Portpatrick Primary

As part of their ‘Food and Farming’ Topic in Social Studies and Health and Wellbeing, P1-4 visited Tesco for their ‘Farm to Fork’ workshop.  Pupils were taken a tour around Tesco to explore where food comes from and even got to taste some of the lovely items on offer!  The children took part in an activity to use food labels and packaging to discover where food came from.  They were amazed at the distance some fruit and vegetables travel from around the world, including from Cameroon, Columbia, France and Spain!

A selection of local cheese was offered to the children including a smoked applewood (which wasn’t very popular among the group!) and the daredevils tried a chilli and lime cheese, which was more popular than expected!

Pupils then explored downstairs in Tesco, which they were amazed at as they didn’t know Tesco had a ‘downstairs!’.  They enjoyed testing out how cold the deep freezers were and learned about how important it is to keep temperatures at the correct level.

It was a great educational trip and was enjoyed by all!

here is the arts and crafts group  making their puppets.

By Lachlan p4

This is Lee, Finlay and Mia

We are the new school blog team.  from Lachlan, Rhian and Myles!  Watch out for our updates.

 

 

The whole school recently enjoyed a day trip to Glasgow Science centre.  While at the science centre,  the children took part in various experiments as well as visiting the planetarium, taking part in a forces workshop, learning more about magnets and even launching rockets and standing on people on a bed of nails!

Have a look at our photographs which demonstrate some of the learning which took place!

Before the Easter holidays, the whole school put on a fantastic showcase of ‘The Last Monster in Scotland.’  The show was about a young journalist in Drumnadrochit, Katie Albright, trying to get a break through in her career with a fantastic news story… and she certainly got one!  She actually got to meet the Loch Ness Monster!  Despite the begrudged legend and myth buster Hamish McGarrigal trying to prove that Nessie didn’t exist!

The show also included American tourists hoping for a ride on Nessie’s back, wacky scientists trying to disprove Nessie’s existence and school children learning about the much loved legend of Nessie.

Children worked hard to learn all their lines, songs and actions which all came together on the show performances.  They added that extra sparkle to their parts and had the audience laughing along throughout.  A huge turnout was had for both performances and fantastic feedback was received from the parents and Portpatrick community.

Well done to the team from Portpatrick who were the winners at the recent Rotary Quiz .  This event is run annually and all Primary schools from the Stranraer area take place.  After many rounds of questions, Portpatrick were declared the winners.  They will go on to the area finals in Glasgow, in June.  The photograph shows Lara, Ruth, Connor and Magnus with the dictionaries they won.  Great work team!

A fantastic morning of Science learning was had by P3-P7 pupils at Portpatrick School.  Generation Science visited the school with their ‘Cosy Cosy’ workshop, which looked at teaching pupils about home insulation and how to save energy in the home.

Some very complex Science was being explored during the workshop and really had the mini scientists thinking about insulation, conductors, energy, conservation and a lot more!

The pupils had an exciting challenge to see who could insulate their model houses the best to conserve the most amount of energy and create the highest temperature.  The scientists leading the workshop reported that Portpatrick school had created the highest temperatures out of all the schools so this was a great achievement – they had obviously been listening well!

As part of their Eco-Friendly School duties, all pupils headed down to Portpatrick beach for a big clean up.  Loaded with protective gloves, waterproofs and bin bags, the pupils worked hard to collect in all the litter to leave their community beach sparkling clean.  We were pleasantly surprised at how little litter there was on the beach so it didn’t take long!  The school then headed to the local park and collected some more rubbish there… and had a quick play on the swings as a reward for their hard work in the cold weather!

The hard work didn’t stop there though!  On returning back to school, the children thought it would be a good idea to have a school clean!  So all children scoured the school grounds for any excess rubbish.

This was an important lesson in learning respect for their community and surroundings! 🙂

Portpatrick School made the most of an exciting hour of wonder during the first solar eclipse since 1999.  Pupils were issued with UV protective glasses to watch the solar eclipse happen and, in pairs, all took turns to see the amazing spectacle!

Pupils were told of the many dangers of looking at the sun directly.  All pupils behaved so well and I am sure the experience of the solar eclipse will remain a special memory to them all.. until the next one!