Portpatrick Primary

Primary 5 – 7 from Kirkcolm and Portpatrick came together to take part in a Bonfire safety talk with Robert McCrorie from our local fire station.

Robert advised on how to behave responsibly with fireworks such as sparklers. Did you know that they can burn 15 times hotter than a kettle.  Robert told us to wear gloves, and safety glasses if we have them, tie hair back and don’t pick a sparkler up.  He said to put used sparklers in a bucket of sand or water.

We talked about what we can and can’t put on a bonfire.  We know not to put aerosol cans on as they can explode. Although we can use newspapers, we can’t burn magazines as they give off damaging gases.  We also can’t use straw bales as the lit stems can blow away and start a fire elsewhere. Robert told us what to do if our clothing catches fire. Ivan ably demonstrated how to Stop – Drop – Roll.

We are creating entries for the Firework Safety Competition to raise awareness of how to keep ourselves safe during the Bonfire celebrations.

Our thanks to Robert for taking the time to help us stay safe. 🙂

Thank you Robert!

 

We learned about how to be safe, be kind and be smart with fireworks and bonfires. Thank you Robert!

UNCRC Rights of the Child – Article 29 Aims of Education

What a great trip we had to Barsolus today! Primary 7 were kindly invited to visit Gillian and the crew to learn how plants benefit humans and how farming practices work from field to fork.

Gillian explained about the seasonality of different crops and how Barsolus need to time planting of vegetables such as Brussel Sprouts perfectly so they are ready to harvest for our Christmas dinners!

Our pupils also found out how different varieties of vegetables impacts on soil health over time. As a result farmers are required to rotate crop growing on field every three years or so. We also talked about taking care not to release too much carbon from soil through the use of NPK fertilisers.

We learned about cooperative arrangements with Girvan Early Growers who rent fields from Barsolus for carrot growing.  They don’t have enough land around Girvan, so hire fields to grow and harvest their own crops.

Barsolus talked about working in more environmentally sustainable ways through the Government’s ‘greening policy’. Barsolus have chosen to interpret their green action by leaving areas to grow and develop naturally. Farmers have options on what solution they choose. Gillian also chatted about reducing the chemicals added to soil through the need to change to using less damaging types of fertiliser.

We had a game of ‘identify the veg’. The children were very knowledgeable. We then had a carrot pulling competition to see who could pick the biggest carrot. Scott chose three category winners:

• Biggest carrot – Cara
• Fattest carrot – Atticus
• Longest carrot – Stephen

Cara was declared the supreme carrot champion.

Gillian very generously let the children fill a bag of veggie goodness to take home. There’ll be a few pots of soup on the go tonight. 🙂

Our thanks go to Wilma Benson for very ably escorting Leswalt and helping out our group.

We can’t thank Barosolus enough for a fabulous learning experience right on our doorstep!

 

UNCRC Rights of the Child – Article 24 health, food and the environment

 

Today, our North Rhins Partnership Digital Leaders came together to take part in a digital literacy training workshop. To ensure that everyone has the required skills to support their fellow pupils, the children undertook a series of training activities. Here are the skills we practiced and developed as part of our training:

Logging In:

• Logging on to our computers and logging into our Glow Accounts

Websites:

• Setting our favourites bar to display at all times
• Adding a web address to our favourites bar for easy access

Blog:

• Creating a new blog post as a contributor
• Saving our draft ready for approval for posting

QR Codes:

• Creating and downloading a QR code for a website (BBC Bitesize – Computing Lessons)
• Accessing our download folder to retrieve files

Emails:

• Accessing our email account
• Adding a recipient to an email
• Adding a subject and attachment (BBC Bitesize Computing website) and sending an email
• Creating folders in our email account
• Flagging and pinning an email in a folder

Although Scott couldn’t be with us today, we are sure he will be keen to support us as soon as he is back.

Our leaders are now busy planning Digi Skills clubs and events to help improve the whole school community ‘s digital literacy.  Look out for  the minutes of our meeting to find out more about what we got up today. Watch this space!

UNCRC Rights of the Child:

Article 15 Setting Up and Joining Groups, Article 29 – Aims of Education

After the recent water damage caused by Storm Agnes, Portpatrick Primary headed off to Kirkcolm Primary for our temporary school adventure. We expect to be at Kirkcolm for about a week.

The boys and girls were very excited on our bus trip and everyone is looking forward to learning and playing with our Kirkcolm friends.

The children enjoyed tucking into a decicious lunch courtesy of Michelle’s fab dinners.  It was great connecting with our partnership friends again. Lots of fun was had in our mixed game of rounders. All in all, a very positive day!

Thank you Kirkcolm Primary for being our kind hosts!

UNCRC Article 29- Aims of Education

 

Maths Week Scotland 2023

The children of the North Rhins Partnership Schools got their calculating brains in gear to participate in Maths Week Scotland. Each school took part in a fantastic array of maths related a…

Go to this Sway

Why not see what we’ve been up to?  Click on the link then select play. 🙂

UNCRC Rights of the Child:

Article 29 – Aims of Education

We’ve kickstarted off our Sphero robotic and coding club!  After the fabulous news that we were the successful recipients of a £5000 Digital Xtra Grant, we’ve been so keen to get started with Sphero that we’ve borrowed a kit from our South Rhins Partnership school friends until our equipment arrives – Thank you Sandhead and Drummore primary schools!

What is a Sphero, you ask? Well, Sphero robots have many different internal parts that make them work such as motors, LEDs, encoders, processors, a CPU and Bluetooth communication module for connecting to phones, and a gyroscope that keeps it oriented. A small, wheeled robot inside the shell climbs up the walls and pushes them forward, causing the ball to roll.

Sphero programmable robots help kids learn fundamental STEM concepts through play-based learning and educational STEAM activities. You can use Sphero robots to play games, create programs, or complete challenges.

Our first extra-curricular club activities focussed on using Bluetooth to pair our devices, orientating our Spheros and using direction and speed to control the travel of our devices.  The children quickly mastered the balance between speed and control and were then able to navigate obstacles with increasing accuracy.  There was some fun racing the Spheros in figures of eight round cones in  pairs.  We even had a play with adapting the colours of the led array.

Feedback from our pupils asked for more ‘tinker time’, so the second session gave the boys and girls the opportunity to do just that.

Our next activity will bring in the skills of selecting and using a range of coding blocks to ‘draw’ 2D shapes.  This will incorporate thinking about angles, delays and loops.

Watch this space!

UNCRC Rights of the Child:

Article 15 – Setting up and joining groups

Article 28 – Access to Education

Article 29 – Aims of Education

The whole school had an great arfternoon of activities to celebrate harvest festival.  Rev. Breakey, her daughter, Claire, and Mrs Ross came along to give the children the oppportunity to

• Create our  beautifully coloured ‘stained glass’ panel using bright cellothane and piping for the leadwork

 

Look how beautiful the finished panels are!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Plant a selection of edible plants to sell at the Harvest Festival to raise money for a local cause. (Rocket, Cress, Kale & Parsley)

 

The boys and girls were fully absorbed in the experiences.  Rev. Breakey spoke to the children on why Christians celebrate Harvest Festival.

A great afternoon was had by all. Thank you ladies!

UNCRC Rights of the Child:

Article 24 – Health, Water, Food & Environment

Article 31 – Rest, Play, Culture & Arts

P 5 – 7 are studying plants and biodiversity as this term’s science topic.  Today we set up an experiment with the hypothesis of:

Does fertiliser improve the growth of plants?

To keep it a fair test our little scientists determined that we needed to control the variables and the constants:

Constants:

• Type of soil
• Type of seed
• Same amount of sunlight (same location)
• Same temperature (same location)

Variables:

• Adding fertiliser to the water for the plants

Everyone planted a pea seed.  Half the class have used just water and half added fertiliser to the water. We predicted what we think we might observe over time.  Some think the plants will grow to the same height and some think the fertilised water plants will grow taller . We will monitor the growth over time, then apply our data handling skills to produce a graph of our results for comparison. We might even throw in a few mean, mode, median and range calculations while we’re at it!

Watch this space!

UCNRC  Rights of the Child:

Article 24: Health, Water, Food & Environment, Article 29 – Aims of Educaton

 

Whilst our shiny new smartboards were being fitted, both classes took advantage of the fabulous weather to get outdoors for some learning activities.

P5 – 7 went ‘unplugged’ to carry out some computational thinking combined with physical movement.  The children had to collaborate to solve a coordination and sequencing challenge using the following skills:

• Decomposition – The breaking down of a complex problem into smaller, more manageable parts
• Pattern recognition – The analysis of similar ideas to extend or create patterns to better understand a challenge
• Algorithm design – The development of steps used to solve a challenge, often a sequential set of rules that are followed
• Debugging – Identifying the issues and creating solutions to problems

We had to work out how to set out our hoop array to enable everyone to travel from one side to the other without colliding, using coordinated step movements.  The children had a lot of fun, with purposeful discussion and teamwork to successfully solve the challenge!

 

P1 – 4 explored what living things need to survive and thrive.  They planted sunflowers and will be caring for these over the next wee while to ensure the plants stay healthy and grow.

UNCRC Rights of the Child:

Article 29 – Aims of Education

Our newly appointed Eco Committee met for the first time today.

• P7 – Lewis
• P6 – Lacey (absent)
• P5 – Rebecca
• P4 – Adam
• P3 – Adam
• P2 – Josh
• P1 – George

After a successful interview process, our new members were happy to join us for our first meeting to agree our targets for our next Eco Flag application.  After carrying out an PP environmental-review-2023 – 2024, the group agreed that the targets we will focus on for the next two year action plan will be:

• Litter and Waste
• Global Citizenship
• Climate Action

The members were keen to get cracking and have already organised today’s litter survey in our school grounds, followed by a litter survey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our older members visited both classes to explain what has been agreed and chatted about how everyone will have a role to play in helping us achieve our eco-friendly goals.

UNCRC Rights of the Child:

• Article 12 Respect for children’s views
• Article 13 – Sharing thoughts freely
• Article 15 – Setting up and joining groups
• Article 24 – Health, water, food and environment