Portpatrick Primary

Today, the whole school enjoyed our annual Christmas lunch.  The children were treated to a delicious festive meal with all the trimmings.  Crackers were pulled, songs were sung and a good time was had by all.  It was a great social occasion for pupils and staff; all enjoying Barbara’s wonderful cooking.  Thank you Barbara!

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15 of the boys and girls attended the Portpatrick Church Community Carol Service on Sunday evening. The pupils performed Away in a Manger and gave a sneak preview of 2 of the songs from our Christmas show. The congregation and church members were very appreciative of the fantastic turn-out and many are looking forward to seeing the Christmas show in full next Monday. Afterwards, everybody headed through to the hall for some tasty mince pies! 

As part of Computing Science Education Week, the trio participated in the Hour Of Coding initiative.  This is a worldwide event organised to allow children the experience of coding and programming as part of developing skills for future life and learning.

Carol Moyes, RAiSE team (Raising Aspirations in STEM Education) kindly travelled from Dumfries to visit Leswalt, Kircolm and Portpatrick on the same day.

Our P4-7 pupils were able to select coding challenges to work collaboratively on.  They applied the computational thinking of logic and evaluation to create algorithms to control and design computing gaming activities.  They had to use decomposition to break down sequences into steps and debug any errors.  All the children were highly motivated and engaged throughout the whole activity.

The activities are available to explore and use at home via the code.org website.

Our thanks to Carol for her help and support

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The Darlings and the Thorburns kindly volunteered to man a stall at Portpatrick Community Christmas Fair on the 2nd of December.  They sold Christmas crafts and decorations made by all the pupils of Portpatrick Primary.  They spent several hours on duty and raised over £120 for school funds.  Well done and thank you!

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Cherry Dashper, a local author, came into visit P1-3 last week.  She talked about Autumn and the class made leaves from sugar paper.  She then read her book about a snotty princess and a dragon to model the art of oral story telling.  The pupils role played being leaves in the story.  The boys and girls thoroughly enjoyed her visit and found her story very funny. They were able to recount the main action points and the plot.

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Last Night, the The NASA InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) probes successfully reached the surface of Mars.   This will be the first probe to dedicate its investigations to understanding Mars’ interior. Scientists want to know how this world is constructed – from its core to its crust.

The pupils of Portpatrick Primary have had a long wait for this mission to reach its destination, which was originally scheduled for May 2018.  Last October, the boys and girls took advantage of the opportunity to participate in the mission by adding their names to a silicon microchip headed to the Red Planet aboard NASA’s InSight Mars lander. More than 2.4 million names from around the world were added to the microchip, which has now safely reached the surface of the Red Planet.  Parents may recall the children coming home with their individual printed boarding passes for the mission.

Our connection to the mission has encouraged pupils to take a keen interest in this scientific event.  The children are enthusiastically discussing the space mission in school, which aligns perfectly with this term’s Solar System science topic for P4-7.

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P.C. Wilson joined P5-7 today to give them some wise input on the subject of alcohol.  This relates directly to our Health and Wellbeing topic this term.  She and the children discussed many aspects such as the law on age and drink driving limits.  dangers to health and how to approach peer pressure and emergency situations.  The pupils engaged maturely and sensibly with the session, asking many interesting questions.

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All pupils  were treated to a ‘Let’s Get Sporty’ session today as part of a partner initiative with Dumfries & Galloway council.  The pupils practised cooperation, coordination, spatial awareness and team work as part of a series of sporting challenges which they all thoroughly enjoyed!

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Primary 1-3 pupils were very excited this morning to receive their Bookbug (P1)/ Read, Write, Count (P2-3) gift bags. Parents were invited in as part of our launch of this Scottish Government initiative which aims to inspire a lifelong love of reading, writing and counting, and strengthen links between home and school learning by supporting parents in taking an active role in their child’s learning to give them the best start in life. They were shown the contents of the bags and given suggestions for helping to develop literacy and numeracy at home using these resources. After presenting the boys and girls with their bags, everyone headed down to the classroom where we spent some time exploring our new books and games. The pupils are really looking forward to using the contents of their bags at home!

Portpatrick Primary pupils rallied the troops for Children In Need 2018.  The boys and girls made a ‘spotacular’ effort to dress to impress  in support of Pudsey and Blush.  The spottiest, dottiest pupils were judged to be Scott and Jack who were wearing too many spots to count. Pupils made a voluntary donation for this non-uniform day.

The pupil council came up with the creative idea of guessing the bear’s birthday to raise funds.  The cuddly bear, kindly donated by Mrs McHarg’s family, was won by Olivia Cumming.  The children spent the week building up to the day by selling official bear ears and wrist bands.

The boys and girls engaged in learning challenges, such as mental and written maths problem solving tasks, on the theme of Children In Need.  We also had a chat about why supporting Children In Need makes such a difference to the lives of so many children.

A big thank you to all of our wonderful families who supported the event today.

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