Portpatrick Primary

What beautiful weather we had for our outdoor learning day today!

We got stuck in to a wide range of learning opportunities using our outdoor environment.  In the morning, we were visited by Mrs Norval Dampney of the Incredible Edible team to carry out some TLC of our fruit orchard.

We have been reducing waste by recycling and soaking cardboard to make mulch.  We combined this with straw and soil and created a moisture sandwich around the base of each tree to act as a moisture reseviour to keep the roots watered on dry days.

Mrs Dampney educated the children on all things soil and plant related.  Did you know that there are more microbes in one teaspoon of soil than there are humans on the planet!  She promised to come back in October when the trees will be dormant to carry out some pruning with the boys and girls.

P1 -4 were Eco champions; carrying out a litter survey and a litter pick in our village.  We are pleased to report very little litter was found.

Next up, P5 – 7 linked their data handling topic in maths with outdoor learning.  We walked to the harbour and recorded the colours of cars we found using tally marks.  We then displayed this data as a bar graph and calculated the mean, mode, median and range of our data.  We grouped data such as silver and grey to minimise categories.

P1 – 4 went to the beach for a maths session using sand to draw clock faces to to tell the time.

 

In the afternoon, P5 – 7 had a PE session outdoors to maintain our health and wellbeing whilst P1 – 4 gathered natural materials to use for art printing as well as practicing their spelling words with chalk.

 

P.S. Here’s some gardening activities previousy with Kim when the children planted Casablanca and Shanon potatoes, parsley, sweet peas, pak choi, lettuce.  Yum!  Kim also kindly gave the willow dome a much needed ‘haircut’ today.

UNCRC:

• Article 24 – Health, Water, Food & Environment
• Article 29 –  Aims of Education

 

Today, we used our prior learning on the human circulatory sytem to create  lifesize diagrams of this body system.  We included the following features:

• The heart
• The lungs
• The arteries carrying oxygenated blood away from the heart around the body
• The veins carrying deoxygenated blood back to the heart and lungs

We showed the direction of flow on both the arteries and the veins.

Don’t they look great! 😉

UNCRC – 29 Aims of Education

We are delighted to announce we have been awarded our RSPB Wild Challenge Gold Award for our hard work supporting biodiversity in our school environment.

Our children completed a total of 18 challenges to Help Nature and Experience Nature , all of which promotes Learning for Sustainability, Sustainable Development Goals, outdoor learning and good health and wellbeing!

Feedback from the RSPB – We’re proud to announce that you’re a Wild Challenge gold award winner! A HUGE well done!

What a journey. You’ve taken on 18 challenges, helping your pupils get to know nature and helping it to thrive; you’ve done an amazing job!

 

 

 

 

 

 

We can now proudly display our Gold accolade for all to see.

UNCRC Rights of the Child – Article 24: Heath, Water, Food, Environment

Sustainable Development Goal – 15: Life on Land

P5 – 7 have linked with the Glasgow Science Centre to participate in their Body Works programme to learn how key body systems work.  Today, we explored the digestive process.

To simulate digestion, we filled the mouth (a snack bag) with food (bananas and crackers) and stomach acid (orange juice + water).  We mashed up the food to simulate our stomach muscles contracting and expanding to break down the food into smaller pieces.  We then put the contents into our intestines (tights).  The liquid nutrients passed through the small intestines (tights) into the body’s bloodstream (bowl).  Water was reabsorbed back into the body through the large intestines. The waste food was then passed to the rectum (foot of the tights) and was excreted as faeces through the anus with our hands working as a muscle to aid the excretion of waste (hole in the toe of the tights).

It was a ‘guddly’ mess,  but it certainly let us understand the process better.

Just look at Katie’s face! 😉

UNCRC Rights of the Child – Article 29: Aims of Education

Primary 1 – 4 combined wildlife observation with maths today as part of outdoor learning.  The boys and girls went down to our village beach and to the park to create tally charts on the mini-beasts they could spot in our local environment. The children learned how to use the conventions of tallies to record how many of each species of mini-beast they spotted.

In addition, as part of our RSPB Wild Challenges they carried out a Spot It! activity to see how many tracks and signs they could see around them. There were snail trails, cobwebs, animal droppings and feathers.  The children managed to spot shells and a live crab too.

UNCRC Rights of the Child:

Article 24 – Health, Water, Food & Environment

Article 29 – Aims of Education

Sustainable Development Goal 15 – Life on Land

Portpatrick pupils have been busy this week celebrating the coronation of King Charles III.

Earlier in the week, pupils learned all about the coronation of a monarch – from the very first coronation taking place in Bath in 973AD, to what will happen during the ceremony tomorrow.

Today, pupils came to school looking very patriotic, dressed in red, white and blue. Some even came with Union Jack capes, hats, hair braids and head boppers on! In the morning, we put our maths skills into action and baked some delicious scones,  which we enjoyed later in the day with jam and cream.

After we had enjoyed our delicious buffet lunch kindly prepared by Kim, we made some dazzling crowns and Union Jack flags. We coronated our very our King and Queen of Portpatrick Primary (Jack and Katie!). After they both gave an oath to look after everyone in Portpatrick, the Archbishop of Canterbury (AKA Lacey) anointed the King and Queen with some Portpatrick holy water; they were given the sceptre and the orb; and then they were crowned. The whole school then headed through the village in a procession, waving at locals and visitors as we went!

To end the day, parents were invited to pop into the hall to watch our special performance of “I Just Can’t Wait to be King!”

We had a brilliant day full of Coronation fun!

The lovely ladies from Lighthouse Musicians, Gillian and Helen, popped back to Portpatrick this morning to work with pupils in P1-4.

The boys and girls had a great time playing games that involved being a conductor and singing songs. They then learned about rhythm through the use of beanbags, hoops and cones which were given various values and pupils had to clap out the correct rhythm in time. Gillian taught pupils the names of some musical notes and pupils started reading music to clap out a basic rhythm involving 1 and 4-beat notes and rests.

We then got the musical bells out and played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star – this took lots of concentration but we managed to play all 6 lines successfully!

Finally, we recapped some Italian musical terms describing the dynamics of music and played a game to help us remember these.

Thank you to both of the ladies for coming into school today – we had a great morning of music and can’t wait for your next visit!

 

As it was such a beautiful day, we went outdoors for our assembly time today, focussing on Eco Schools and Learning for Sustainability.

Aiming to complete some RSPB wild challenges, we set about repurposing some materials to create a birdbath and a mini pond to make our school grounds a more wildlife friendly habitat.

Mini Pond

A hole was dug in the nature area.  We then levelled a basin into the hole. We filled the basin with water and created islands to ensure that insects and creatures have a route to get out if required.

Bird Bath

We set a basin in the base of the tree support and created a perch point and an escape ramp from used bricks.  This is supported by its own weight so we can change the water regularly.

Habitat Hunt

Our eager pupils worked in pairs to identify all the habitat zones we have created and have naturally in our school.  Using and applying our maths skills we worked together  to add up how many points we have scored for habitats on the RSPB recording sheet.  We are proud to report we had an impressive score 155/173.  We calculated this to be a score of 90%.

# Effective Contributors

UNCRC Rights of the Child Article 24 – Health, Water, Food & Environment

Sustainable Development Goal 15 – Life on Land

Our Primary 4 pupils were invited to participate in an Earth Day workshop at the Ryan Centre.  Along with pupils from our cluster schools, the children watched videos to learn more about alternative energies from wind turbines. They learned how blades are manufacturing, the role of blade technicians and how this all links to more sustainable energy sources.

The chidren then took part in a team exercise to build a model wind turbine from paper.  They also connected a motor powered by our breaths to light an led as a clean energy source.

# Responsible Citizens

UNCRC Rights of the Child  Article 29- Aims of Education

Sustainable Development Goal 12 – Responsible Consumption & Production

Sustainable Development Goal 13 – Climate Action

The DG Schools STEM Showcase for 2023 is now live.

We are proud to say that the North Rhins Partnership has been highlighted for our excellent learning in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.

 

 

 

 

Click here or scan the QR code below to access a Thinklink to view our good work.  All you need to then do is click on the red hotspots for our school locations to access the content. You can also explore what has been happening in schools across the region in all things STEM.

# Rights of the Child 29 – Aims of Education