Kirkcolm Primary School

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 

Today both the P5-7 classes of Kirkcolm and Leswalt embarked on a trip to the local museum to get a hands on look at the role our local area played in World War 2! We have spent this term examining all the different aspects of WW2 through our social studies and through the fabulous work of Miss Douglas, we have managed to link up with Madeline at Stranraer Museum to see what they had to offer on the topic. 

Pupils learned about Stranraer in the past and during war time, they were able to explore the different artefacts the museum had and even get hands on with them! (pleased to report that everyone was very careful and respectful of the objects!)

There were 4 boxes with separate artefacts and pupils moved round in groups of 4 exploring the items of the boxes before trying to decide what person the artefacts were linked to. At the end they then had to become museum curators themselves and arrange the artefacts in a ‘mini’ exhibition.

Overall this was such a fantastic way to spend the morning and a great way to engage with what our local community has to offer. We are so grateful to the wonderful staff at Stranraer Museum for welcoming us in the morning and making use of their facilities and we hope to have many reasons to return in the future! 

Rory – ‘My favourite part was when we went into the replica Anderson shelter and heard all the sounds civilians would have heard during the war👂👂. We did an activity where we split up into groups and got a box with items in it and we had to guess who the items belonged to. Then we had to make displays with all the objects in them. We saw a biscuit tin radio which planes dropped on enemy camps to listen to messages.’ 

Bryleigh – ‘ The museum was amazing and had to so much cool things to see like, cheese pounders, gas masks, old shoes, pictures, jewellery, stones, and so much more! At the museum there was a very nice woman called Madeline she was the one who showed us around the museum and gave us tasks. My favourite part about the museum had to be when I saw the gas mask it was so cool and very interesting, although don’t try it on because I learned that there’s a chemical in there to stop the gas getting through and it’s bad for you! When  we were at the museum we did a task that we had to read and look at the stuff in a box and find out who the person was what I mean by that is what the job is and after you make a display with the stuff you had in your box, there were four boxes so we were spilt into four teams it was very fun! There was a Anderson shelter there and she showed us what an air raid siren sounded like. We learned more about rationing and we learned about the woman’s’ land army there and it was really fascinating! 🌍⚔🫡’

Allyssa – ‘One of the things Madeline showed us was a old phone that had recorded messages from people who had survived ww2‼️ in Stranraer and if you wanted to hear the messages you had to dial 14🔢. The last thing we did was we got into four groups and rotated around room to look at  artefacts🏺🏺 that you can hold and touch with your group and make a museum exhibit with our groups.’

Meta Skills 

Focusing Fergus

Critical Thinking Chris

Curiosity Carlos 

Articles

Article 17 – Access to Information 

Article 28 – Right to Education