Leswalt Primary School

This afternoon, P6/7 joined a live lesson working on the use of Adobe Express. Each pupil worked on an iPad to create a multi-media collage with a spooky theme. They selected a background, added design elements, assigned animations to each object and layered sound effects over the top! What fantastic results!

The pupils then screenshot their work and emailed them to me (another handy computing skill) for me to upload them to the blog. You can’t quite get the full multimedia effect of sound and movement – but it does give you a glimpse of just some of the super computing skills in use.

Well done all – superbly spooky stuff 🙂

 

Today we had the pleasure of welcoming Jack and Linea from the Children’s Parliament back to talk about Sustainability.

Today’s focus was on our ‘campus’ and how we use our school building. This ties in with the Scottish Government’s aim that by 2030 they want to make sure that…

• all schools are eco friendly in how they heat, power and use materials at school.
• all spaces can be used to learn outdoors within,
• all spaces respect children’s rights.

The pupils were set the task of re-creating the school campus using anything they could find in the classroom – not easy but they worked together and did so well! They then needed to write down how each area is used and how eco-friendly these areas are. We linked our school campus back to the UNCRC Children’s Rights Charter so that we could see these rights as they are put into action. This gave us lots of things to talk and think about.

We are doing lots already to make our local campus as sustainable as it can be, but we know there are lots of steps we could take to improve. Some of these things we would need to help to put into action – but Jack and Linea said that all our opinions are important and they’d take all ideas back to the Scottish Government.

Another great session! We are looking forward to our next session next month too 🙂

This morning, P6-7 learned a very important life skill – CPR. This annual initiative was led by  Resuscitation Council UK which aims to increase the number of people surviving out-of-hospital cardiac arrests by helping more people learn CPR. We spent 5 minutes listening to a doctor explain about the importance of CPR, and how CPR and use of a Defibrillator hugely increases a person’s chance of survival.

We then learned what to do in the event of finding someone unconscious – we had to remember the acronym CCP.  CHECK for danger and to see if the person responds/is breathing; CALL for help by phoning 999 and putting your phone on loud speaker to free up your hands; if they aren’t breathing, PUSH on their chest to start chest compressions.

We practised doing chest compressions on a cushion – we got up on our knees, interlocked our fingers and pushed down in the middle of the breastbone firmly (the video said approx. 6cm). We kept this going for the duration of the Baby Shark song – and quickly realised how tiring it was to keep up the same momentum!

We learned that it’s better to have a go and try to save someone’s life rather than standing by and not doing anything. CPR is such an important skill to have – although one we hope pupils will never have to use.

P1-4 were delighted to welcome Megan Bark, Dental Health Officer, into school this afternoon to help them learn all about dental hygiene as part of their Health and Wellbeing topic. Megan gave the pupils some hints and tips to keep their teeth sparkling clean and pupils got the chance to put her advice into practise on some puppets.

Megan has set all of the pupils a challenge – to ensure that they brush their teeth morning and night, at least for the next month. They have all been provided with a toothbrushing diary that they need to tick to show when they brushed their teeth and should return it to school when finished. Those who return their successfully completed diary will receive a certificate! We are looking forward to seeing who is up to the challenge!

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!

This week is ‘Maths Week Scotland’! It’s a chance to explore, enjoy and discover all things relating to Maths – and realise just how much Maths we use everyday – sometimes without even realising it!

Each day, both classes have had lots of Maths fun doing different activities.

On Monday, P6/7 watched and talked about the maths relating to Alice in Wonderland with an online Maths Live event – who knew just how much logic was used in that famous story! They also brushed up their Maths whizzkid number skills with their weekly Beat That and CLIC number challenges.

On Tuesday, P1-4 had lots of outside fun with Liz Tindall – the weather was in their favour for that ! They enjoyed a Beetle Drive, stick measuring, symmetry and made a giant pizza! Lots of maths concepts being used in a variety of ways.

P6/7 enjoyed a Pairs Puzzle (planned for outside but the weather had other ideas!) Working together, pupils solved number puzzles hidden all around the school, unscrambled an anagram of the letters on each puzzle piece (yo spell ‘we are the greatest!) and were rewarded with a Puzzle Prize at the end (Haribos!)

Wednesday was a very busy day with P6/7  using their number skills in French with a fund outdoors game with Mrs McKnight – ooh la la!

On Thursday, P1-4 participated in two online events exploring storytelling and maths whilst P6/7’s online session explored the idea of infinity through a story called ‘Infinity and Me’ by Kate Hosford and listened to the experiences of a STEM Ambassador who explained her route towards the job she does now as an engineer and the part which maths plays in this. Plus we had fun doing our maths games such as Kahoot (a VERY competitive game enjoyed by P6/7!) and coding Spheros to follow an obstacle course.

And to round the week off, on Friday P6/7 headed outside for a challenging outdoor Maths Trail. Pupils worked together in pairs to answer the questions about various things outdoors, from calculating the number of rectangles in the fence surrounding the car park, to identifying different types of angles outside.

The finish off our busy week, we participated in the #ShowYourWorking event and welcomed in 2 parents, Andrew (Betty & Ela’s Dad) and Lauren (Gregor’s Mum), who shared how they use maths in their every day lives and work. Pupils were prepared with some questions to ask them to gain an insight into how vital a skill maths is for everyone, and even put them on the spot to see how many times tables they could remember!!

Phew! It’s been a busy week!

P6/7 are lucky to be enjoying Living Life to the Full sessions with Matthew Robinson from the D&G Youth Work team. This ties in perfectly with their HWB focus on Feelings and Self-Esteem. Pupils have been participating in team-building games and reflecting on different emotions and thinking about their reactions in different situations. Lots of chat and fun helping pupils to work on their self-belief and ability to recognise and deal with their feelings.
Thanks to Matthew for his input. Looking forward to the next few sessions 😊

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

P6/7 were delighted to welcome Jack and Linnea to their class today to lead them through a Dignity in School Children’s Parliament session. The class met Dodger the Red Squirrel and considered the rights Dodger has as well as the rights we all have – and the ones we share/differ. We linked these to our Children’s Rights and thought about the Digni-tree as it has safe, happy and healthy as its branches and our rights as its roots – where everything grows from!
We were set the challenge to think about things we learn about when we’re outdoors, things we learn about other children and their countries and challenges they might face and things we learn about the environment, nature and climate change.

We are looking forward to seeing Jack, Linnea and Dodger again next term when we are exploring our Government and Democracy topic!

 

 

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.