Over the last 4 week, we’ve had the pleasure of Stuart Fisher’s company who has taken each class on a weekly basis for 30 minutes of tri-golf. We’ve covered things from hitting long range shots using drivers and irons (in our PJs as it was Children in Need!), target practise with the large sticky target, and putting. We put all of our new skills into practise through lots of fun games and activities that Stuart setup.
Thanks to Stuart for taking the time to come in to Leswalt Primary – we’ve had a fab few weeks!
The scene was set…lights twinkling on the decorated trees, cheery children decked out in their Festive knits, crackers laid on the tables, Christmas tunes pumping and the smell of a delicious dinner wafting around the hall! It was time for Christmas Lunch at Leswalt!
What a delicious lunch was enjoyed by everyone. Such a lovely time to all be together. Just look at these smiling faces…
This morning we were delighted to welcome back Owain Evan’s from Scripture Union with the fantastic Christmas Unwrapped presentation! Fun games and a thought-provoking quiz got everyone on their feet and engaged. This covered Christmas traditions and threw up some very interesting answers…
Owain told the class that Jesus’ coming was spoken of over 351 times in the Bible! Each group participated in a chance to work together to share their knowledge of the Christmas Story. They saw examples of a typical 1st Century Hebrew home and heard about some of the ‘prettier ideas’ that the Nativity Story has included over the centuries!
The hands-on activities continued as each group got a sequencing task to work through to some Christmas tunes but it wasn’t quite as straightforward as they might have hoped! It took a bit of figuring out to spot the ‘wild card’ 🤣
The morning continued with a wordsearch including all the key points covered. Super speedy word finding, followed by a video clip re-telling the Nativity dispelling those age-old myths!
The session ended with each pupil getting the chance to create their own commemorative ceramic tile selecting a key message from the Christmas Story – just look at these amazing designs below!
UNCRC Articles 13 Sharing Thoughts Freely, 29 Aims of Education and 31 Rest, Play, Culture and Arts.
PC Mc Gregor paid a visit to Leswalt Primary today to collect all the donations from the children for their Police Scotland Youth volunteers Christmas appeal.
The boys and girls had brought in lots of items such as shower gel, biscuits, tins of soup, toothpaste and gloves. These items will be made up into mini hampers and distributed amongst elderly people in the community.
The photograph shows the Eco Committee handing over the goodies to PC Mc Gregor. Well done to all at Leswalt Primary for thinking of others at this time of year.
To mark World Kindness Day last month, P6/7 created their own Kindness Advent Calendar!
Each day in December, a different class member has opened a homemade envelope to reveal the kindness suggestion inside. These, so far, have ranged from looking out for any one in the playground who could do with a buddy to thanking folks at home for just being themselves and offering to lend a hand (Ela is going to help clean the kitchen – think Christmas Day would be a perfect day to offer her help there!)
The pupils came up with their own kindness suggestions and it offers an opportunity to highlight those little things we can all do to bring a smile to everyone’s faces! ❤️
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!
Our superstar singers of Leswalt Primary went on tour on Friday night and performed at Leswalt community concert. Our little choir of volunteers opened the show with a sneak preview of two songs which they will all perform in their forthcoming Christmas show.
Fourteen of our pupils gave up their Friday night to entertain the local community in Leswalt Memorial hall. Many thanks must go to the boys and girls, and their parents for this support. All the children have been rewarded with a merit for their efforts. And, the feedback from the audience was that they were great!
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.
Leswalt Primary pupils left the school with huge smiles on their faces today, after each being gifted a chocolate advent calendar from the Leswalt Community Association. They are all super excited to be allowed to have chocolate as part of their breakfast every day in December! A huge thank-you to LCA for their generosity!
P6-7 were joined by Rebecca from the NHS Tobacco team this morning, to learn all about the dangers of smoking and vaping. Rebecca’s job is to work with people who are ill from the effects of smoking/vaping, but also to try and prevent people from starting smoking/vaping to begin with.
We learned that the legal age to buy cigarettes/vapes will rise to 19 years old next year, 20 years old the following year, and so on so that it will eventually be illegal for everyone to smoke. We discussed the physical effects of smoking, as well as the effects on your bank balance! We learned that nicotine is more addictive than some drugs and how it affects the brain. We did an activity where we had to run/jump on the spot for 20 seconds, we then repeated this but had to doing it breathing through a small straw to show how hard it is for smokers to breath doing anything active.
Finally, we learned about the environmental impact of smoking – on average, there are 50 bin lorries of cigarette ends disposed of each year. In 2022, there was the equivalent of 22 football pitches worth of vapes disposed of.
Rebecca encouraged pupils to share her team’s information with anyone at home who smokes and is keen to quit – they can email dg.quityourway@nhs.scot
Thank-you to Rebecca for travelling to Leswalt for a very informative morning!
