Kirkcolm Primary School

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. 

Today we were very lucky to be invited down to the Stranraer Campus of the Dumfries and Galloway College to engage in some taster sessions for the courses they offer while also tying into Math Week Scotland. 

What an amazing day we have had! This was the first time many of the pupils (and staff) had seen inside the college campus building and we were blown away by how bright, airy and modern it was with such fantastic facilities inside to suit a variety of different courses on offer! 

Our first venture of the day was in Mocktail making. We headed into the lovely clean kitchen and set to work learning how to mix together our drinks and how to make fruit salads on the other side of the kitchen. Pupils use their measuring skills to put the correct amounts of each dish/drink into the glass/bowl and then got to enjoy the (literal) fruits of their labour.

Next on our experience was the STEM centre that has been build in the middle of the campus. This was an absolutely excellent space that we absolutely made the most of, using our STEM activity kits we set to work on a variety of different STEM challenges which used our knowledge of 3D shape, measure and counting.

Our final stop was in the childcare area of the college which was kitted out with a fantastic playroom for the pupils to get involved in. Students were able to lead the pupils in a variety of different activities that put to work their numeracy skills such as; making up bottles for babies, making play dough and some games with the other students on the course. It was lovely watching the child care students and the pupils interact together.

Finally, we hopped on the bus back to school just in time for lunch (okay… maybe a touch late!) 

We cannot thank the lovely staff at DGC Stranraer campus enough for this experience and our own Miss Whorlow for the time taken to arrange it for us all. We all had an amazing day and it has been such a good experience for the staff and pupils to see what the Stranraer campus has to offer! 

We successfully applied for funding from the Edinburgh Mathematical Society (EMS) School Enrichment Fund to pay for transportation costs for all three schools from our trio to attend this great event. Thank you also to this organisation for making today’s learning experience possible.

Here are some recounts from the pupils of their day; 

Today at the college the thing I liked most was making the play doh 😚🤗😍🤩 . The people at the college were really friendly people. At the college we made fruit salad ,fruit drinks and drew our drink🍎🍍🍌. The fruit drink was very nice. 😍😘🏡 – Pheobe (p5) 

Elspeth Hall from the D&G STEM team visited school today to provide the pupils with a fun, hands-on maths workshops – and they certainly weren’t disappointed! The infant class has their session this morning and the upper class went this afternoon. The workshop was part of our Maths Week Scotland celebrations (although we are a week early due to Elspeth’s busy schedule!).

After a little ice breaker where we had a competition to create as many different sized triangles as we could, both classes got their thinking caps on and had to work together to solve problems and complete challenges using various visual and concrete materials. We had:

• The Engine challenge where we had to sequence the coloured carts of the train in the correct order (this involved lots of maths language);
• The Wizard’s Cat where we had to put 3 magic circles around the cats so they each had their own space;
• Dice Towers where each of the 4 sides had to equal 14 but no number could be the same (think Sudoku using dice!);
• Domino walls where each side had to equal 10;
• And the Milk Bottle challenge where we had to fit 6 milk bottles into a 5×3 crate, ensuring that each column and row had an even number of milk bottles.

We finished off with a bit of healthy competition where pupils could only move the hands of the clock on by either 30-minute or 1-hour. The winner was the first person to get to 12pm.

The pupils had a brilliant time applying their maths skills into problems. Many thanks to Mrs Hall for providing pupils with a fantastic maths roadshow!

Today P5-7 took part in a live Coding Session and got their first experience using the Microbit! A Microbit is a small pocket sized computer developed by the BBC, it has a number of amazing tiny outputs all over it which can be coded on a computer through online software to do different tasks or a variety of different things altogether! 

It has lights on the front to spell out words or show pictures, a small speaker on the back, a thermometer, a light sensor, a compass and finally an emotion sensor! (You would have to see it to believe it that the lovely developers of this handy little tool have actually managed to pack this much into something that can fit in the palm of your hand!?)

We coded little Emoji faces which responded to different button inputs on the front to either put a sad face or a happy face. The pupils picked his up in no time and by the end were having a ball experimenting with building their own codes and transferring them onto the gadget! 

Micro:Bit gets the thumbs up from Kirkcolm! 

Love a bit of alliteration..!

What an amazing day we have had today at Kirkcolm, we have been lucky enough to partake in an afternoon of farming innovation and fun on a glorious sunny autumn day! This is all thanks to the P1-4’s topic this term – Farm to Fork. The little people have been looking at all things farm related and today was a great day to see everything first hand. 

We had Grant Hurcumb, Jack Milroy (who was kind enough to let us use one of his fields to host all this!) and Ian McKnight to inform us of all things sheep related. We got a first hand look at some sheep shearing by Grant as well as learning about all the different ways the farmer looks after his sheep and the precautions needed. From vaccinations to types of feed – we covered it all! 

Steven Adams and Angus Brown brought some machinery for us to have a look at, this included a tractor and a chopper (we got extremely well acquainted with the horn on both of these…) As well as that, Steven managed to wrangle Blossom the sheep down for us to feed and swoon over, as well as two lovely little calves! 

Stuart McCrindle brought down some more sheep and sheep dogs! We got an amazing sheep dog demonstration as well as getting to meet the cutest wee sheep dog pup that stole the hearts of all the pupils and adults alike! WE all took a vote in naming the new pup and Olivia Johnstone from Kirkcolm was the lucky name pulled with the beautiful (and monosyllabic) name of; Jem.

Finally, Leswalt’s own Alexander Clark had some auctioneering fun with us where he demonstrated what exactly happens at a real auction and the groups attempted to out bid each other for the sheep of choice! 

Overall, what a fab time we have had and what a treat it is to be able to bring all 3 schools together. Thanks to all for coming down and a huge thank you to Mrs McKnight, the lady with the super farming connections who brought a lot of this together! 

We were visited today by Frances Wallace from ‘Make It Happen’ who came to explain to the pupils about a competition that her company is running to design an app.

The pupils had a think about what they use apps for and the list was huge – playing, learning, listening to music, editing pictures/videos, reading books, finding out the weather, and Mrs McHarg’s favourite – shopping!!

Frances explained the process that app designers go through from the initial idea, to designing it, to building it. She then shared some examples of apps that were created by other children – there was an app called Go Get Dressed to help children get dressed in the morning in time for school; an app that was a snap game to teach about recycling; an app to teach about flags of the world; and another that was to help a non-verbal child communicate.

Frances talked through what the pupils need to do to enter the competition. There will be 1 winner selected from Leswalt, Kirkcolm & Portpatrick who will win a Kindle Fire and other goodies! We’re looking forward to seeing all the creative entries!

Digital Leaders from Kirkcolm, Leswalt and Portpatrick came together for a training session today.

The children covered a lot of areas as part of today’s agenda:

• Roles and Responsibilities
• Correctly handling, storing and charging devices
• Managing and using logins – personal information, successfully accessing sites
• Bookmarking favourites and displaying our favourites bar
• Adding tiles to personal Glow launch pads e.g. Teams, Email, One Drive etc.
• Creating and sending emails with attachments to the correct recipient
• Discussing possible breaktime clubs e.g. Scratch Coding

Our inventive team decided that they would like to collaborate with each other across the partnership to plan events such as Safety Internet Day.  We have now set up an email group just for our digital leaders so they can communicate with each other.

The session was very productive and our team are ready to support their classmates in any way they can.

Here is a useful parent guide to support your child online:

Digital-Learning-Parental-Leaflet-2022_23 (2)

# Responsible Citizens