Kirkcolm Primary School

We are celebrating World Children’s Day as part of our Rights Respecting Schools award journey. This is UNICEF’s annual day of action for children, by children.  The theme this year is ” Investing in our future means investing in our children”. 

Primary 1 to 4 were, as always, super keen to be involved.  The focus we took was to think about the role children play in caring for our environment now, and in the future.

The class listened to and watched Michael Foreman’s book called Dinosaurs and All that Rubbish which has an environmental theme.

You can watch and listen here too:

Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish. Children’s Environmental Book. – YouTube

Next, the children decided to take action and write a free-flow letter to our planet earth.  They told our planet all the things that they will do to take care of our home now and in the future.  They are powerful advocates for change.

Letters to the Earth are being written by people from all over the world. Children as young as 3, parents, teachers, scientists, journalists, musicians, indigenous leaders, activists, nurses, business leaders, priests, politicians, TV presenters, artists such as Yoko Ono, authors such as Ben Okri, fashion designers such as Vivienne Westwood, and more.  These are being shared on this website, if you would like to find out more:

Home | Letters to the Earth

We hope you enjoy our letters:

# Responsible Citizens

Couldn’t quite believe my eyes when I opened the door to welcome all these top class athletes into the school this morning! The boys and girls made a super effort today of dressing up in their sportiest clothing and we saw a range of different sports represented from the ever popular rugby and football to horse riders!

Over the week you may of noticed the odd Pudsey ear or wrist band floating about, that is because our House Captains have been ultra dedicated to selling merchandise to help raise funds! In addition to this, pupils have ran a ‘Guess The Name of the Bear’ competition for the chance to win a cuddly wee companion.

A huge thank you to all the kind donations towards the Bring n’ Buy afternoon – we are all astounded at the generosity from everyone in bringing in bits and pieces to sell on for others – this also fed in well to our Eco Plan where we are promoting the reuse and recycling of everything – toys included! Another successfully ran enterprise by our astounding team of House Captains across both Leswalt and Kirkcolm – thank you Miley, Taylor & co who all lent a hand!

Finally, each pupils contribution for putting their all into completing a whopping 5 round of Joe Wicks 5 minute exercise videos (I think we can all remember the intensity of these from the lockdown days….!) The whole school absolutely smashed it, with the upper class going that extra mile fitting in an additional 20 minute live workout this morning! 

Altogether we managed a grand total of £197.63 which is absolutely astounding for such a wee school out in the countryside! It means so much to a school that promotes the Rights of the Child and Global Goals as part of their ethos to be able to take part so enthusiastically on a day like today and even more to absolutely smash it out the park with our generosity!

Here are some photos of todays fun…

As COP26 has now drawn to a close, we are pleased to share a snapshot of our recent related learning projects across the North Rhins Partnership.

Our children are always so enthusiastic to do their bit to help protect our environment and to contribute towards global goals.

Click on the link below and select play in the top right.  🙂

# Responsible Citizens

# Effective Contributors

North Rhins Partnership

Leswalt Primary pupils have kept up-to-date with COP 26 in school . The pupils talked about how their recent Learning for Sustainability work, and the plans of the Eco-Committee, link to th…

Go to this Sway

Another addition to our Book Week Scotland celebrations was the much anticipated arrival and gifting of the Read, Write, Count bags! These bags have been lovingly made up by the folks up in Edinburgh to give the little ones in our school access to games and stories to help bring on their learning and make it enjoyable!

We hope you have all had some time to explore these at home and try out some of the fun activities included, you can see from their wee faces in these photos that they were overjoyed with their haul!

How great it was to see some odd socks worn today in support of the start of Anti-Bullying Week! So many boys and girls came in today showing their support in the fight to quash bullying all over the world.

We discussed the meaning behind odd socks and what we are trying to say with this statement in schools. To support individuality and acknowledge that it is our differences that make us and nobody should be judged for standing out!

We looked at the focus of this years week; One Kind Word and the in line with their health and wellbeing topic about friends and relationships we celebrated the friendships we have in class and each wrote something kind about all of our classmates.

Now we all have something to take home and look at to make us smile. What a kind bunch we are!

A very sustainable start to the morning! Today all of Kirkcolm gathered together in the upper classroom to watch a live lesson from the lovely gentlemen and creators of The 3 Engineers Company!

https://www.the3engineers.com/

Jon, Matt and Nick spoke a little about what they do as engineers and what the purpose of this lesson was – raising awareness about issues to do with sustainability.

They spoke about the books for children they help create which address areas of sustainability and how we can be eco conscious and help prevent climate change and pollution!

This was a great opportunity for the pupils to listen to engineers at work and feel inspired by their jobs and skill set, as well as getting to hear a lovely story about a young girl called Scout and her quest to save the world a little bit at a time! 🙂

Our very responsible pupils joined with their community to pay respects to the sacrifices of others on Remembrance Day.

Senior pupils attended a service with Reverent Burl, Councillor Willie Scobie and other community members.  Prayers were shared and a lone piper marked the end of  a minute’s silence.

The children read a Remembrance Day senses poem to the gathering before Olivia presented a poppy stem to ‘Tommy’.  Tommy is a silhouette figure that has been mounted on the lamp post adjacent to the village entrance.  It is hoped he will be a permanent fixture to greet those arriving into our village.

The remainder of the school walked up to the village war memorial to pay their respects there. Breagh and Oliver read a poem for all to reflect upon.  The children also marked the 1 minute silence.

Lest We Forget!

In line with COP26 happening this week on our very own home soil and what with this school being a massive promoter of being Eco friendly and learning for sustainability – it seemed only right we dedicated a whole afternoon on learning all about the purpose of COP26 this year and applying our own genius brains to solving the problem that is Climate Change!

We discussed what COP26 was and what we hoped the purpose of this weekend would be from all the nations involved. The boys and girls were very clued up from several inputs with Miss Whorlow and lot’s of Newsround.

We then watched this excellent video by BP Educational services, which not only highlighted the damage that climate change is doing, but showed us all the inspirational things that are happening all over the world in a bid to start tackling this issue and to reach that Net-Zero goal for our carbon emissions.

This got us inspired and we split off into small groups to make our own posters which showed the different ways we thought our own community could move towards being net-zero!

We are lucky at Kirkcolm to have such caring and eco-aware pupils that truly care about their environment and the world around them and they really showcased these skills today!

On Thursday we were lucky enough to have a Teams meeting input from the lovely Stacey who is Financial Capability Officer at Money Talks Scotland. This was an exciting opportunity for the pupils to chat and learn form people form outside agencies.

Stacey had a fab and interactive presentation which got the pupils thinking about what sort of things we ‘need‘ to spend money on and what are the more frivolous things our money goes on. I must say, I was very impressed and proud of the answers they were coming up – quite the savvy’ lot! 

We then took a quiz and had to figure out what the average price was for certain things across the whole of Scotland, this looked at rent, food shop and they’re on hobbies and we quickly realised just how much these things can add up! 

On a final note, we discussed ways we could act to keep our financial costs down and once again the pupils were filled with great ideas – very resourceful. Some of these included growing our own food or making our own clothes or cutting down on takeaways throughout the month. 

It was a great input and we are very glad for Stacey to make the time for us, the pupils proved themselves a money smart bunch! 

… Still couldn’t quite guess how much the average house was though! Something to come back to later in the year! £100?? If only! 

Our combined Eco Committees received a visit from Dumfries and Galloway Councillors Ros Surtees (Vice Chair of Education and Learning Committee) and Dougie Campbell (Environment Champion) yesterday.

Ms Surtees and Mr Campbell are keen to encourage schools throughout the region to become Eco Schools just like ours.  They have heard of the North Rhins Partnership’s good work in this area and wanted the opportunity to talk to our children as to how we have made being Eco schools so successful.  They hope to use our example as a model to promote others to participate in this very important award scheme.  It couldn’t be  more timely with COP26 very much on everyone’s agenda.

The children had a wealth of ideas and suggestions to share.  The councillors praised everyone for their passion and enthusiasm, saying what an inspiration and credit they are to us all. Olivia presented a PowerPoint message that she had created in her own time.  This was filled with strategies and tips we can all take onboard at home to help protect the planet. Aiden gave the message of the day when asked what he would say to schools that think they are too busy for Eco Schools, he replied, “You are never too busy for the world!”

Here are our responsible citizens engaged in purposeful discussion.

Have a look at Olivia’s presentation for yourselves here:

Eco Presentation – Copy

They really are our own ENVIRONMENT CHAMPIONS!