoon, having been invited by our Locum Minister for Leswalt, Marlene Cash. In preparation for this event, the whole school have been donating food items to distribute around the local community; the gardening club made a scarecrow whom they named ‘Les’ (short for Leswalt!); and pupils have been learning the song ‘Harvest Samba’ to perform at the church.

During the service, we discussed our favourite foods and learned where some of them come from. Marlene got pupils up to the front of the church to demonstrate how food isn’t distributed equally around the world – it often depends on how much money you have. But we learned that Harvest contains the letters ‘share’ and that this is a time for sharing food and making sure that everyone has enough to eat.

After the pupils sang their hearts out, P1-6 headed back to school and our P7 pupils went around the village with Mrs Baillie and Mrs Kyle to distribute our bags of donated food.

Thank you to everyone who was able to donate some food, to those who managed to attend the service today and to Marlene for a lovely service. We look forward to visiting the church again soon!

At the start of the term, all of our pupils were given the opportunity to apply for various positions of responsibility in the school, including: Pupil Council, Eco Committee, House Captains, Digital Leaders and Monitor jobs. The purpose of this is to ensure that pupils’ have a voice in everything we do and know that they can make a positive impact on our school.

Having looked through the applications and/or held interviews, we have now selected our reps for the current session! Have a keek below at all the smiley faces to see who will be helping to make our school shine even more!

Pupil Council  – 

Eco Committee –

House Captains –

Digital Leaders –

Monitor jobs:

• Rebecca P6) & Amelia (P7) as Head Librarians
• James (P2) as Dinner Hall monitor
• Keira (P3) & Ben G. (P7) as Playground Monitors
• Cameron (P2) & Sean (P7) as Cloakroom Monitors

Pupils are the North Rhins Schools are delighted to share that they have been awarded the Gold Rights Respecting School Award from UNICEF. Having already achieved their Bronze and Silver awards, both Leswalt and Kirkcolm Primaries have been working hard over the last 18 months to achieve their Gold award, with our Pupil Council reps leading on this.

The award is split into 3 strands – it aims to teach children about their rights; they learn through their rights by demonstrating positive relationships and attitudes, and respecting others’ rights; and finally they learn to take action through their rights to become responsible global citizens.

The UNICEF Rights Respecting School assessor visited both Leswalt and Kirkcolm Primaries at the end of May and pupils were able to share with her the many activities that we’ve worked on in our journey towards gold, including: Children’s Right’s Tuesday; learning about rights at assemblies; our class charters; linking rights to our school events such as House Captain elections, Children’s Mental Heath Week and Children in Need; our worry boxes in class; learning about Child Line; our climate change protest; and all of our various pupil voice groups, such as our Eco Schools work.

The school was provided with a report, sharing strengths and some next steps for when we work towards the Sustaining Gold award. The report stated that “it was evident that children’s rights are embedded across the school and underpin every facet of school life.” She felt that we have “very articulate children who knew a wide range of articles and were confident in the concept of rights.” The assessor was impressed with the extent to which rights are embedded in the day-to-day life of both schools and the strong commitment of passionate staff as champions of children’s rights. Finally, the assessor highlighted that pupil voice is valued highly across the schools, with visible actions arising from pupil suggestions and an understanding from children that they can influence positive change.

We are thrilled that our hard work has been recognised and we have been awarded this accolade. We are looking forward to continuing our Rights journey as we work towards the Sustaining Gold award.

We were greeted at the door this morning by lots of smiling faces (who have all grown so much taller!), glad to be back at school for a new year!

This year we are joined by our new P1 pupils – Gregor, Ada, Erin, Betty and Jessica – have a keek at their cutes faces below! We also have Rebecca joining P6 who will make an excellent addition to the team.

We hope that everyone comes home tonight having had a great first day back at school – albeit a little dishevelled and tired (and that’s just the teachers!) and that they are ready and raring to go all over again tomorrow!

Loch Connell won the inter-school house relay, with Corsewall in 2nd place, Soleburn in 3rd and Loch Naw in 4th position.

Kirkcolm were the overall winners of the day with a grand total of 192 points, and Leswalt were in 2nd place with 116 points.

As part of their Health and Wellbeing lessons learning about different dietary requirements, it was the turn of the final 3 groups to make their recipes into real-life delicious creations!

On the menu this week we had – a vegan chocolate cake, a gluten free pizza and a diabetic curry! Yum!!

Huge thanks to Mrs Kyle for lending her culinary skills to help the groups. See them in action below!

UNCRC – article 24 right to healthy food

The official Outdoor Classroom Day may have been rained off last Thursday, but that didn’t stop us from celebrating it a week later! This afternoon, we split into 3 groups and rotated around 3 different activities on offer – gardening (which included letting P5-7 pupils loose with a pair of secateurs on the willow dome!!); creating ‘grass heads’ using tights, grass seed, compost and plastic cups; and a village litter pick so we can see whether our litter posters make an impact when they go up this weekend!

We had a fabulous afternoon in the sunshine!

UNCRC article 24 – mental well-being and protecting our environment

We were visited this morning by 2 members of the Community Safety Team who brought some exciting news! A few months ago, all pupils were tasked with designing a poster encouraging people to put their litter in the bin. 20 of these posters were selected by the Community Wardens and turned into weather-proof versions. They will be distributed on lamp posts all around the village this weekend, to encourage everyone in our little community to be responsible (and avoid an £80 fine if caught dropping litter!).

Have a peek below to see the 20 selected pupils with their posters! Everyone has been tasked with finding all of the posters in the community this weekend – we’d love to see any photos if you manage to come across any!

A huge thank-you to the Community Safety Team for their hard work in producing our posters and hanging them around Leswalt to hopefully keep it litter-free!

UNCRC – Article 24 right to a safe environment; Article 12 right to be listened to.

Our Primary 6 pupils headed off to Stair Park today to participate in Operation Safety – a whole day session involving different workshops provided by various agencies, including the emergency services.

Pupils had inputs from –

• Police Scotland, learning about drug and alcohol awareness and vandalism
• Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, learning about home safety
• Youth Work on internet safety
• Coastguard on water safety
• Scottish Ambulance Service on First Aid
• Community Safety Team, learning about anti-social behaviour
• and SP Energy Networks, learning about electrical safety

They learned a range of life skills to help keep them safe and healthy and had a brilliant time! Thank-you to everyone who helped to organise this very worthwhile day!

UNCRC Article 2 – Survival; Article 16 – Protection of Privacy; Article 17 – Access to Information; and Article 33 – Harmful Drugs

Our House Captains and Vice Captains have been busy over the last few weeks, organising an Easter egg-stravaganza for the final day of term!

Firstly, we had our decorate a hard-boiled egg competition. We had lots of wonderful entries which made the judging a tricky decision! So much so that the House Captains ended up awarding 2nd and 3rd place to each class (and Miss Gordon had to run up to the shop to buy extra prizes!!). Our winners were –

P1-4

• 1st = Eilidh Ramsay
• 2nd = Emma Shirley
• 3rd = Jorgie Paton

P5-7

• 1st – Colin McGregor
• 2nd = Isla Kirkpatrick
• 3rd = Amelia McHallum

A huge thank-you to everyone who participated – it was a fab effort from all!

In the afternoon, pupils paired up for an Easter scavenger hunt outside. Each pair were given a sheet of clues to help them find the next egg. They had to write down the colour of each egg that they found to prove that they had indeed completed the hunt! The final egg led them to a gigantic plastic egg full of chocolate!

Thank-you to our House Captains and Vice Captains for a final day full of fun!

UNCRC Article 14 (freedom of belief and religion) and article 31 (right to play and participate in art activities).