Kirkcolm Primary School

Much like our lovely Leswalt neighbours, who got to experience this last term – this term, it is Kirkcolm’s chance to welcome Matthew Robinson and the D&G Youth Work team into our P5-7 classroom to deliver the ‘Living Life to the Full’ input which deals with ideas of feelings and self-esteem – our health and wellbeing focus for this term! 

Matthew will be with us for the entire term helping to encourage pupils to explore their feelings and look at coping mechanisms for dealing with big feelings in their life.

We were very happy to welcome back Jack and Linea to deliver another Children’s Parliament session with our pupils. We focused on our ‘Campus’ and pupils had quite the go at recreating our school campus on the classroom floor.

We discussed what resources we have in school to help support our learning and how we can use environmentally friendly energy resources to help power the resources in our school and what steps we need to take to improve! 

It was a great informative session and we were wow’ed but what a great effort our school does to be sustainable already! We are excited to welcome back Jack and Linea for further sessions throughout the school year!

A post from our Gardening Superstar Mrs Richardson…

‘The Kirkcolm School Parent Council Gardening Club secured funding via foundation school from Kilgallioch wind farm community fund for a polycrub. The polycrub is a secure polycarbonate poly tunnel which will allow the gardening club to grow things for the school and the community.

The school is very grateful  to locals Mark Clayton, Chris Hunter & Dave Taylor who volunteered to build it, a huge engineering task as it required to be concreted in the ground! Today the school are pleased to announce that the polycrub is complete and can now be used by the school. Mark, Chris and Dave came to the school and were presented with a card and gifts to say thank you for their efforts over the past few weeks.’

Our wee school is always very touched by the help locals are willing to give to us! Another perfect example of a community working together 🙂 

P1-4 pupils were treated to an afternoon of music today, led by Helen from Lighthouse Musicians. We started off with an opposites game to help pupils get their listening ears on. We then had to copy Helen by repeating different rhythms, created using body percussion. This led nicely into a discussion about different note values, such as crotchets and quavers.

We then looked at various Italian musical terms for the different dynamics of music (pp = very quiet; p = quiet; f = loud; ff = very loud). We also learned some new terms today – Crescendo, which means getting louder, and Diminuendo, which means getting quieter.

To put our new learning into practise, we played a game of ‘Hot or Cold’ but used our voices to direct the person to the hidden object. Helen hid a beanbag somewhere in the room and the pupils sang ‘Where’s the Beanbag?’ to the tune of Frere Jacques. They sang louder when the person got closer to the beanbag, and got quieter when the person moved further away from the beanbag.

We finished off with a bit of music appraisal – discussing the different instruments we could hear in a piece of music that was played, the dynamics we heard, the tempo and why we liked it or not.

Huge thank-you to Helen for popping in this afternoon – we had a lovely Tuneful Tuesday afternoon!

What a delight to head up to Kirkcolm Church this afternoon for a Harvest Festival Service by our Minister Marlene Cash! We had a beautiful, engaging service which showed off the Gardening Clubs Scarecrow project; Cedric and learned all about the meaning behind the Harvest Festival. Pupils stood up in front the church service and sang their wee hearts out with a Harvest Song they had been practicing for the last few weeks.

Overall it was a lovely, wholesome afternoon which taught us all the importance of sharing and looking after each other. We happily walked back down to school munching our apples from the church as the Primary 7 pupils left with Mrs Baillie to distribute some Harvest Festival goodies to the people of Kirkcolm. 

A huge thank you to the Minister for the fantastic service, the boys and girls for their lovely singing and finally, the parents of Kirkcolm Primary for their kind donations to the school. What an outstanding community we have here! 

Celebrating all things Maths has been our focus for this week! Maths is such an important and integral part of our lives beyond school and Maths Week Scotland does it’s best to promote why maths is important and get our pupils involved in some fun tasks which help inspire a love for all things numeracy! 

P1-4

P1-4 have started their maths week with some outdoor learning inputs from OWL Scotland where parents got the chance to join in on the fun! They went outside and explored measure by comparing sticks and making their own stick at a whopping 17m long on the ground. They then got stuck into some symmetrical butterflies using natural materials and a beetle drive. They had another math-y morning outside extending their measure knowledge with Miss Douglas’s own measure challenge so boys and girls had lots of funning running about the playground wielding their metre sticks! 

P5-7

P5-7 have taken the chance to get involved in some of the Maths Week live lessons this week, on Monday we did Math Story Telling and pupils had a bash at the Maths Week Story Writing competition with their ‘Finn Finity’ stories! We also partook in a different live lesson that involved making our own math inspired booklets. On Wednesday we braved the Autumn chill and did some outdoor learning with place value and finished up in the warmth of the classroom trying some online numeracy escape rooms. Thursday we did some arty maths and created our own labyrinths and mazes!

Finally on Friday, we had parents complete a survey which highlighted the many ways they use maths in their real life jobs which allowed the pupils to see the value in this key curricular area! Thanks very much to all parents who took part in that for us! 🙂 

At the start of the term, all of our pupils were given the opportunity to apply for various positions of responsibility in the school, including: Pupil Council, Eco Committee, House Captains, Digital Leaders and Monitor jobs. The purpose of this is to ensure that pupils’ have a voice in everything we do and know that they can make a positive impact on our school.

Having looked through the applications and/or held interviews, we have now selected our reps for the current session! Have a keek below at all the smiley faces to see who will be helping to make our school shine even more!

Pupil Council –

Eco Committee: Harlow (P2), Henry (P3), Sally (P3), Ian (P4), Paige (P5), Lyle (P6) and Archie (P7).

House Captains –

Digital Leaders –

Monitors:

• Fallon (P5) & Rebecca (P5) as our Head Librarians;
• Harrison (P4) as our Dinner Hall Monitor;
• Emilie (P5) & Bryleigh (P5) as our Playground Monitors;
• Henry (P3) as our Cloakroom Monitor.

A big thank you to Marlene from Kirkcolm Church who stopped by in school today to announce the winners of the Church Picture competition and give them a prize of an Amazon voucher. 

Pupils took a walk up to the church and drew pictures using any media they liked to celebrate the 200th Anniversary of Kirkcolm Church, visitors to the church on Saturday were able to pop a sticker on their favourites and the one that had the most stickers was… 

Ivan Turtle! 

Arran Farquhar was a close runner up so a big well done to both boys for their effort and a big thank you to Marlene for coming in to let us know the good news! 🙂 

Kirkcolm P5-7 have been lucky enough to invite some representatives from the Children’s Parliament to start Dignity Workshops with the class. This has been a great way to explore our social studies topic for this term which has been centred around Democracy, our Rights and exploring the topic of Discrimination. 

The workshop began by exploring what exactly Dignity is and introducing the pupils to Jack and Linnea who will be leading the workshop. We discussed how our rights make sure we are Happy, Healthy and Safe, exploring how Dignity is like a tree with all these rights feeding into it and explored this through activities today! We discussed how we show our environment Dignity and the ways people do not show the environment Dignity.

We really enjoyed a day with Jack and Linnea and look forward to welcoming them back for more sessions before the end of the year! 🙂 

Pupils are the North Rhins Schools are delighted to share that they have been awarded the Gold Rights Respecting School Award from UNICEF. Having already achieved their Bronze and Silver awards, both Leswalt and Kirkcolm Primaries have been working hard over the last 18 months to achieve their Gold award, with our Pupil Council reps leading on this.

The award is split into 3 strands – it aims to teach children about their rights; they learn through their rights by demonstrating positive relationships and attitudes, and respecting others’ rights; and finally they learn to take action through their rights to become responsible global citizens.

The UNICEF Rights Respecting School assessor visited both Leswalt and Kirkcolm Primaries at the end of May and pupils were able to share with her the many activities that we’ve worked on in our journey towards gold, including: Children’s Right’s Tuesday; learning about rights at assemblies; our class charters; linking rights to our school events such as House Captain elections, Children’s Mental Heath Week and Children in Need; our worry boxes in class; learning about Child Line; our climate change protest; and all of our various pupil voice groups, such as our Eco Schools work.

The school was provided with a report, sharing strengths and some next steps for when we work towards the Sustaining Gold award. The report stated that “it was evident that children’s rights are embedded across the school and underpin every facet of school life.” She felt that we have “very articulate children who knew a wide range of articles and were confident in the concept of rights.” The assessor was impressed with the extent to which rights are embedded in the day-to-day life of both schools and the strong commitment of passionate staff as champions of children’s rights. Finally, the assessor highlighted that pupil voice is valued highly across the schools, with visible actions arising from pupil suggestions and an understanding from children that they can influence positive change.

We are thrilled that our hard work has been recognised and we have been awarded this accolade. We are looking forward to continuing our Rights journey as we work towards the Sustaining Gold award.