Kirkcolm Primary School

The North Rhins Partnership schools have been extremely busy marking a trio of annual calendar events which all happened to coincide in the same week this year – Book Week Scotland, Anti-Bullying Week and Children in Need. Kirkcolm, Leswalt and Portpatrick Pupil Councils worked together to plan lots of fun activities to celebrate these.

We kicked off Book Week Scotland with an author visit to each school as part of the Big DoG Schools’ Tour, organised by Wigtown Book Festival. Portpatrick pupils were entertained by the hilarious Renita Boyle, and Leswalt and Kirkcolm pupils had the pleasure of David MacPhail. Pupils also participated in a book swap – each pupil brought a pre-loved book from home for another pupil to enjoy. Pupils then cosied up in their classrooms with a hot chocolate and marshmallows to read their new books. In addition to this, parents and carers were invited in to see P1-3 pupils being gifted with their Bookbug/Read, Write, Count bag. This is part of a Scottish Government initiative to encourage families to incorporate fun literacy and numeracy activities into their everyday lives.

Anti-Bullying Week was the theme for our assemblies this week, linking to our work on children’s rights. Portpatrick pupils also wrote kindness letters as part of the Diana Trust’s Positive Post box. Pupils were empowered to spread positivity by either writing a letter or drawing a picture which will then be sent to another child in the UK.

As part of our Children in Need celebrations, pupils were given the choice to either come to school in their pyjamas (PJs for Pudsey) or dressed as their favourite book character, in return for a small donation to the very worthwhile charity. Face painting and biscuit decorating were on offer throughout the morning and bookmarks that pupils designed were sold. Together, our partnership raised an amazing total of over £350!

Despite a very busy week, Christmas is in sight which means one thing – preparing for school shows and Christmas craft fayres!

My oh my, thank goodness this morning’s rain passed up by as the upper class at Kirkcolm were invited along to the Kirkcolm Community Hub for a visit this afternoon! How lovely it was for all of us (especially those of us who do not live centrally in the village) to see what this little community have put together. 

Pupils sat down, greeted the slightly older crowd who had came down for a Warm Wednesday session, and tucked into biscuits and juice provided by the kind folks working at the hub that day! Ainsley explained to pupils the purpose of the hub is and what it has to offer to them while I enjoyed a first-hand view of what they’ve been working on… 

They are currently developing a new space to host the Fed0-Up Cafe 4 times a week, this will be open from 10am-2pm daily and will provide hot drinks, cool drinks, cakes and biscuits and a light hot food menu for those passing through the village! Set to open in February, you can see already all the hard work that has been put into developing this space and I can’t wait to see it flourish and to pop down for my own lunch some days… 

The people behind the scenes have been working hard to develop an eco-friendly space with solar panels and air pump heating, they shared these developments with the pupils knowing Kirkcolm Primary’s own strong Eco Positive stance! 

The space already hosts a variety of activities, from Tai-Chi to art classes and is available to hire out to any prospective events…

Overall, we love seeing what the community is getting up to and we are never ones to turn down an offer to get out and about, so it was lovely seeing what there was on our own doorstep and realising all the ways we could work together and make use of this space! 

Thanks again to Ainsley McClure for inviting us down and all the others working together at Kirkcolm Community Hub! 

Comfies at the ready! This year Pudsy bear was back and the wee yellow ears were out in full force once again at Kirkcolm Primary as the pupils dawned these to show their support and to help raise money for the cause! We were given the choice to either come cosied up in our pajamas for the day or we could pay homage to Book Week Scotland by dressing as our favourite character from novels. 

Pupil Council were hard at work organising different ways to raise money. With bookmarks being sold at break and face painting on offer. (We are extremely grateful to Kirkcolm mum Lucy James for coming in to offer her artistic skills for this!) 

Overall, we all had a lovely day together and have some fab photos to show off demonstrating the pupils dressing up efforts! We managed to raise £138.78 which, I am sure you will agree, is a decent contribution for such a small school! Every little helps! 

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!