Kirkcolm Primary School

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

Today was meant to be our day of Harvest Festival Fun from our potatoes given to us by the kind people of the Dandelion Project! Pupils made hard efforts at growing these potatoes both at home and in school and today we celebrated these efforts using potato in some creative ways! 

We kept it very low key today, especially given the recent sad news of the passing of our Queen. We spent some time today reflecting on her reign and the impact this day will have all over the world. 

So this morning we put our cooking skills to work making some tattie scones. Pupils peeled and shaped their mashed potatoes (teachers and adults handled the boiling and the mashing side…) and formed them into some interestingly shaped tattie scones which were then fried by staff! This was definitely an experience for pupils and some were amazing and some were sticky potato blobs sadly doomed for the bin, but what is success without some failure too? 

After enjoying these, the classes joined together once more for some potato based art. Pupils were given some sliced potatoes for printing purposes and told to come up with designs which made them think harvest, autumn and making the most of the land around us. As you can see, they did a great job with this brief. 

Overall, another lovely day in school to perhaps take our minds off the sad news from yesterday.

A huge shout out to Michelle, the lovely cook and Mrs Smith from Leswalt, who swooped in to lend a hand over the hot stove and the wild cleaning up. We couldn’t do it without you ladies 🙂

Today the boys and girls of Kirkcolm got a little visit and a chat from the Community Safety Team for the West of Dumfries and Galloway! The Safety Officers took this opportunity to remind pupils about how they can stay safe in and around the community and keep their community and surrounding safe for others. 

We discussed issues related to dog fouling and litter – things that just don’t make for the nicest surroundings… Pupils were reminded of the laws regarding these and what can happen to offenders. We also discussed the rising issue with Gulls in the area – no longer seagulls but urban gulls!

We had a lot of great discussions based around how we can keep ourselves and our community safe and the boys and girls proved to be superstar listeners. 

Finally managed to pin down this crazy wee crew… Phew!

The pupils and staff here at Kirkcolm are delighted to welcome our new precious wee P1’s that started with us at the beginning of the term! We have got James, Sally, Ewan and Henry all looking very smart, kitted our in their burgundy…

As well as this gang joining us in the first week, we have actually had another wee addition to our team… We are very pleased to welcome Vladislav with open arms – who is joining us here at Kirkcolm Primary all the way from Ukraine. We hope he enjoys being part of our team!

Let’s get stuck into Term 1! 

On Monday this week, we were very lucky to have Neve from Wigtownshire Rugby Club coming in to coach the pupils of P5-7 in some rugby skills! Neve taught us some new rugby skills and got us developing our throwing and catching abilities, our dodging abilities and even some (safe!) tackling abilities! We all had good fun – even if it was a bit hot!

This is the start of a 6 week block of lessons and Kirkcolm will be out every Monday on that playing field – so please remember appropriate P.E Kit and trainers for a Monday!

Starting off our new school year, we are pleased to announce we have been awarded our RSPB Wild Challenge Silver Award.  This is as a result of all the hard work of our pupils in promoting biodiversity in our school grounds.

Our children had to complete six challenges both to help nature and experience nature, all of which promotes Learning for Sustainability, Sustainable Development Goals and good health and wellbeing.

Kirkcolm Primary for Silver

Feedback from the RSPB is as follows:

Congratulations on achieving your Silver Wild Challenge award! We loved your Biodiversity Action plan and were very impressed with all you hard work. Thank you for your amazing efforts. Every action you take makes a real difference. We hope you thoroughly enjoyed learning through nature on your journey to your award.

Well done everyone!

# Effective Contributors & Responsible Citizens

This has been a jam packed week to celebrate our final time together with the 10 super star P7 pupils and the classes we are currently in.

How amazing it has been to have a normal school year, totally uninterrupted by any external; factors, and to go back to a sense of normality at last! One of the biggest signs of finally returning to normal was being able to open our doors once again to the parents and grans and grampas and anybody else who fancied it, to attend our Closing Ceremony on Wednesday! 

We spent the entire afternoon celebrating all the fantastic achievements of the past year and wow – was there a lot. From our Super STAR Readers, to our teacher delegated awards, the Rainbow Spelling/Tables Awards and the STAR Award GOLD Certificate! The pupils of Kirkcolm really cleaned up house this year!

We also hope we delighted you with some of our singing (I am sure yopu missed that!) so we had been working very hard this past term to learn the hymns as well as our rendition of Hello Goodbye by The Beatles and our own Kirkcolm version of The Wellerman Song! Available for event hire if you are at all interested… 

To round off the ceremony, we bid a tearful goodbye to our (giant) P7 babies, as they head on off to the Academy! We gave them their yearbooks and their leavers hoodies and celebrated just how much they have grown over the years with the Photostory! 

Finally on Friday (the actual last day!) we enjoyed a nice chilled out day watching films, getting our classrooms all tidied up for summer and spending that ever so important final few hours together before a lengthy summer apart.

We were very much treated in the end by George Keith who kindly donated his Bouncy Castle Assult Course win to us to have fun on and finally, the day was rounded off by a tasty ice cream in the sun courteous of the fantastic ladies of the Parent Council. 

We can’t even begin to thank everyone for helping to contribute to the fantastic year we have all had together, from pupils to parents to teachers, staff and cooks – it has all came together to be a fantastic year together and what a perfect day to finish it off. Here’s to many more years of normality – may we never take it for granted ever again! 

Have am amazing summer folks and we will see you again in August! P7’s, you have been a delight and keep on doing great things! 

-All Kirkcolm Staff 🙂 

Once again – a Huge Thanks to everyone involved for the end of year treats! You are all stars and we are such a blessed wee community and team!

Felt it very, very necessary to pop up a wee post to say a huge congratulations to past students Ruth Turtle, Danny Lyon and Ellie Miller – who all managed to secure a Pupil of the year title at the Stranraer Academy Awards! 3 out of 6 awards is outstanding for this wee school. 

We feel very blessed to have gotten to know/teach these wonderful (not so wee anymore) people and see what fantastic young adults they’re turning into – You may not sport the burgundy anymore but that’s how we will always remember you! 

Here’s a look back at some simpler times with them… (I can’t imagine they’ll be overly amused at these photos but oh well!) 😀