Kirkcolm Primary School

On Wednesday the pupils at Kirkcolm were most certainly creepin’ it real as they got dressed up for their annual Halloween party. The party was organised by our House Captains, Robin McAuley and Michaela Lyon, who planned some fun games for everyone to participate in.

We started off with a costume parade for each year group with the nursery joining in on the fun too. The Pupil Council were on hand to choose the winners, with some proving just too difficult to call, resulting in a draw in the Primary 4 category.

After some dancing we moved onto the games, including Roll the Pumpkin, Creepy Corners, Musical Zombie Statues, Pin the Wart on the Witch and Wrap the Mummy. We are very grateful to the Parents and Carers who kindly donated prizes for the children to enjoy. Everyone had a spook-tacular time!

On this lovely Wednesday Miss McNicoll’s P4-7 were lucky enough to have a visit from our Lego engineering extraordinaire, John!

John came in to talk to pupils about their topic for this term; renewable and non-renewable energy sources, he was able to introduce them to ways they can experience these renewable energy sources we hear so much about for themselves and explained some very technical energy terms to them.

Our pupils got to hear all about the transfer of energy, and witnessed it first hand using a heat camera! – Extremely impressive military-grade equipment! In addition to this the pupils were given the challenge to use the Lego in their own way to design a machine which used a generator and some form of system to turn it using ‘kinetic energy’ that could give them the most volts. No surprise it ended up being Grace and Innes’s team (who were appropriately name ‘The Volts’) that pulled it off in the end with a staggering 17.9 volts! Closely followed by Cody and Daniel with an impressive 17.7 volts! Tight race kids!

Onto the next challenge… this one was a little bit harder and definitely required more steps. The pupils had to design a Lego machine… powered by a renewable energy source! So there could be no little hands turning any levers to make it work. The pupils were given outlines of this and amazingly, despite how difficult it proved to be at times, and fidgety, and tough… They managed it. As you can see in the photos we have some hydro powered Lego machines and some wind powered machines – Well done folks!

Finally, we rounded off our day with a little solar challenge. Since the weather was so kind to us we were able to make some solar powered cars to race in the playground! It was a bit grey and spotty at times but we managed it and you can see all the delighted and fiercely competitive faces during their races.

Overall, we have had a fantastic and extremely informative day and we have nobody else to thank but John of course for all his patience with us and for bringing all these fantastic gadgets to the school for us to play with. I hope he’s inspired some of us into being safer and more conservative with our energy use and perhaps even towards considering a career in a STEM field.

Lego Renewable Energy Input 
On the 10th or October at Kirkcolm Primary school the upper class got a Lego Input on Renewable Energy. First John told us a bit about Renewable us a bit about Renewable Energy. Then we had the challenge to make a windmill or a water turning that was fun. After break we finished them of up onto lunch time I made a water turbine. When we came back from lunch we made solar powered cars it was tricky and hard me and Miley raced with our classmates when we finished our car. The sun had disappeared but John brought lamps but it didn’t work as good as the sun. After we raced it was time to pack up I didn’t want them to go we said thank you to John that was Kirkcolm primary schools Lego Input I hope if you get this opportunity to get what Kirkcolm got I hope you liked it as much as we did.
Mackenzie Adams P.7 

Please have a flick through our lovely photos to see what we’ve been getting up to!

…and why it’s such a bad habit!

We were lucky enough to have the lovely Mrs Lisa Ashby visit us from Smoking Matters (Scotland’s initiative against smoking) to have a chat with the P4-7 pupils about the health concerns that come with smoking and all the dangers that surround it!

We played some true or false games and our faces turn to absolute horror when we realised some of the very real facts associated with smoking. The average person takes 17-20 years to quit smoking – we couldn’t believe our ears!

We got to witness Professor Scott and Professor Ruth dawn their lab coats and safety gear to conduct an experiment looking at all the dangerous chemicals that are in tobacco. Did you know there is around 4800 different chemicals in tobacco!?

As well as that, Mrs Ashby used her technology to give Robin and Miley a glimpse into the future if they were ever to take up the bad habit and you can see the horror and shock on their faces when they got the big reveal.

Hearing about some of the health concerns to do with smoking really sends some shivers down your spine; hairy tongues and black teeth!? As well as the long term affects on your lung health with all that tar. Hopefully this taught the boys and girls the real danger of taking up such a habit and why they should be participating and backing NHS Scotland’s goal to be a smoke free country by 2034!

If you know anybody who smokes, try and encourage them to jump on the bandwagon!

In the meantime – here are some photos of the boys and girls getting stuck into their experiments…

Kirkcolm Primary school is very proud to have a UK record holder in our midst.  Finlay Nelson, in Primary 7, now has the honour of being the fastest 11 year old boy in the whole of the United Kingdom with the fastest time for swimming 50 metres butterfly. 

What a star – and so humble too……. Mrs Baillie only learned of this amazing achievement today with a chance conversation over fish and chips!

Well done Finlay, we are all extremely proud of you!

Today we held our first Pupil Council meeting of the new session. Our new Pupil Council reps are: Archie Ashton, Jack Howie, Peyton Parker, Miley Adams, Abbi Johnstone, Ivy Richardson, Jack Barrett & Guy Butler

What responsible young citizens they are proving to be – they were full of great ideas to help make our school an even better place!!

Today, P 4-7 were lucky enough to have a visit from Professor John Lockhart from the University of the West of Scotland to talk to them about the BREATH campaign he has started, directed towards targeted regions in Scotland and England.

The pupils learnt all about Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD for short) and how the rates of this were exceptionally high in our own South West region of Scotland.

Pupils were educated of how the lungs work to keep us alive, how this disease can affect them and how it can be prevented or stopped.

This tied in well with our tobacco topic where we have been looking at smoking and the adverse health effects that come with it.

Our pupils were given instructions to educate, educate, educate everyone they could about what they have learnt today so don’t be surprised when they start letting you know about COPD in South West Scotland!

Here are some photos to show off what they were getting up to with Professor Lockhart!

Examining toxins in cigarettes, e-cigarettes and then nothing at all.

Ivy showing us all the mouse lungs – there was a good hand washing post input!

Danny very pleased with his breath test results!

Making lungs!!

Getting ready….

…and blow!

Book Festival Fun!

The boys and girls of Kirkcolm Primary were very lucky to once again have the opportunity this year to head across to the Wigtown Book Festival for the day!

On Friday the P1-4 pupils set off on their bus journey all the way down to Wigtown (after a quick pit stop to pick up our Leswalt partners!) to go hear an input from Andy Stanton who has published a variety of children’s books. The pupils got to listen to the author discuss their works and then take questions from pupils about their life and works.

Then come Monday, it was P5-7’s opportunity to head down to the book festival!. Once again with our Leswalt peers we departed to hear a talk from Gareth P. Jones who entertained us all with his unique songs about every single book he’s wrote and funny quips!

Overall, both classes had a fantastic time at the book festival and enjoyed the opportunity to experience Wigtown Book Town and all it has to offer. Already excited for the next one rolling around…

Here are a few photos from our visit;

A huge well done to Phoebe, Jack, Peyton and Danny who completed the Maths Week Scotland homework challenge to create a collage. What fabulous designs they produced to show that maths really is everywhere!

Just like that – our Maths Week fun has come to an end and big thanks go out to all the pupils, parents, class teachers and the fab organiser behind it all – Mrs McHarg!

To take you through this week’s highlights, on Monday we investigated maths in art! Mrs Wither’s class used different 2D shapes to create castles, while Miss McNicoll’s class played with parabolic curves on graphs and create some funky patterns to decorate the room.

On Tuesday we had a big day with maths and ICT, trying to get as ‘full STEM ahead’ as we could! Lower school used the Beebots and coding mouse to make letters using their programming skills while the upper school proved their computer whizz kid skills using a coding website called ‘Scratch’ to make letters – with great success!

Then on Wednesday, Mrs Wither’s class took advantage of the good weather and headed outside to discover maths outdoors, using what they could find in nature to count and create numbers and I’m sure you’ll agree from looking at the photos; they did a good job! Miss McNicoll’s class waited until later to go outside and do some number relays and games to incorporate maths into their exercise, successfully tiring out both the minds and the bodies!

Thursday was the highlight of the week because it gave us the chance to have everyone come together for a spot of baking! Parents came into school and joined us in making tasty treats; Miss Wither’s class produced some mouth-watering Rugby slice while Miss McNicoll’s older pupils got messy with melted chocolate to make rocky road slices. I can whole-heartedly confirm there was definitely more than one face smothered with a chocolate goatee!

And the week draws to a close on Friday where the lower school pupils went about their Big Maths business, hopefully smashing those CLIC tests and Beat That’s out of the park! Upper school took their turn venturing outside on a Maths Scavenger hunt devised by Mrs McHarg – thankfully the weather was kind to them.

A big, huge thank you to everyone who participated in Maths week from coming in for the baking to giving the homework challenge of ‘Maths is Everywhere’ a shot – It has been so greatly appreciated! We have all had an amazing time and look forward to seeing what the next year’s week of number fun brings! For now please have a flick through the photos to get an insight into how busy we have been.

The pupils at Kirkcolm were delighted to see some new additions to the outside playground toy store.  A huge box of playground toy equipment was recently delivered to school and Mrs Macpherson and the children has great fun seeing what was inside. 

Many thanks must go to Kirkcolm community council for the wind farm funding which has allowed the children to have this new equipment.