Kirkcolm Primary School

Today our P6 pupils across both schools dotted off to Operation Safety at Stair Park today for a wide variety of different safety inputs!🆘All helping them get clued up before their senior year! 

Pupils moved around 7 stations, each with their own focus;

1. Fire safety – can they spot the fire hazards in a home and how to manage these! 🧯🔥🚒
2. The Coastguard! (very important for this time of year in this area…) what to do if they spot somebody drowning and how to keep themselves safe in water. 🥽🚣‍♀️
3. Electricity with Scottish Power – spotting electrical hazards in the home and how to prevent these ⚡💡🔌
4. Youth Work came and did an input on Internet Safety – teaching pupils how to stay safe online and what they should or shouldn’t share online. 👍
5. Drugs and Alcohol – what are the harmful effects of drugs and alcohol 👎
6. Community, Council & Criminal – looking at certain acts and who is responsible for preventing and managing these! Is it a criminal problem for the police? A problem for the community to manage themselves? Or something we should turn to the council to help prevent? 🧐🤔
7. Vandalism in the community! Pupils built giant Jenga Towers before they were cruelly destroyed in front of them. This taught pupils how it feels to have something of value that others can take upon themselves to deface! 🖌🎨

After  the whopping 7 inputs over the course of the day – safe to say our P6 pupils are pretty clued up ! Thank you to all the organisations in the community for making this happen every year and to Mrs MacPherson for accompanying pupils today and playing the role of photographer to document the day! 

Meta Skills

Focusing Fergus

Collaborating Cora 

Articles

Article 29 – Right to Education

Today our Primary 7s from both schools took the opportunity to have a little jaunt to Stranraer Academy where they got to get a feel for the building as well as participate in some lessons! Today they got to get stuck into some Home Economics with Miss Jamieson making cheese and ham toasties and Art & Design with Mrs Thompson where they made their own superheroes! 

This was a fantastic opportunity to start getting the P7 Leavers familiar with the layout of the building, some of the staff they will be encountering during their time there and the food available in the lunch hall! Safe to say – nobody was about to turn down some free hot food! 🍔There was talks of pizza, brownies and cheese toasties when they got back. 

The boys and girls had a fab time and are very excited for their next steps after summer! (Hopefully they are also still a bit sad about leaving us in all the excitement!) 

Meta Skills

Collaborating Cora 

Communicating Cate

Articles

Article 28 – Right to Education 

Our fabulous partnership football team took part in the Sheuchan Fun Day football tournament this past Friday! This term, during their Friday evenings after school, many of the pupils have been participating in some football training with the wonderful Miss Agnew and felt ready to take on some tournaments together… 

Every single of them gave it their best on Friday, 110% effort! ⚽ Despite no wins – they had a blast and enjoyed getting to meet boys and girls from the different schools. I also heard there were half time tangerines🍊 and plenty of sunshine 🌞

An excellent way to round off the week… 

Today we had the joy of the sun shining upon us (after the usual quick smattering of rain this morning) as we hopped on a bus to our Annual trip to Logan Botanical Gardens. This is always a fantastic opportunity to remind the boys and girls of this wonderful, magical place and all the natural beauty it has to offer 🌻🌼🌷

P1-4 went off to enjoy their input all about ‘Our Senses in the Garden’ and investigated how their senses help them investigate life around them! 👀👂👄👃🤚They used little spy glasses (tubes!) to look up close at various plants and flowers around the garden and use their sight to see the different parts of plants! Then they foraged around the gardens for any leaves or flower petals on the floor to make yp their own special concoctions and use their noses to smell what they came up with! Finally, using some foraged goods, they made small collages to take home to show off about their day! 

P5-7  enjoyed an input on ‘The Life Cycle of Plants’ and investigated how plants procreate and create new plants and flowers. This was brought to life with a very effective drama performance starring some of the pupils! Shout out to Cameron – our fab Busy Bee pollinator! 🐝They saw how plants contain both male and female parts to pollinate and there is a wide variety of pollinators all over the world! From humming birds to squirrels losing their hidden seeds for over the Winter! We also investigated how birds see more red and insects more blue and how plants evolve their petals to appeal to either with some rather cool glasses. 🔵🔴

Before we all came together again to hop on the bus back home – just in time for a fab Tuesday lunch from Michelle at school together! 🍛 Huge thanks to the team at the Botanical gardens for consistently putting on engaging and interesting inputs to allow the pupils to get up close with nature each year! 

Meta Skills

Focusing Fergus

Collaborating Cora 

Leading Li 

Creativity Cassidy 

Sense Making Samira 

Articles

Article 29 – Right to Education

Article 24 – Health, Water, Food & Environment 

Today PC MacGregor and PC Jack came out to speak to the boys and girls in the upper class all about substance abuse! This talk was delivered to all P7 pupils across the cluster ahead of their transition to the Academy. 

We learned what was classed as a drug and were all very shocked out that chocolate even came under that heading! No surprises there – given how addictive it can be! 🍫 We learned about the differences between legal and illegal drugs, different sub categories of drugs and what the different types are. Pupils got to ask PC Mac Gregor and PC Jack all about them. 

Then we got on to a very exciting surprise for the afternoon – they had brought in the different sniffer dogs for the pupils to get up close to! Pupils got to meet Nancy and Poppy – 2 sniffer dogs and watch them in action! Both spaniels were absolutely smashing at their job. We learned about the hard work that goes into training up these dogs, with dogs at the end of this training process being worth a whopping £14,000. WE were very happy to hear that outside their working hours, the dogs enjoyed a luxury home life with their caring handlers. 🐕‍🦺🐶🦴

A huge thank you to the Stranraer Community Police team for offering this input to us! 

Meta Skills

Focusing Fergus

Articles

Article 29 – Right to Education

This afternoon the whole school enjoyed an afternoon at the beach to celebrate all the walking and running they did to win the steps challenge last term! 🚶‍♂️🚶 House Captains Arran and Allyssa had selected this as their prize at our most recent meeting and put in the miles to win! 😄 The sun had disappeared a little after a beautiful week of weather but that didn’t stop our fun! We played games, built sandcastles and collected an unimaginable amount of stones and shells! It was lovely to see having a laugh and a giggle with some outdoor learning in one of our favourite places! 🏖️🐚

Meta Skills:
Creativity Cassidy
Feeling Felix

Article 31 – The right to play and relax 

Today we welcomed the lovely people from the Children’s Parliament, they have been doing work in developing what their priority issues are for their Children’s Human Rights Defenders program.

This means they are working closely with a few selected schools across Scotland to find out what issues matter the most to children across the country and we have been selected to participate in this due to our lovely Fallon’s work with Children’s Parliament in representing children across Scotland. 🙌

Throughout the course of the day we explored all of the Rights children have in, and which rights pupils felt were being respected or disrespected. 🤯

Pupils selected the right which they felt was the most important to them and explained their reasons. They went on to jazz up their chosen right as a GEM 💎 to demonstrate how important it is to them.

There was a wide range of topics that were up for discussion over the course of the day! Pupils hotly debated social media for under 16’s, the effects of vaping, disability access in Scotland… 🗣️

Meta Skills

Focusing Fergus

Collaborating Cora

Leading Li 

Communicating Cate 

Sense Making Samira 

Critical Thinking Chris 

Integrity Imani 

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All of them! 🤗🤩