Portpatrick Primary

As part of learning about the Victorian era, P4-7 have produced fantastic results in a S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Maths) challenge.  The pupils were given an open ended brief to design, construct and evaluate a resource that depicts an aspect of Victorian life.

As always, the children impressed with their imagination, creativity, and attention to detail.  The standard of entry and the enthusiasm of the boys and girls was lovely to observe.  Barbara judged the entries and awarded the following:

1st Place – Ava Lily with her Victorian home with fine detail

2nd Place – Liam with his Victorian camera, complete with bellow style covering

3rd Place – Maya with her historically accurate coloured and shaped Victorian post box

All agreed that every entry was of a very high quality.  Thank you for all of the family engagement and support that made this possible.  Why not pop in to see our terrific table top display?

# Successful Learners

 

Sunday saw a very busy and successful Portpatrick Christmas Fayre, held in the village hall. Having spent all week creating Christmas crafts in school, the older pupils took it in turns to run the school craft stall. On sale were snow globes, gift boxes with peppermints, salt dough tree decorations and wrapping paper. In total, the stall made an incredible £125!

The Parent Council also ran the cafe, selling lots of delicious homemade baking, and raised a grand total of £522.23.

Having been held captive in the kitchen to practise their singing from 3.30pm, the pupils took to the stage at 4pm donned with festive jumpers and cheery smiles, to entertain everyone with some Christmas songs they had been busy learning in school. The pupils sang loud and proud and helped to put everyone into the festive mood!

Well done to everyone involved – the countdown to Christmas is now on!

The whole school has been enterprising ‘Christmas Crazy’ this last little while preparing lots of lovely crafty gifts to sell at Sunday’s Portpatrick Christmas Fair.

The pupils (and Barbara) have made peppermint sweet gift boxes, shortbread gift boxes, salt dough tree ornaments, wrapping paper, photo snow globes AND Christmas tree & Snowmen decorations.  They all look fabulous and will help decorate your home, ready to get you in the festive spirit.

The children have used this as an Enterprise project to help raise funds.Please do come along and support our wee school.  Thank you.

Ho, Ho, Ho!

# Effective Contributors

After 12 weeks of learning and practice, P4-7 gave a musical performance to the whole school and family members this afternoon.  The children performed a range of traditional Scottish songs sung both in Gaelic and English whilst playing the tin whistle.  The boys and girls were accompanied by Wendy and  Kate of Feis Rois, who have delivered excellent instruction to the pupils.

The audience thoroughly enjoyed the talents of the pupils and a great morning’s entertainment was had by all.

Have a listen to a couple of the musical performances below to see the skills our boys and girls have mastered.

# Successful Learners

P4-7 got creative to find ways to support the community Christmas fair.  They decided to make sweets to sell.  The class made peppermint creams by following a simple recipe.  We initially weighed quantities, but after experience we were able to use ‘ready reckoning’.

We applied strict hygiene standards throughout the task, wearing hair nets and aprons and making sure we had squeaky clean hands.

The group were able to calculate the amount we had to sell each pack of sweet for to make a profit.  We added up the total cost of the ingredients and divided that number by the quantity of sweets we were able to make.  This was then multiplied by how many sweets would be in a pack.  We now know how much we must sell each gift pack of sweets for to generate a profit sale.

The boys and girls used paper craft to create decorated presentation gift boxes.  They will make a lovely present for someone at the Christmas Fair.  We hope you would like to buy them.

# Effective Contributors & Successful Learners

Lauren Steel, Principal Technician: Structures & Engineering Design for Communities with Dumfries and Galloway Council joined us today to deliver a P4-7  engineering workshop, in collaboration with the Institute of Civil Engineers (ICE).  Lauren volunteers her time to help develop children’s learning in S.T.E.M across the region.

Lauren talked to the children about different designs of bridges that can be found in the world.  The most common in Dumfries and Galloway is the masonry arch bridge.

Working in small groups, the children were given the challenge of initially designing and sketching a bridge that would be capable of being load bearing.  They then had to select materials and combine them to meet the brief.

The boys and girls used a wide range of Higher Order thinking skills to problem solve.  They had to plan, select, estimate, combine, construct, modify, improve and adapt and test their bridge construction.  Further, they had to apply their soft skills of cooperating, negotiating, discussing, sharing and agreeing to complete the task – phew!

All children were completely absorbed by the task at every step of the process.  They collaborated effectively in their teams and rose to the challenge. Every bridge constructed was successful in supporting a heavy load of a filled water bottle.

Future engineers in the making!

# Successful Learners

 

I am delighted to say that following a process which we have been undertaking over the last 2 years, as part of our School improvement plan, our partnership of trio schools has achieved National recognition in the Digital Skills Scotland awards.

The boys and girls in P1-4 at Portpatrick Primary have been busy learning all about how Bar Models can help us with our maths reasoning. By Drawing out the bar we are able to decipher what mathematical process is required to solve the problem.

Today we took on Q1 and Q2 of White Rose Maths #Barvember challenge. Each Day a new challenge is uploaded. I think we are starting to get the hang of it now !

Yesterday we participated in The BBC Authors Live Event in partnership with Book Week Scotland where pupils were able to listen to James Robertson and Catriona Lexy Campbell read out renditions of The Gruffalo in both Scots and Gaelic.

There were lots of giggles as we discussed our favourite Scots words and we even learnt some new Gaelic words.

We were lucky enough to be watching Live and even Tweeted BBC Scotland Learning to let them know we were watching and we even got a little retweet.  If anyone who uses twitter would like to follow Miss McGeoch’s professional account the handle is @MissMcGeoch.

As part of our Book Week Scotland celebrations (which runs from 18^th-24^th November), P1-3 parents were invited into school this afternoon as part of the Bookbug (P1) / Read, Write, Count (P2-3) initiatives. Parents spent time exploring the contents of the bags and discussing ways in which the resources could be used to develop pupils’ literacy and numeracy at home. We also had a look at the ‘Parent Club’ website which gives further examples of activities to do at home using the resources.

An excited bunch of P1-3 pupils then joined us and were gifted with their bags. Pupils were desperate to get into their bags and see what it contained! Having sat patiently, we then headed to the classroom where pupils explored the goodies they were given – some were reading books; others were playing games of rockets & meteors or top trumps; and some were using story cubes to create imaginative silly stories!

Later in the week to continue the Book Week Scotland celebrations, P4-7 pupils will be doing some paired reading with P1-3, as suggested by the Pupil Council, and some pupils will be watching the Authors Live event which tells the story of the Gruffalo in Scots. We are all looking forward to getting together to enjoy some stories and share in our love of reading!