Kirkcolm Primary School

Today, P1-4 were very excited to welcome Ailsa Buchanan into school to talk us about her job as a Vet, especially given the number of aspiring vets we have in the school!🐾

Ailsa told us all about the skills and qualities she needed to become a vet. She explained that in order to be a vet,  you must have a kind and  caring personality and love animals! Which was great to hear for all our little animal lovers!😻

She brought with her some of her special vet equipment; stethoscope, thermometer etc. and explained how vets use them to help animals to feel better. Then, it was over to us to become vets, Ailsa brought with her some X-Rays from some attention needing animals and we had to work out what was wrong with the animals and why they needed help from the vet. We saw the X-Ray of a poorly pup who had swallowed a stone, some broken paws and a pregnant dog too!🐶🐱

A huge thank you to Ailsa from Academy Vets for taking the time to visit Primary 1-4. We absolutely loved hearing all about her job and the work she does to look after our furry friends! 🐮🐶🐱🐹🐰

Curiosity Carlos
Critical Thinking Chris
Collaborating Cora

Today we had Norval working with us outside at the little Orchard at the bottom of the playground, looking after the fruit trees we planted a few years ago now! 🍎🍏🍐

The fruit trees need around the year care and this was the opportunity to give them some Winter attention – so the trees were sufficiently mulched and checked over for any damage (which there was – pesky hares having a nibble!) so we made sure we protected them as best we could. 

Norval had a lot of very interesting information about caring for trees – how diseased branches can spread their diseases  and how trees can send out signals to each other for more nutrients and support from their tree friends! Nature really is incredible 🌳🤩

Meta Skills 

Integrity Imani

Collaborating Cora 

Focusing Fergus 

Feeling Felix 

Communicating Cate 

Articles

Article 24 – Health, Food, Water and Environment 

Today the little people of Kirkcolm Primary tootled over to Leswalt primary to get VERY hands on exploring their health and well-being topic – People Who Help Us!

Part of this was looking at people who can help us when we find ourselves in danger and need urgent assistance and thus… Emergency Services Afternoon was made! Big thank you to Mrs Warwick for her excellent work in co-coordinating all these kind volunteers to come to the school. 

Pupils had inputs from; 

Coastguard – Learning how in a seaside town like Stranraer they have an active role is making sure that people stay safe out on the Loch and further afield!🚣🏼‍♂️🚤

RNLI – Mush like the Coastguard, they are another essential service to have this close to the water. They experience many call outs all across the area from people struggling in boats. 🏊🏼‍♀️⛵

Police – We learned about how our local police help us daily by keeping the place we live safe for us and are always quick to respond in an emergency should we ever need their help! 👮🏼‍♀️🚓

It’s always fantastic for the pupils to get hands on during these open afternoons and it really helps bring the topic to life for them! A huge thank you to the kind volunteers who gave up their time for this. I know when P1-4 came back, they were buzzing with chat from their afternoon. 

Meta Skills 

Integrity Imani

Collaborating Cora 

Articles

Article 24 – Health, Food, Water and Environment 

Article 19 – Protection from Violence 

Huge congratulations and well done to our very own Paige Neill who took part in the local Wigtownshire Badminton Competition and managed to secure a silver medal in the P6 girls tournament! 

Well done Paige – you have done a fantastic job representing the school with your sporty skills! 

Meta Skills 

Focusing Fergus

Articles

Article 24 – Health, Food, Water and Environment

Big thank you to the lovely gentlemen of the Stranraer Rotary Club who kindly came out to school today to drop off some litter pickers and speak to the boys and girls about the importance of not dropping litter! 

Litter has been an ongoing issue across our local community for some time now and even the students of Kirkcolm Primary can be guilty of this in their own playground! Hopefully this will inspire the pupils to be more conscious of throwing their rubbish in the bin. 🗑️

The Rotary Club themselves have collected 523 large bags of rubbish over the past year – enough to fill our entire classroom! They spoke tot he children about the harmful effects of dropping litter on the environment and how long it takes certain items to complete biodegrade. Ranging from 5 days for a banana peel to 500 years for plastics – which is mostly just the process of them breaking down into micro plastics! 

We discussed the 3 R’s: 

• Reduce
• Reuse and… 
• Recycle 

They left us with some plastic bags, bag holders and litter pickers – all of which were kindly donated by Kirkcolm Bowling Club and Lidl – to support ‘We Are OSOM’ – Our School, Our mission! 

Meta Skills 

Integrity Imani

Collaborating Cora 

Initiative Ivy 

Articles

Article 24 – Health, Food, Water and Environment 

P5-7 at Kirkcolm primary took part in a Live lesson to help them understand what Skills we us in the world place. This was run by the lovely people at Skills Development Scotland and it focused on what our strengths and skills are, how we can work on them and putting them into practice! 

We started by discussing how we feel about the future and have any of us considered jobs way WAY  down the line! Some pupils felt happy at the thought but others did feel some anxiety about it – already! We then looked at the skills we develop and use within school already. Since we spend so much time reflecting on our Meta Skills; we were very good at this! 🤩💪🏼

We also looked at the wide range of skills that are transferable to a work place and we looked at Tunnocks Tea Cakes! Pupils were quick to spy that there are far more jobs in a company like that then meets the eye! So that left us all feeling a bit more reassured about the future! 📈

We will have a follow up Live Lesson on this a few weeks! 

Meta Skills

All of them! 

Yesterday at kirkcolm School Paige and Ross held our annual Internet Safety Day. They explained about how to stay safe when using AI as this years  theme was Smart tech safe choices – Exploring the safe and responsible use of Artificial Intelligence. The digital leaders worked with Rachel and ben at Leswalt at our latest meeting to create a forms quiz. The digital leaders explained the concept and how AI works when being used. At the start of the assembly all the primary school children came into the older class to watch a live lesson in the classroom. The live lesson included making an AI chatbot, giving it an algorithm, teaching it some rules and making sure it was a fun, pleasant robot. The robotic animal was called a African breaded Vulture with glamorous feathers and a touching face. The pupils loved the Internet Safety Day and we will keep you updated on the blog!

Metaskills
Leading LI
Collaboratign Cora

Today Bryleigh and Harrison got the chance to represent Kirkcolm Primary and travelled to Sheuchan Primary school to take part in the cluster heat of the KNEX engineering challenge.

It  is a great opportunity where pupils have the chance to demonstrate their creative design and build skills by solving set engineering challenges using the construction set K’NEX.

Our team used their communication skills alongside their design
and build skills to compete against fellow pupils from all the other schools in the Stranraer area.   The challenge was to make something for a children’s playpark which had a handle to turn to make it move.  Our team made a swing.

They did a great job – well done Harrison and Bryleigh!

META SKILLS

Collaborating

Communicating

Creativity

Critical thinking

This morning while the older boys an girls were away at Lochinch, P1-4’s winners from last week’s Scots Poetry judging – Tom, Jamie, Orla and Henry went up to Kirkcolm Hub to recite their poem one last time to a lovely group of community members. Tom recited his poem ‘Mince n Tatties’, Jamie recited ‘The Crocodile’, Orla recited ‘The Sair Finger’ and Henry recited ‘Street Talk’ with actions and expression! 🎤Dressed in her kilt, Orla then showed off her fabulous dancing skills from her Highland Dancing – The Fling and Seann Triubhas which was lovely! A huge thanks to Catherine from Kirkcolm Hub for asking us to join their Welcome Wednesday meeting 🙂

 
MetaSkills
Collaborating Cora 
Communicating Cate
Leading Li