Leswalt Primary School

Thanks to today’s Leswalt Litter Picking heroes for all their hard work in keeping our school and community looking fabulous! Several bags of rubbish were collected using great teamwork – top job Leswalt!

Many thanks to Active Schools for their recent delivery of the letters of the alphabet for their upcoming initiative Alphabet Street!

Leswalt gladly took delivery of their letters – and promptly put them to good use spelling out their own message! See below…

As we are on the move to share Kirkcolm’s school and playground very soon whilst our exciting refurbishment gets under way, we will store out alphabet letters for the moment and plan some fun with them on our return! Meanwhile, we will enjoy using Kirkcolm’s letters to participate in the Active Schools Challenges. Thanks Active Schools Team!

P5-7 enjoyed Feis Rois with a difference last term – as their weekly lessons were delivered via Microsoft Teams to their own living rooms!

Jamie and Emily, who are multi-instrument musicians with Feis Rois, led our lessons which had us listening to and identifying different musical genres, participating in Scottish and Gaelic action songs and, rather excitingly, working collaboratively to create a sound postcard!

This involved the pupils who participated in the weekly meetings recording sound effects and an extract each of the spooky local story ‘The Phantom Piper of Dunskey’. Rose designed the artwork for the postcard which was then produced into a final piece incorporating the drawing plus a QR code which can be scanned to hear the story production! Very clever stuff.

Thanks to Malcolm, Aidan, Rose, Noah, Breagh, Murray, Thomas, Tristan and Struan for the story recordings.

Check us out below with the finished articles and our class ipads which we used to scan the QR codes and listen to our work.

Well done to Rose and Holly from completing the D&G Active Schools Miles for Smiles challenge! This was set during Lockdown to encourage people to stay active and the girls had great fun doing this! As a thank you, Laura McClymont popped out today with a water bottle for each of them.

Just look at those smiles! Well done girls.

Many thanks must go to Mrs Richardson, Ivy Richardson and the team of helpers from p5-7 who over the last two Friday afternoons have set about the back garden area at school.

The willow dome was in great need of a lock down haircut – it had grown out of  control.  Have  a look at the wonderful transformation. 

Many thanks to Mrs Richardson and her team for all of their hard work.

Mrs Baillie is looking forward to the hairdressers opening soon so she can have the same magical transformation…….

This morning, P5-7 enjoyed their second and final session with Laura McClymont from Active Schools, which resulted in them all being awarded with their Young Sports Leader ‘Playleader’ awards!

Their introductory session was just before the Christmas break and the class took some planning time this week to refresh their memories and organise a game which they could then deliver to their schoolmates.

They needed to think about organisation, safety, groupings and rules. An extra challenge was to go ‘equipment-free’ if possible!

What a range of games were played! The pupils had created a wide choice of games including: Rome Tig, RaRa Relays, Spire Tig, Minecraft Mayhem, Warmongers, Cat and Mouse, Hide n’ Tig, Catch the Villager and Rounders Catch! Laura was most impressed!

Certificates to follow. These are recognised national awards at level 2 – go P5-7!

Well done all!

We’ve had a fantastic week being all back together and today topped it all off with our Share a Smile for Red Nose Day celebrations!

Pupils and staff came to school dressed casually or as superheroes for a small donation. Red noses had literally being flying off the shelves all week, superhero masks were designed, pupils enjoyed Red Nose Day activities and found out more about this charitable event; what it does and the many who benefit from the generous fund-raising!

In the afternoon, we all enjoyed watching the many Talent videos which had been sent in from entrants across the North Rhins Trio. From drumming to dancing; horse-riding to golf; impressions to table tennis and scootering to gymnastics – the wealth of talent across all three of our schools was clear to see!

Every pupil had one vote and, once these had been cast, we headed outside to enjoy the Spring sunshine. Some helped Mrs Richardson with some gardening whilst the rest played octopus tig with Mrs McKnight and Mrs F.

Just before 3pm, Mrs Baillie popped out to reveal the results! Leswalt’s runner-up was Breagh with her horse-riding and the winner was Murray with his scooter skills!

We had a great day whilst raising money for a very good cause (the total to follow).

Many smiles were shared at Leswalt!

 

 

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!