Kirkcolm Primary School

Wow – all those weeks worth of work have paid off! 

Since the end of January, pupils and teachers have been prepping for the upcoming return of the School Easter Show! It has been many years since we have been able to go back on the stage and entertain you all with our drama skills and for many of the pupils here – it is their first time getting the opportunity to take part in a whole school play.

This year we went with Pirates vs Mermaids, it was sure to be a comedy spectacular and had lots of funny moments and catchy songs! 

Pupils have put in such a huge amount of work in preparing for this, they have been diligently learning their lines and songs and taking orders/direction from some very amateur director teachers!

The Drama Club were a huge help to us by supplying the majority of the costumes and we cannot thank them enough. Parents as well, for no doubt putting up with hearing these songs being sung endlessly at home as well as helping support the pupils in learning their lines and getting together all the bits they needed for the final show. 

I hope the final product was worth it!

Here are some photos live from the day time show and the show was also recorded and can be viewed on You Tube Pirates vs Mermaids – YouTube

Until next year! 

There was an excellent turn out from our cluster primary schools at this year’s annual Primary 7 Rotary Quiz.

Teams of four from each school competed to be this year’s champions.  There were a number of categories such as:

• Geography
• Technology
• Entertainment
• Nature

The questions were very entertaining and wide ranging.  A good few of them challenged the grown-ups in the audience too.

The winners were as follows:

1. Rephad
2. Sandhead
3. Kirkcolm

Congratulations to Noah, Jack, James and Olivia!

Our partnership pupils enjoyed the social mingle. There was a great team spirit and a lively atmosphere . Well done to all the keen beans who took part.  Thank you to the Rotary Club for organising the event and funding the refreshments and prizes.  Thank you also to Rephad for hosting the event.  A good time was had by all.

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The Lighthouse Musicians visited P1-4 at Kirkcolm Primary today for a morning of music. To get started, Gillian led the boys and girls though an opposites game which was aimed at getting their bodies warmed up and their minds concentrating, with Sally being crowned the winner. After this, they then spoke about the importance of warming up our voices before singing and pupils took it in turns to lead the class through the ‘voice rollercoaster’ warm-up, were the pitch of our voice had to follow the person’s hand up or down.

We then had great fun trying to say the tongue twister that Gillian had created especially for Kirkcolm – “Kirsty kissed a camel at Kirkcolm” – before singing some songs together, including 5 Speckled Frogs and BINGO! Each pupil then received a cup and we sat in a big circle. We had to learn the rhythm that Gillian taught us and play it as an ensemble. After we finished the rhythm each time, we had to pass our cup onto the next person and see if we could keep it going until we got our original cup back. And we did, meaning we managed the same rhythm 24 times in total!!

Finally, we learned some Italian musical terms, including forte (loud), fortissimo (very loud), piano (quiet), pianissimo (very quiet). We played the hot/cold game with a hidden ball, but using the Italian terms instead.

A huge thank-you to the Lighthouse Musicians for coming into school today – we had a wonderful musical morning!

On Wednesday we welcomed Ansley McClure from the Kirkcolm Community Hub to present a prize to a very special little lady in P3! Last year, all pupils took part in a competition for designing the new logo for the Kirkcolm Community Hub and it was Jessica’s lovely design of the sunset over the Loch with the silhouette of Corsewell Lighthouse that won it in the end! 

Jessica earned herself a WHSmith voucher to spend on herself and her design has been made into a sign which now sits outside the hub, welcoming any passer-by’s in! 

Well done Jessica! 

To celebrate Red Nose Day 2023 and raise funds for Comic Relief, everyone came to school today dressed in their casual clothes. We even had one pupil who sprayed his hair red to mark the occasion! Official merchandise has been on sale all week to raise further pennies for this very worthwhile cause.

Our House Captains, James and Noah, have also been busy organising our ‘Kirkcolm’s Got Talent’ show over the last few weeks. They held auditions and got everything set up for our show this afternoon, to which parents and friends of the school were invited in return for a small donation. We had a variety of wonderful acts entertaining the audience, including Ivan playing his saxophone, Sally & Phoebe displaying their gymnastics skills, Emilie singing and dancing to George Ezra ‘Green Green Grass’, and Alistair doing a comedy sketch to ‘The Duck Song.’

Former Kirkcolm Headteacher, Mr Harold McCracken, kindly gave up his time to come in and help our House Captains judge the talent show. Despite it being a difficult decision, Ross and Rory were award 3rd place for singing Ed Sheeran ‘Celestial’; Havana was awarded 2nd place for playing the harmonica; and Jack was awarded 1st place for singing U2 ‘With or Without You.’

We raised an amazing total of £151.45 for Comic Relief! A huge well done to all our performers – you are indeed a very talented bunch! – and thank-you to everyone for supporting our charity fundraising.

The upper class have been studying WW2 and as part of their topic they had to pick an area we looked at and crate their own personal project on it, and well… One pupil really went the extra mile! 

Young James Turtle CREATED this piece of work, it is a zeplin based on the type you would have seen being used in WW2 and created it in his own work shop entirely out of recycled wood from pallets! 

I am sure you will all agree with me that he has a bright future ahead of him in carpentry and get your orders in now! 

Well done to our P7 pupils who dazzled at the Curling Bonspiel on Monday! Pupils headed down to the North West Castle, kindly escorted by parent Lucy, to participate in some curling fun and engage in a bit of competition. 

There met up with Portpatrick, Leswalt, Sandhead, Sheuchan, Park, Belmont and Rephad teams and our wee buddies at Kirkcolm managed to swing second place!

With the outcome being; 

1st: Rephad 

2nd: Kirkcolm 

3rd: Sheuchan

Pupils also got a tasty lunch at the North West castle for their hard work and we hope this has inspired some of them to take up the sport themselves in their own free time to make use of the great resources we have here in this wee corner of Scotland! 

The second place winners; 

On Friday we got ourselves all sorted out with an early lunch to then head down to the Ryan Centre for a film afternoon! The film afternoon was courtesy of the folk at Intu Film, who kindly came in and did a session with the upper school on film making not long ago. 

We got snuggled up in the cosy theatre to watch Tad the Explorer and the Curse of the Mummy! We had a fab time and it was lovely to see some familiar faces from our partnership schools there! 

A lovely day to come back to and a chance to celebrate all things literature! Today was kindly organised by Olivia from Pupil Council and our two hard working librarians; Archie & Marley, who all worked hard to come up with come activities to help us celebrate World Book Day! 

They ran a character design competition which saw Ivan and Paige come out on top! As well as that, we drew a raffle for anybody who manage to take an accelerated reading test today which had Steven take winning place. All three earned an extra book token!

In class, the younger pupils took part on a main character treasure hunt outside organised by Miss Douglas and the big class participated in the BBC Live Lesson on World Book Day. Upper school pupils also enjoyed a Chill n’ Read session in class where they cosied up with a book and some hot chocolate and biscuits – a huge part of the true joy of reading when you get to curl up with a good book! All pupils took part in the David Walliams Live Lesson later on in the day where the wee people enjoyed their hot chocolate and biscuits! 

Overall, an indulgent calm day was had by all and we hope all the pupils get to make use of their book tokens and feel a tiny bit more inspired by books and what comes with the joy of reading! I have already heard some whispers of pupils thinking about writing their own books or already in the throws of writing so can’t wait to read what they’ve come up with one day! 

Well done to the boys who represented the school at the Active Schools Badminton competition! They have been regularly attending badminton sessions over the past few weeks and all their hard work paid off. James secured second place with a medal, Jack secured third place with a medal and Ivan came fourth overall out of a whopping over 50 who attended the competition!