Kirkcolm Primary School

Helen from Lighthouse Musicians came in this afternoon to work with P1-4 to help develop their musical talents! We started off with a game similar to musical statues, but when the music stopped, we had to get into groups depending on the number that Helen shouted out. This helped to develop our listening and team work!

We then recapped and learned some new Italian musical terms for speed, including accelerando (speeding up) and ritardando (slowing down). Using this knowledge, we sang the Grand Old Duke of York at different speeds – and realised how tricky it is to pronounce words when you are singing so quickly!!

To help us get into the festive spirit, we then sang the 12 Days of Christmas and created our own class version with suggestions from the boys and girls.

To finish off our session, we recapped some musical terms for dynamics, and played a matching game where the word and definition were on different cards, and we had to walk around the room to find our partner.

Thank-you to Helen for taking the time to come in today – we had a wonderful afternoon!

Kirkcolm Parent council had put a great deal of preparation into organising their Christmas coffee morning which took place on Saturday.  Even Storm Darragh could not deter the support for this fabulous fundraising event!

Lots of family and friends of Kirkcolm Primary braved the very strong winds to come out and enjoy the tasty home baking on offer.   Many people even had to take detours to reach Kirkcolm – to avoid all the fallen trees on the roads.

There was a great raffle with lots and lots of fabulous prizes.  There was a variety of Christmas arts and crafts for the children to enjoy in a classroom. The pupils of the school also sold their Christmas crafts and entertained with some Christmas songs.  Santa was on hand, in his amazing grotto to give all the good boys and girls of Kirkcolm some treats too.

This combined team work, led by Sheila, Marie and the Parent council generated the amazing sum of  £1218.16!

Well done, and thank you all.  Thank you to those who baked, helped, bought raffle  tickets, crafts and came along on the day.  This money will help benefit all the children at school.

Today both classes at Kirkcolm had a input from Lisa Cope – who educated the pupils all about budgeting. We learned what budgeting is and why it is an essential skill to have throughout life! Little ones looked at budgeting for a day out where as the older pupils looked at budgeting for a birthday party, with a few curve balls thrown in there along the way! 

This was a great session to examine how budgeting works and our spending habits! Pupils were scandalised when some of them realised they had overspent beyond their means! 

Today we welcomed Rebecca Kirkpatrick into the upper school classroom to deliver the ‘Quit Your Way’ input tot he classroom. This is in line with the Scottish Governments initiative to have Scotland be a smoke free country by 2034. This was a great input and we hope it gave our learners the information they need to make the right choices as they get older! 👏

We discussed all the new laws surrounding Nicotine products from the banning of single use vapes to the gradual increase of the age to buy tobacco products in Scotland which means 15 year olds today will NEVER be able to buy tobacco products. 

Rebecca did some experiments with us to see how smoking would affect our health and ability to do things and overall – it was a great and extremely informative input for the pupils! 😁👍

As part of Book Week Scotland (although we are technically a week later as our bags didn’t arrive in time!), P1-3 parents and family members were invited into school today to find out about the Bookbug (P1) and Read, Write, Count (P2-3) bags that are provided to children by the Scottish Government and Scottish Book Trust. We looked through the contents of the bags – each child received between 2 and 4 books, an activity booklet, and either a card game and maths resource, or a magnetic whiteboard and magnetic numbers to take home and keep. We also looked at all of the online resources that are available to support children’s learning at home using the bags.

We then went into the classroom and gifted the children with their bags – they were very excited to get everything out and have a go at some of the games. We had P2 pupils putting their problem solving skills to the test with a Tangram; P1 pupils practising their numbers and sums on the magnetic whiteboard; and P3 pupils enjoying the ‘act it out’ charades and Top Trumps games using the pack of cards. And top top it off, everyone got to leave school with a biscuit as well as their bookbag to enjoy!

Thank-you to all of the parents and family members who were able to make yesterday’s session. If you were unable to make it, please look in your child’s school bag for their Bookbug/Read, Write, Count bag – there are lots of beautiful resources for you to enjoy together to support literacy and numeracy at home.

Today we did a little switch about with our classes which meant upper school Leswalt and Kirkcolm were brought together, and lower school classes also joined forces. To make the most of this day, teachers organised some little activities to get the pupils bonding with their stage partners across the partnership! It was a fantastic day and it was so lovely to see the red and burgundy mixing together, especially for the older boys and girls ahead of Lockerbie Manor in February and then the Academy! 👏

Lower school pupils looked out their Victorian toys from their Toy topic and played with them outside and inside together.  They then learned about hopscotch and played that outside together. Upper school pupils embarked on a STEM session where we got stuck into some coding with our Microbits and Spheros and flexed our creativity with the K’Nex moving parts set! What a fab day – hope we get to do things like this more often! 👍🤞

Wow! What a fantastic morning we have had here at Kirkcolm primary School! Through the exceptional hard work of Mrs McHarg and Mrs McKnight, both Kirkcolm and Leswalt were able to secure author visits through the Big DoG Schools Tour & Wigtown Book Festival applications.

This meant today at Kirkcolm we had a visit form famous Scottish Author Ross MacKenzie (author of the NoWhere Emporium) and Leswalt were visited by Chae Strathie (author of Dear Dinosaur). Leswalt P6-7 joined us here at Kirkcolm to hear all about Ross MacKenzie’s journey into becoming an author as well as how he comes to write his books. P1-4 of Kirkcolm went to Leswalt for the morning to inspire the pupils there by reading some his books and getting them to make silly drawings of dinosaurs and ice cream!

We are very lucky and blessed to get such great opportunities in this little corner of Scotland. 🥳

Primary 7 pupils travelled to the Stranraer Campus of Dumfries & Galloway College this morning, as part of Scottish Careers Week. The event was organised by Skills Development Scotland and we were joined by Castle Kennedy, Glenluce and Sheuchan Primaries. After an introduction from Kathryn and Lucy (SDS), we had 3 activities that we worked our way around throughout the morning.

The first activity was learning where the Careers Advisers are located at Stranraer Academy and what their role is. We then played a ‘would you rather…?’ game considering different aspect of various jobs, e.g. would you rather have a job that involved people or animals? We then split into 3 small groups and were given items to look at and had to list any job linked to those items – the careers advisers were impressed that 1 group got over 20 jobs and said that was the most that any school had thought of! Finally, we looked at the My World of Work website and learned about the job profiles sections which helps us to learn about different career options.

Next, we were given a tour of the college. We explored the various college courses that are on offer, including childcare, cookery, carpentry and construction, mechanic, hairdressing and beauty.

Finally, we went into the Skills Development Scotland office in the college. We worked in teams to complete a problem solving challenge – we had to imagine we were stuck on a deserted island surrounded by sharks. There were 5 people on the island with us – a scientist, bodybuilder, banker, doctor and pensioner. The rowing boat that we had could only hold us and 3 others so we had to decide which 3 people we’d take on the boat with us. We used lots of skills throughout this challenge – communicating, listening, compromising, team work and problem solving.

To finish off the morning, we all gathered together and participated in a little competition to win a £10 Greggs voucher – we had 1 questions to answer regarding the careers management skills we had learned about and all slips were put into a box and the winner drawn. Unfortunately, our schools didn’t win, but we had a brilliant morning learning all about the various jobs and careers on offer to us, what options exist locally and how to get advice.

Today we ‘migrated’ our way to the Ryan Centre via the reliable transport method of bus, after picking up our Leswalt companions on the way, for a film afternoon in the theatre! Our Intu Film this year was Migration, from the producer who created the minions! We all had a super afternoon snuggled up in the cinema seats before our jaunt back home. Thanks to the people at the Ryan Centre for giving us this opportunity! 

Today to celebrate World Children’s Day both classes at Kirkcolm took part in a live assembly this morning.

This linked well with our work on Rights Respecting School work we have been doing over the past few years and continue to do through our assemblies with Mrs McHarg. The focus of World Children’s Day this year was looking at climate change and how we need to address issues with it in order to secure a safe future for the children of today.

Pupils in the upper class got well stuck into the tasks – we learned about initiatives other schools have been taking on where pupils identified an issue they were having that was having an environmental impact and how they made the changes they need to make to address it! Very inspiring stuff! Hopefully this keeps our pupils inspired to continue being the sustainability superstars they have always been! 

Article #3 – The Best Interests of the Child 

Article #24 – Health, Water, Food & Environment