Kirkcolm Primary School

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!

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)