Our Partnership Primary 6 pupils attended Operation Safety at Stair Park on Tuesday as part of an education and awareness service operated by our emergency services.

The children participated in workshops on a range of key themes to help educate them on dangers they may face and how best to manage risk to keep themselves as safe, healthy and trouble free as possible.

The workshops attended were:

• Coastguard – keeping ourselves safe when rescuing someone drowning
• Ambulance – assessing the situation and recovery position
• Police – alcohol and its effects
• Fire Brigade – Dangers in the home
• Police – Vandalism
• Scottish Power – Electricity and its dangers
• Police – Social media safety
• Police – drugs

Our pupils developed a deeper awareness of the potential risks and discussed strategies to help them cope sensibly with risky situations.

Thank you to our emergency services for a very informative day and worthwhile day.

UNCRC Rights of the Child:

6 – Life, survival and development

16 – Protection of Privacy

17 – Access to Information

33 – Protection from harmful drugs

Sustainable Development Goals:

3 Good Health and Wellbeing

On Friday afternoon we donned our tartan, grabbed our flags and got our dancing shoes on to celebrate 50 years of the Bay City Rollers’ Shang a Lang!

The boys and girls (and adults!) of Portpatrick Primary boogied the afternoon away to commemorate 50 years of the famous single Shang a Lang. While listening to her favourite radio channel, Mrs Henry heard the challenge set by Greatest Hits Radio to submit a video of everyone enjoying the catchy tune. We jumped at the chance to let Mrs Henry relive her youth and have a bop with the children, so keep your eyes peeled to find out if we made it into the official Greatest Hits Radio video!

For now, enjoy our own photos and videos of a fabulous afternoon dancing with a view!

• UNCRC Rights of the Child: Article 31 Rest, Play, Culture and Arts
• Sustainable Development Goal: 3 – Good Health & Wellbeing, 4 – Good Education
• SHANARRI – Active, Included

Pupils from Portpatrick and St. Joseph’s primaries joined together to enjoy a day of outdoor learning at Logan Botanical Gardens.  The children headed off in the sunshine for two workshops.

Primary 4 – 7 pupils explored different ways of experiencing our local habitat to find out some of the ways that environmental factors shape the biodiversity and the landscapes we live in. They practiced creative mapping techniques using scale.  They learned how to represent and connect to their surroundings by recognising the four cardinal directions using compass bearings between features in a landscape. This helped them develop the meta-skills of sense-making and curiosity.

After the workshops there was time for the children to enjoy a picnic lunch in the beautiful gardens.  It was a fantastic day thanks to the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh.

• UNCRC Rights of the Child: Article 24 Health & Environment
• Sustainable Development Goal: 3 – Good Health & Wellbeing, 15 – Life on Land
• SHANARRI – Healthy, Active, Included

Janet from Creative Stranraer came to visit our school on Monday this week to tell the children about the exciting Cycling Festival which is happening in Stranraer soon. She was looking to gather ideas from the children as to what type of activities they would like to see at the event. As expected, the children were full of fantastic ideas including…

Janet was delighted with the children’s suggestions. She plans on seeing if any can be used for the event. She hopes to see the children and families at the Cycling Festival soon – keep a look out for dates!

• UNCRC 5 – Children have the right to be guided by their communities
• UNCRC 12 – Respect for Children’s Views
• UNCRC 13 – Sharing Thoughts Freely
• SHANARRI – Responsible, Respected, Included

Portpatrick and St. Joseph’s football teams enjoyed a practice session in the sun today. Our two coaches, John & John were on hand to offer tips, advice and guidance to our eager team players. Wishing our teams good luck at the Academy tomorrow.

UNCRC Rights of the Child – Article 15: Joining groups, Article 24 – Health

SHANARRI – Healthly, Active, Included

Today Parents and stakeholders from the community came to our school to appreciate how hard our children have worked on learning their UNCRC Rights of the Child.

We kicked off the afternoon with a performance from P1-4 accompanied by the Feis Rois group. They sung beautifully and shared brilliant Scottish knowledge and jokes that had the audience in laughter.

After this we had a whole school performance for “We’ve all got Rights”. The children have learned to sign this song as part of our schools endeavour to become more inclusive.

Mr. Webb who is the equality improvement officer for Inclusion then gave a talk about the importance of Rights and how they can be embedded in schools. He kindly gave up his time to enlighten our community on the objectives for meeting a gold award and how the Rights can benefit us.

We then participated in a competitive game of Rights Bingo. Well done Mrs. Ross who won the coveted Kit Kat bar prize!

Our pupils then introduced our playground charter and how this was shaped using our Rights and the younger class talked about our ABCDE of Rights. After this families joined in to play Rights games and talked to children about their journeys towards gold.

A big thank you once again to everyone who came along to the Parent assembly, your continued support is greatly appreciated. It was especially exciting to see one of our new pupils who is starting after the summer.

UNCRC Rights of the Child

Article 3: Best interests of the child, Article 1: Definition of a child, Article 42: Everyone must know Children’s Rights

SHANARRI: Nurtured, Respected, Responsible, Included.

Global Goals: Quality Education, Partnerships for the goals

Well done to our great wee team of football players for playing their first matches at the inter-school 7-a-side matches on Friday. There was great team spirit from everyone. Thank you to Mr Morrison as our team coach. There will be a replay again in a fortnight’s time.

UNCRC Rights of the Child – Article 15: Setting up and Joining Groups, Article 24: Health

SHANARRI – Active, Included

Taking a closer look at what we can do to save our planet

Today at school children learned about what Earth Day is and how it affects everyone. This years theme is plastic and we discussed about which steps we can take to cut down our carbon footprint. We looked at the detrimental effect that plastic and fossil fuels can have on the planet and the animals which inhabit the earth.

After our great dialogue, we then created our own stained glass window globes. Well done everyone on your fantastic work! Some of the children chose to have their planet in a magnifying glass to change the way world leaders ‘look’ at the earth.

UNCRC Rights of the Child

Article 12 – You have the right to be heard

Sustainable Development Goals –

12 – Responsible Consumption and Production, 13 – Climate Action, 14 – Life Below Water and 15 – Life on Land

SHANARRI – Nurtured and Responsible

Yesterday, our children were learning about the ABCDE of rights as part of our Rights Respecting Schools gold journey. Its purpose is to show how the concepts of rights are universal, inherent, inalienable, unconditional and indivisible.

Universal – All children have rights

Inherent – You have rights since Birth

Inalienable – Your rights Cannot be taken away

Unconditional – Rights Do not have to be earned

Indivisible – All rights are Equally important

Our children very philosophically came up with some great ideas for posters for our ABCDE of rights. The top poster had girls reflecting that even though everybody is different (as shown by the hands), every child’s rights are still the same! A group of boys worked on a galaxy poster which depicts no matter where you are in the milky way, our rights are universal!

Excellent work Portpatrick!

Rights of the Child –

Article 29 – Aims of Education

Article 17 – Access to Information

Sustainable Development Goals – 17 Partnerships for the goals

Portpatrick Primary School recently had a visit from staff on behalf of he Wigtownshire Foodbank. Children learned about how the foodbank works, what kind of food is most welcomed and who might use a foodbank. Our community were able to bring in a very generous donation to the school which was highly appreciated by staff from the foodbank (see email below!).

The staff couldn’t speak highly enough of the children who asked ‘some of the best questions’ they’d ever heard. Well done Portpatrick community for giving to those in need and supporting yet another local charity 👏

UNCRC Rights of the Child –

Article 6 – Life, Survival and Development

Article 24 – Health, Water, Food, Environment

Article 27 – Food, Clothing, a Safe Home.

Sustainable Development Goals 2 – Zero Hunger

SHANARRI – Healthy and Nurtured