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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!

 

UNCRC – Article 29 Aims of Education

Article 31 Rest, Play, Culture, Arts

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!

Well done everyone!

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!

As we had the chance to meet up with our Kirkcolm buddies today for the Ross MacKenzie or Chae Strathie visits – we decided to make the absolute most of this opportunity by enjoying some STEM/topic learning fun with our friends!

P1-4 had fun together at Leswalt looking at Victorian toys from their Toys topic and playing with them in and outside. They also learnt how to play Hopscotch – a forgotten art!

P5-7 tried their hand at some STEM activities with Microbit Coding, Spheros Coding and tackling some Engineering challenges using K’Nex. Such fun to do this together – and particularly good when we have Lockerbie Manor and transition activities coming up soon and the P7s can get to know just a few more faces! 

A fun morning learning together with our buddies from around the coast. Hopefully we get to work together again soon!

 

We had the BEST morning! Not only were we visited by two award-winning authors – the fabulous Chae Strathie and amazing Ross MacKenzie – but we also got to buddy up with our good friends from Kirkcolm Primary to enjoy the experience!

P6/7 Leswalt hopped on the bus and travelled round the coast – whereby P1-4 Kirkcolm jumped aboard and headed back to Leswalt. It was a switchover!

The older class enjoyed listening to Ross Mackenzie talk about his journey to becoming an author – from being a young P5 pupil with not much interest in reading to having his world opened up by his class teacher reading the classic ‘The Witches’ by Roald Dahl! Young Ross decided then and there he wanted to be a writer – and safe to say, he’s never looked back!

As a class, we had enjoyed The Nowhere Emporium as a class novel last session. It was a fantastic read of mystery and magic and one which was developed into a trilogy of Emporium books. Some of us pre-ordered copies for Ross to sign. Ross has 9 published books and has just completed his 10th book – he encouraged us all to dream big! 

P1-4 from both primaries had a morning of fun and giggles with Chae Strathie) author of Dear Dinosaur and Gorilla Loves Vanilla to name just two). Listening to stories, chatting and drawing some fabulously funny ice-cream and dinosaur illustrations were the order of their day.

These visits were secured by Mrs McHarg and Mrs McKnight which was no mean feat as these authors are in high demand! How lucky are we that they agreed to visit our wee schools?!

John Cooper, Conservative MP for Dumfries and Galloway, visited Leswalt P6-7 this afternoon as part of their Democracy and Government topic. John explained to the pupils about his role as an MP – representing all 78,000 citizens in D&G at the Parliament in London.

He explained that he works in the House of Commons and gets to ask the Prime Minister questions. The House of Commons is controlled by the Speaker and he isn’t allowed to speak until he’s been invited to do so.

He told the pupils how he became an MP, starting off as a journalist for the local Free Press, before becoming a Special Advisor to Conservative MP at the time, Alistair Jack. He then spent the last year canvassing D&G constituents before being elected on 4th July this year. He very kindly left a copy of his Maiden Speech, which all MPs have to do after being elected, otherwise they can be kicked out of parliament.

John also takes part in votes to introduce new bills and laws. He showed pupils his parliamentary pass which he uses to enter the House of Commons and either the Aye Lobby or No Lobby, depending on how he is going to vote.

Pupils got the opportunity to ask him some questions to help them learn a little more. They learned what he was interest in when he was at school; what his favourite and least favourite aspect of the job is; and how long he is elected for.

A huge thank-you to John for giving up his afternoon to visit us (especially given that he was in London at the parliament yesterday!).