Uncategorized – Page 3 – Leswalt Primary School

Focusing FUR-gus, Sense-Making LAMB-ira and Feeling FeLICKS – Ian McDonalds Careers Assembly

Today we were very excited to have Cameron’s daddy in to speak to us about his job as a Vet, especially given the number of aspiring vets we have in the school!🐾

Ian told our about his background and how he first became interested in becoming a vet and his love for animals and very many pets that he has at home! He explained that in order to be a vet you must have a kind and caring personality as what he does day-to-day is help animals to feel better. To do this he visits farms around the Stranraer area, assisting with calving, lambing, vaccinations and performing surgeries! He said that one of his favourite parts of his job is the fact that everyday is visit and when out on a job or in the surgery he just can’t predict what problems will arise! 🤔🔬💭

Ian spoke about his role and the skills and qualities needed to be a good vet. We have been learning all about the 12 Meta Skills so it was great to hear how these can be used out with school in the world of work

Focussing Fergus – For obvious reasons. for a vet concentration is key! He has lots of technical and high pressure jobs on his hands from the moment he starts work to the moment he finishes so being able to focus and get the job done right is super important! 🐶🐱

Collaborating Cora – As a vet you often need to work alongside other vets/farmers so being able to work as part of a team is crucial. there is absolutely no way vets could do what they do alone! 🐄

Communicating Cate –Ian explained that working with animals was always something he was very comfortable with and by the sounds of it something he is naturally very talented in! Of course the does not speak the language of ‘dog’ or ‘cat’ but managed to work well with animals all the same! What people maybe don’t realise as much is that vets always need to be good at communicating with human-beings as every pet has an owner! 🐇🦔

Critical Thinking Chris – Often vets have big problems that they may not always know the answers or solutions to straight away! Ian explained that he once had a horse whose skin had been ripped on a barbed wire fence (yes we did see the photos to prove it!) and this means that they have to take time to consider all of the different options and possibilities before deciding to proceed with the best one! 🏇

A huge thank you to Ian for his time, the boys and girls really enjoyed his visit – they were well and truly captivated with every words Ian spoke as well as the cute but equally as interesting pictures he shared – and I have no doubt we will have a few keen to follow in his footsteps after this afternoon!

RRS Links

Article 13 (freedom of expression) Every child must be free to express their thoughts and opinions and to access all kinds of information.

Our Amazing Brains

This morning we welcomed the lovely Kelsey McWhirter from Alzheimer’s Scotland in to speak to the P6/7s about brain health!

She showed us a programme called STARS; each letter representing a way to keep our brains performing to the best of their ability ⭐🧠

Spend time with friends and family – having conversations and making connections about different parts of your day and learning helps the brain to develop

Tuck In – Our brain uses 1/5th of energy from the food that we eat. It is so important to make sure we are earing a healthy, balanced diet to ensure our brain has all of the nutrients it needs! 🍌🍉

Active and Healthy – Moving our bodies helps the blood pump to our brain, giving it a boost!🏃‍♀️

Rest and Relax – It is so important tat children get 10 hours of sleep per night! While we are sleeping our brains are processing all of the important information learned throughout the day!😴💤🌙

Safety – try to keep our heads and brains safe by keeping away from danger, especially head injuries!

We learned a lot of useful information to help us to keep our brains working hard and some fun facts that I am sure you might be amazed by over the dinner table tonight!

Thanks again to Kelsey from Alzheimer’s Scotland for her session today, we thoroughly enjoyed her visit!

Meta Skills

Feeling Felix

Focusing Fergus

Sense Making Samira

RRS

Article 24 – Access to Health Care

Article 28 – The right to an Education

Ewan and Fallon speak to the Government!

As part of both schools ongoing work with The Children’s Parliament – Both Fallon (Kirkcolm) and Ewan (Leswalt) were selected to represent children’s voices and views at the Scottish Government base at Atlantic Quay in Glasgow. Fallon and Ewan and have been doing ongoing work with The Children’s Human Right Defenders. This has meant many video calls and a whole lot of information for them both to absorb and contribute to before presenting their hard work. This culminated in a Residential Trip last week, escorted up by Mrs Baillie herself. They stayed near Edinburgh, and went from the Sunday morning until Tuesday evening. There were 7 children representing the whole of Scotland at this residential – and two of them were ours! Fallon and Ewan did us very proud – they were impeccably behaved, confident and articulate individuals.

Ewan had customised his glasses with some pipe cleaners, left over from his artwork. He even managed to persuade some of the government to do the same – see if you can spot this in the photographs!

Here is Fallon’s account of their days away –

We left Stranraer at 11 am on Sunday morning with Mrs Baillie driving. We stopped for something to eat at Ayr. When we arrived we got straight in to work. We finished off making our butterfly and bat – our “pollinators for change”. I finished in a few minutes so I could go on to the next activity. We made bees and flowers too. I made my quite quickly . Before we had a little break I helped Hamza with his butterfly and Ewan put the final touches on his bat. He added pompoms and pipe cleaners!

We had a half an hour break and we went back to work. Then we decorated our rails. Ewan and I used mainly green and blue ribbon and some fake leaves but we also added a touch of pink bows and the flowers. Then we made our dinner – it was pizza! We went to bed. I shared a room with Kati and Ella, Ewan shared a room with Hamza.

On the second day, we had breakfast as got straight back to work. We worked on our speeches. Ewan and I presented all about climate change. One other group spoke about mental health and another spoke about vapes. We organized who was saying what and practiced for a few hours till we could say our speech with no help and no notes. We said our speeches in front of everyone and Cara said her introduction speech – everyone was very good. Then we did a few more practises until dinner , which was chicken wraps.

On the third and final day we packed up, had breakfast and headed off to Atantic Quay in Glasgow.

When we arrived in Glasgow we got our garden set up (the place where we would be talking to everyone). We organised our rails and plants. We went into a big fancy room and we heard Joe Griffin say his speech. Then we all said our speeches. It went very well and you could tell they where listening as they asked lots of questions.

I really enjoyed my time away.

Fallon

Eco schools success – Flag number 4!

Leswalt Primary is delighted to announce they have just received an Eco Schools Scotland Green flag award! This is in recognition of all the hard work and efforts of the school to protect the environment,

This is the 4th Green flag the school has achieved. Previous awards were in 2019, 2021 and 2023 – demonstrating our ongoing commitment to this.

Please click here to see the feedback we received.

The photograph below shows our Eco committee under their Eco flag and proud of another award

Sun, Run and Lots of Fun at Leswalt Sports Day!

After being scheduled, rescheduled and then rescheduled again Leswalt’s annual Sports Day finally took place and what glorious, sunny weather we got! 😎☀🌞

The races of the day were as follows:
The Sprint
The Skipping Race
The Sack Race
Egg and Spoon Race
Obstacle Race
Long Distance

The races ran very smoothly and Mrs Baillie managed to get them done in record time before the highly anticipated Relay Race. A team from Lochnaw and Soleburn after days (maybe even weeks) of practise were finally ready to go head-to-head! It was extremely close throughout the race but during the final leg Murray just pipped Daisy to the post! 🏆

The sportsmanship that the boys and girls showed today was just fantastic – they cheered one another on and had plenty of laughs, we are so incredibly proud of them all!♥🥇🥈🥉

A huge big thank you to Gordon and Kim from Leswalt shop to very kindly bought ice-lollies, sweets and bottles of water for the boys and girls the enjoy after their races (some of them ran just as fast for these as they did in their races haha!)

Excited to see how this effects our already very close House Points and who manages to secure Sports Champion boy and girl this year!? All will be revealed at the Closing Ceremony. 🏆🤔

Results will be posted soon… Here are some cute action shots and some funny facials for now!

Rights of the Child
Article 31 of the UNCRC says that children and young people have the right to have fun in the way they want to.

Article 28 – The right to an education

Metaskills:
Focussing Fergus (as you can see from the action shots)

Leading Li (Thank you House Captains)

Collaborating Cora (Plenty of fantastic team work)

Communicating Cate (just in case you didn’t hear the cheers)

Meeting McTaggart Construction!

Today we donned our hi-viz vests, popped on a hard hat and met Ross and Lynsey from McTaggart Construction at the building site to hear more about the new housing development.

There are to be 56 houses built on the land and, at the moment, excavators, diggers and bulldozers are getting the land ready so the foundations can be put in place. This’ enabling phase’ is expected to take 6-12 weeks. The field they are building in is known as a ‘green field’ which means it hasn’t had anything built on it before ( a ‘brown field’ has had buildings which have been cleared to make way for new ones to be built). Ross told us that there are just under 1000 different jobs involved in the construction industry and lots of people need to work together to get from planning to the finished result!

As a treat, Ross and Lynsey had a bag of sweeties for each child – thank you!

We are looking forward to working with McTaggart Construction to find out more abut the building industry and watch the process of this housing development.

UNCRC

27 – Food, clothing and a safe home

29 – Aims of Education

Meta-Skills

Focusing Fergus Curiosity Carlos Sense-making Samira

Forest School – week 5 🌳

Another afternoon of the best outdoor fun today with Richard for week 5 of Forest School! 🌳
It was a little showery but we’re a hardy bunch. What is it they say…‘it’s not bad weather it’s just you’re not dressed for it!’ So kitted out in waterproof jackets, we were set for an hour of den building (plus the P6/7 pupils got a chance to learn how to use a saw responsibly!)

Interestingly, Isla unearthed a brown glass Domestos bottle down the burn which, we discovered after a quick Google search that this was in production from the late 1930s until the familiar blue plastic Domestos bottle came into production in 1961! We might get in touch with the local museum about her discovery!

We all had the best time. Initially we got a little waylaid spotting the many many tiny frogs hopping along the Wetland paths. Clearly the mild temperatures and damp conditions were paradise to them! 🐸

Richard set us all tasks to start creating our dens – he then took the older pupils to have a go at using a saw while he supervised and gave them top tips on how to use a saw safely. 🪚

Far too soon, it was time for us all to head back to school. We’ve just one more week of Forest School fun left. I think it’s safe to say that everyone has thoroughly enjoyed this experience! Thanks to Richard for leading these sessions. 😄

Meta-skills

Curiosity Carlos Communicating Cate Adapting Aleksander

Integrity Imani Leading Li Collaborating Cora

UNCRC

13 sharing thoughts freely 🗣

28 access to education 🏫

24 health, water, food and environment 🌳

From Dunskey Green to the Crime Scene: Stuart Fisher’s Careers Assembly

On Friday afternoon we were very excited to have Stuart Fisher back in our school, we always love Stuart’s visits to help us with our golfing skills but this time he came not as a golfing coach but as a Police officer. ⛳🏌️‍♀️👮‍♂️

Stuart has recently undertaken his Police training and has very kindly come in to talk about his new job as part of our careers in the community assemblies. He spoke about all of the many things that he does as a police officer and how he makes sure he keeps everyone safe. As expected the boys and girls came armed with many questions and Stuart did very well to answer them.

We have been learning all about the 12 meta skills as part of our assembly focus and Stuart explained the key skills he needs to do his job including:

Adapting Aleksander – He explained that each and every day is different and most days you don’t know what problems you will have to deal with so being adaptive is a skill that every police officer needs.

Focussing Fergus – Stuart also explained that despite being out and about in Stranraer, on foot and in the police van he also spends a lot of time in the office doing paperwork so must be good at concentrating and staying focussed to help him get it done!🚓🚨🚔✏️📝

Collaborating Cora – As a police officer Stuart needs to work with lots of different people (not just criminals ), he also works with members of the public, doctors, nurses, families, schools to name just a few! He said he must have good people skills to help him with this.

Communicating Cate – Being a police officer can be a very high pressure job and many people find speaking to the police a little scary. Stuart explained that the police are there to help and will always speak calmly, fairly and respectfully.

Curiosity Carlos – One of the most obvious roles of a Police officer is to resolve problems and get to the bottom of crimes. He explained that he must ask the right questions to help him to do this.

A huge thank you to Stuart for his time, as always he made us smile and laugh and I am sure inspired a few of us to follow in his footsteps! 👮‍♂️

Article 13 (freedom of expression) Every child must be free to express their thoughts and opinions and to access all kinds of information.

Forest School Week 4 – Art!

What fun we had yesterday afternoon over at Aldouran Wetlands with Richard Patchett!

The mission this week was to use natural materials to create art. P1-4 worked in groups building a nest, den and a tent. Jorgie designed a fabulous picture complete with a picture frame, tree and sunshine made from a yellow leaf! Love this creativity!

The P6/7 crew split into groups and all opted to build cosy dens. Teamwork was the order of the day with branches and leaves being used to support and cover the structures. All good fun – even the midges were being kind ! The smell of wild garlic was just amazing – pair that with the giggles of everyone as they had fun exploring and what is not to love?!

Look at the happy faces below 😀🌳