Kirkcolm Primary School

As part of our Book Week Scotland celebrations, parents were invited into school today to see P1-3 pupils being presented with their Bookbug (P1) and Read, Write, Count (P2-3) bags.

This initiative, ran by the Scottish Book Trust and Scottish Government, sees every P1-3 child receive a free bag which contains beautiful books, educational games and writing materials. The bags are designed to help build parents’ confidence and encourage families to include easy and fun reading, writing and counting activities into their everyday lives.

After being gifted with their bags, pupils then spent some time in class exploring the contents with parents. P1s listen to some stories and practised writing their names on their new whiteboards. P2s had fun playing charades and trying to create various tangram shapes – although it seemed to be more of a challenge to get the tangram pieces back into the holder at the end than it was to create the shapes!! And P3 pupils had fun running around trying to find items to match a given adjective.

Thank you to everyone who was able to come into school today. We hope you all enjoy exploring the contents of the bag with your child at home!

Over half of the school gathered at 3pm today to participate in the first of 4 Christmas lantern-making workshops, kindly organised by the Parent Council and Kirkcolm Community Council.

Pupils started to create their own lanterns using willow, in preparation for the village Christmas lights switch-on parade on December 3rd.

A huge thank-you to Anita, Lesley and Finlay for giving up their time today, and to the Kirkcolm Community Council for funding this project. We can’t wait to see the finished lanterns!

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!