Kirkcolm Primary School

Today we bid farewell to Leswalt!

In what has been a chaotic week for poor Mrs Baillie and the Leswalt staff, trying to transport a whole school from one place to another, but the superstars have managed it(!!!) and today their extended stay with us has come to an end…

Poor Leswalt were only meant to be out of home for a term but due to unforeseen circumstances, this stay has extended for a year and a half! So Mrs Ferguson and the Leswalt senior class have endured the ‘metal box’ portacabin through blisteringly cold days and oven hot days and I bet they are more than ready to re-enter a cosy and brand spanking new classroom along with their infant troops who have resided in the spare classroom at Kirkcolm. 

To celebrate their stay with us, both schools came together for a cosy film afternoon in the Kirkcolm classrooms, and this gave the helpers a chance to clear out the classrooms in preparation for Monday… I am sure you will all join me in bidding them a sad goodbye, we have enjoyed having them here and forming new friendships across the 2 schools and watching the burgundy and red jumpers mixing together in the playground. We hope the pupils enjoyed their time together too, we know the staff did! We wish them all the best in their lovely new school building and we can’t think of anybody who deserves it more! 

From all here at Kirkcolm, until we are all reunited again, enjoy your new building and we will miss you!

We are delighted to announce that the North Rhins Partnership primary schools in the Rhins has achieved a Silver Rights Respecting School Award by UNICEF UK. Leswalt, Kirkcolm and Portpatrick primaries have worked collaboratively to meet the standards for this UNICEF prestigious accreditation.

UNICEF is the world’s leading organisation working for children and their rights. The Rights Respecting Schools Award is granted to schools that show commitment to promoting and realising children’s rights and encouraging adults, children and young people to respect the rights of others in school. Silver is given to schools that make excellent progress towards embedding the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into its ethos and curriculum.

Mrs Baillie, said, “Having achieved our Bronze award in 2021, we are all very proud to have now to celebrate achieving our Silver award.  Our school community has worked very hard to embed children’s rights in everything we do.  We can see the positive impact of the Award on pupils and the school as a whole. Thank you to our responsible pupils, staff and families for working together to make this achievement possible.”

The Award recognises achievement in putting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child at the heart of a school’s planning, policies and practice. A Rights Respecting School is a community where children’s rights are learned, taught, practised, respected, protected and promoted.

The UNICEF UK Rights Respecting Schools initiative is aimed at schools across the UK. Schools have reported a positive impact on pupil behaviour, relationships and well-being by enhancing pupils’ self-esteem, leading to less truancy and bullying, better learning and improved academic standards.

Have a read of our assessment report: Kirkcolm-Leswalt-Portpatrick_RRS Report

We can now proudly display our Rights Respecting Schools Silver Logo!

We are lucky this term to have Sound Trap sessions return to this region so today we welcomed back to class Mr John Dinnings with all his equipment to give pupils an insight into how to use this amazing music technology to generate podcasts or musical medleys!

This will be running for the full term with 4 different inputs on alternating weeks giving pupils guidance on how to mix their music and create their podcasts in the second half of the term. We will be dipping into this on the weeks Mr Dinning is not with us! Pupils can also feel free to login in at home and play about with the technology! 

What a day to come back – Halloween! 

As you can imagine, today was all go at Kirkcolm Primary with the start of Term 2 ahead of us and Halloween festivities taking place this afternoon.

Pupils came with scary costumes bagged and ready to go for a quick change at lunchtime. Afterwards we had our Halloween costume judging competition! We did this altogether with Leswalt combined and had both a Leswalt and Kirkcolm winner in each primary. What a super effort all the boys and girls made today, with some truly spook-tacular costume ideas and some that showed real hard work at home. Both House Captains and teachers were so impressed. 

The winner is each primary was; 

P1 – Sally the Spider! 

P2 – Robert the Storm Trooper! 

P3 – Cameron the Dog and Calum the Vampire Scotsman! 

P4 – Marley as Jack Skellington!

P5 – Phoebe the Zombie School Girl! 

P6 – Sally as a Corpse Bride!

P7 – Blaze as a Zombie! 

After that the wee and big classes divided for some apple dookin’ and Halloween games in the hall hosted by the House Captains, Noah and James! 

What a great time we had and what a blast to share our final combined party with Leswalt before we wave them goodbye this Friday! 

Primary 7 have recently completed a block of swimming at the Ryan Centre, over 3 weeks.

Many thanks to Mrs Agnew and staff at school for supervising them at this.

They all enjoyed learning new skills and splashing about!

Many thanks to the Community re-use shop in Stranraer who have donated numerous plant pots to the school to help them with their on-going gardening work.

Pictured below are some of the Eco committee with the plant pots!

It was the Return of the Curling at long last! With Covid a thing of the past, we were able to get our P7 pupils in for their taster session at the North West Castle! Pupils were taught the curling ropes and skills and then played their own curling game by the end! This was a fab treat for the p7’s and they had such a good time. If anybody would like to think of taking up curling, Gail Munro will be running a session on Tuesday evenings for all. 

Today, Stranraer, 10 years from now.. Olympics? It’s very possible! 

Thank you to Mrs Kyle for accompanying the pupils on this trip! 

The ever amazing STEM guru Miss Whorlow managed to secure us another fun, interactive Lego We Do Session for the pupil in class. Mrs Hall came in in to take the pupils through some hands on coding using the We Do kits and the software that was already installed on our school iPads.

Pupils made a variety of different moving objects such as a fan and a space rover and then using the iPads managed to code them to move and turn! This is not the first time pupils have engaged in a session like this and it showed, most had a really good idea of what they were doing and were quite savvy with the computer coding! 

We will make programmers of them all yet! 

Phew! Just like that we have once again celebrated all things math and reminded pupils why it is so important and essential skill to have and a topic to learn! Math permeates all aspects of our life and the aim of Math Week in to show everyone just that! 

Monday

On Monday the big class got stuck into a math themed escape room! Once we recapped what the entire point of an escape room is, we then moved on to flex our problem solving brains to figure out the challenges and find our way out. I must say, even the so-called ‘easiest’ ones certainly weren’t anything to be sniffed at! 

Tuesday

On Tuesday the lower class decided that the price of a weekly food shop was just too much to handle at the moment so thought they could combat it by making their own butter! They pupils shook their wee wrists silly (after using some essential math skills to measure out the ingredients) and chilled it overnight to enjoy the butter of their labours! 

Upper school participated in a Live Lesson all about Math in Art and focusing on finding symmetry in nature. Once this was done, we made our own symmetrical monster by using our cutting out skills and replicating the patterns on both sides of our Monsters. 

Wednesday

Lower school managed to combine their math with their P.E and used time and estimation skills to guess how long they would take to do certain tasks before pairing up and timing each other to see how long it actually took them in the end. 

While upper school were busy having a great time at Stranraer College Campus as you can see in the previous blog post!

Thursday

On Thursday, lower school decided to try their own symmetry using butterflies. Not sure which class wins in the symmetry wars but I can’t deny they made some very beautiful butterflies!

While the upper class took their maths outdoors (while the sun still stuck around…) for some times table games outside! 

Friday

Now, we had big plans for Friday with Live Lessons, but then the weather decided to cause a power cut which Kirkcolm Primary building just could not handle. While we all managed to complete our Big Maths before being cut off, it seemed that our math week celebrations truly got stopped in their tracks! 

Regardless, we have had a fun week and we have loved getting to express our joy for maths in many different ways. Just because Math Week is over, by no means stops this from happening in the classroom every day.