Author: Mrs McHarg

Report by Kaiden & Faye –

On Thursday 25th May all of the P6 pupils went to Operation Safety . The event took place at Stair Park football grounds in Stranraer. There were lots of workshops that we visited. This is a list of the workshops:

• Fire brigade to spot the different hazards to make them safe, like a knife in a toaster or too many plugs in a lead.
• Scottish Power workshop where we spotted electrical hazards outside.
• Stranraer Coastguard for water safety and how to save someone if they are drowning.
• Alcohol and drugs presented by PC McCutcheon where we got to try on beer goggles.

We then had our lunch in the stadium seat and afterwards we visited our last few workshops:

• Anti-social behaviour where we played a song really loudly and the council came and said he was going to fine us £20.
• Ambulance where we learned how to do CPR.

Our favourite workshop was the drugs and alcohol one because the drunk glasses were fun and felt weird.

To make the most of the glorious sunshine and work on some of our Eco targets, the pupils all headed over to the Wetlands on Tuesday afternoon to offer up their services as community volunteers.

The children split into three groups – one group helped with general tidying by raking and weeding; another group were identifying flowers; and the final group were painting stones for the ladybird noughts & crosses game in the willow dome. Pupils also went to see the goose sitting on her eggs in the nest – see if you can spot her in the picture below!

Huge thanks to the adult Wetland volunteers who gave up their time to assist the pupils and set up these activities. We love being able to help out in our community!

Pupils in P5-7 at Kirkcolm, Leswalt and Portpatrick Primary Schools headed off to Abernethy Barcaple Outdoor Centre on Monday for an overnight residential stay.

The boys and girls participated in a range of activities whilst there including archery, abseiling, a challenge course, climbing wall, and team problem solving challenges. Pupils overcame fears and developed their team-working skills throughout the course of our trip. 

After a fun-filled day of activities, everyone enjoyed an evening game of hide and seek in the dark – at which point the staff watched as 50 children ran off into the darkness at a location they had never been before; cue panicking teachers! But thankfully all returned safe and sound, and no one was left to spend the night in the great outdoors! 

We then headed to our rooms to settle down for the night – and despite a lot of sugar being consumed, everyone was asleep by midnight much to the staff’s relief! 

The next day started bright and early with some pupils rising at 6.30am. After breakfast, we finished our final group activities and hopped onto the bus just after lunch time. It was a very quiet journey home with lots of tired little people catching 40 winks to make up for the lack of sleep the night before! 

Everyone had a brilliant time away and enjoyed mixing with pupils from all of our trio schools. 

Can you believe it’s been 3 whole years since our pupils last took to the stage to perform at Christmas time?! Today they were back with a vengeance with their Christmas play ‘Who Took all the Loo Roll?’ The show tells the story of a group of aliens who have been watching us humans from a distant planet and are intrigued by our Christmas traditions, so they decide to visit to learn more.

They are baffled by: the gifting of loo roll (having panic-bought it during covid!); mistletoe (a feeling that is only enhanced when they see great-granny trying to land a smackeroonie on everyone – quite literally as Alexander Clark ran around the audience with some mistletoe!!!) and the most hated vegetable – brussel sprouts! The story culminates in the aliens finding out about why humans celebrate Christmas, with everyone learning that the real hero is actually the donkey – how else would Mary have got to Bethlehem?!

Pupils have been working really hard this term to learn their lines and lyrics and I think anyone who came to watch the show can agree, it definitely paid off! It was lovely to see everyone back together again sharing in the children’s achievements!

As part of our Book Week Scotland celebrations, parents/grandparents were invited into school today to see P1-3 pupils being presented with their Bookbug (P1) and Read, Write, Count (P2-3) bags.

This initiative, ran by the Scottish Book Trust and Scottish Government, sees every P1-3 child receive a free bag which contains beautiful books, educational games and writing materials. The bags are designed to help build parents’ confidence and encourage families to include easy and fun reading, writing and counting activities into their everyday lives.

After being gifted with their bags, pupils then spent some time in class exploring the contents with parents, grandparents and P4 buddies: P1s curled up to listen to some stories; some pupils played snap using their card games; and P2s had fun trying to create various tangram shapes – although it seemed to be more of a challenge to get the tangram pieces back into the holder at the end than it was to create the shapes!!

We hope you all enjoy exploring the contents of the bag with your child at home!

 

Mrs Buchanan popped into the playground today, to see the boys and girls on their first day back at school – and was welcomed by lots of smiling faces who were super happy to be reunited with all their friends. She visited for another very special reason too – to commemorate the 25^th anniversary of the Dunblane tragedy.

Just before the end of the day, we all stood around the Dunblane memorial in the playground, and Mrs McHarg said a few words about how lucky we are to all be back at school together. Our oldest and youngest pupils, Lily and Andrew, then laid some flowers that Mrs Buchanan brought on the memorial and we stood in silence for a few moments. Pupils then took it in turns to say why they are glad to be back at school or, for those younger pupils who have already been back for a few weeks, what they’ve enjoyed about being back so far.

The moment certainly helped us to reflect and appreciate how lucky we are to be able to come to school safely together.

Yay – we’re all back together!!! After what seems like a life time, P4-7 pupils returned to school today for the first time since mid-December (can you believe it’s been that long?!)! It was lovely to see all these cheery faces at the school door this morning and the sun even made an appearance to celebrate the occasion! Everyone is super happy to be back with their friends and teachers, and we’re ready and raring to go!

Another week, another celebration! This time it was the turn of British Science Week, which ran from 8^th – 13^th March and had the theme of ‘Innovating for the Future.’ P1-3 celebrated the week from school with various STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) activities on offer and also learned about inventors who changed the world.

First of all, pupils attempted to build the tallest tower using only dried spaghetti and marshmallows.  The children were split into teams and had to explore which designs could result in the strongest and tallest tower.  This proved tricky and after 15-minutes of building, the towers were not very tall, or strong!  We took a few minutes to look at all of the towers, then had 5 minutes to rebuild and improve our designs.  The winning team were Sean, Isla and Murray.  To quote Sean, “We are geniuses!”

Next, we tried the cracker eating challenge!  The girls and boys all thought that eating 3 crackers in 1 minute would be super easy.  How wrong they were!  We learned how important saliva is in the digestive system and eating crackers quickly is impossible!

Finally, we tried a very easy experiment that answers a tricky question.  Two eggs look and feel the same but how can we tell which one is hard boiled and which is not?  We shook then, spun them, rolled them, made our decision and then tested our results by dropping them on parachutes we had designed.  We learned all about something called ‘Inertia’.

Meanwhile, P4-7 were busy celebrating the Science Week from home, in their final week of remote learning (“YIPEEEE!” we can hear all the parents cry!!). They had lots of different challenges to choose from, including: putting their STEM skills into action to design a solution to a real-life problem linking to the Global Goals; various science experiments and engineering challenging such as designing a marble run, making their own paint, powering a boat using a chemical reaction and creating an underwater volcano; learning about stereotypes and exploring the world of work in relation to STEM careers; and exploring innovations that changed the world.

We all had a brilliant week thinking about and exploring problems like real-life scientists and engineers!

Leswalt Primary celebrated World Book Day today with a variety of fun activities to enable pupils to share their love of books and stories.

P1-3 pupils all came to school prepared with their favourite book to share with the class, some just couldn’t contain their excitement and were sharing them in the line at 9am!! We had a huge range from Harry Potter and David Walliams’ Demon Dentist, to the Beano and Black Beauty. Later on, pupils watched the live event ‘Bringing a Story to Life’ on the World Book Day website, where a star-studded cast of famous authors and illustrators, such as Tom Fletcher (the guy from McFly!), told the pupils how they get their ideas for their stories. They also participated in a draw-along with an illustrator and made their own pictures of flying bookmarks.

After break, they headed outside to participate in the World Book Day scavenger hunt – 12 pictures of characters from well-known books were hidden around the school grounds for them to find. They had to find each one, write down the number on the picture to prove they had found it and make a note of the character’s name and book they are from. A group of girls were victorious and finished first – a big well done to Ela, Ruby, Amelia & Isla! It seemed that Piglet was hidden in a rather tricky place though, as some of the boys just could not find him and needed directions from the rest of the class to locate him!

In the afternoon pupils were busy writing their own stories, using the tips they learned from the live event earlier on, and used some of the books in the library to see how many words/pictures they could find in a book scavenger hunt. At the very end of the day, pupils played ‘Name that Story’ and were given clues to help them determine the famous tale.

And not forgetting our P4-7 pupils who celebrated World Book Day from home – they were also given a range of activities to pick from to join in on the fun. On offer were tasks such as the Masked Reader, designing their favourite character from fruit/veg/toilet roll tube, a Big Booky Breakfast, and lots more! Have a keek below for some photos & videos from all of our pupils, to show how we celebrated the day in style!

It may have been an odd year, but nonetheless 2020 was a rather successful one for the North Rhins Partnership – we are delighted to announce that we have achieved our Bronze Award for Rights Respecting Schools! This national accreditation is to recognise the work we have done so far and our commitment to learning more about and embedding the UNCRC Rights of the Child in the life and ethos of our schools.

Our work started waaaay back in January last year (pre-Covid times – can anyone remember what that was like?!) when pupils began learning about the Rights of the Child at assemblies. Then, when pesky Covid came on the scene, we were forced to continue our journey towards our Bronze Award online, with some home learning challenges on various different Rights of the Child.

When we were eventually allowed to return to school and class assemblies resumed, we then focused on ‘Respect’ – what this means and how to respect others’ rights. We learned how respect is at the centre of anti-bullying and we made a video to share with everyone, explaining what ‘RESPECT’ means to each of us; here is the link if you’d like to watch it and the finalised copy of our ‘Respect for All’ policy to have a read through:

Leswalt: Leswalt Respect Movie.MOV

Respect for All Policy:RfA Final Policy October2020.pdf

Behind the scenes, staff have also been busy learning all about the Rights of the Child, how this permeates lots of what we do in school (including how it is embedded into our ‘Respect for All’ policy) and how we can use language and a restorative approach to further promote respecting everyone’s rights.

A huge thank-you to everyone who helped in achieving this award – we are very pleased to gain national accreditation and recognition for all of our hard work. We can’t wait to continue our Rights Respecting School journey towards our silver award – watch this space!