Every year to help celebrate Book Week Scotland, P1-3 pupils are gifted with a Book Bug (P1) / Read, Write, Count (P2/3) bag as part of a government initiative to promote literacy and numeracy at home. And despite Covid ruining most things this year, thankfully it didn’t ruin this (albeit it was a bit late since Book Week was technically 2 weeks ago!!!).
On Friday afternoon, pupils were presented with their gift bags and got the opportunity to explore the contents. They enjoyed reading the books and playing some of the games contained inside the bags. There was much hilarity with the ‘This is a Dog’ book – if you have a P1 Bookbug bag, have a keek for yourself!! Although this year we were missing the parents (who usually pop in to share in this wonderful event), the pupils were thrilled with their bags.
Please look out for your child bringing these bags home for you to enjoy together. If you’d like any further information or suggestions on how to use the bags at home, check out the Scottish Book Trust website:
Pupils at Portpatrick Primary had a wonderful new addition to the playground this week. After watching the construction work in awe all of last week, pupils were delighted to be able to cut the tape around the new playground equipment and get stuck into the new inclusive outdoor gym. Back in January our wonderful Parent Council applied to the Kilgallioch Community Benefit Company grant and was awarded £7664 to go towards a new outdoor gym. The fund supports projects that engage and empower young people and improve the quality of life, health, and well-being of those in the community. In a year where health and wellbeing has been a priority for all, the new equipment couldn’t have arrived at a better time. A huge thanks to all those involved and who helped to put the application together. The children are absolutely delighted with the new equipment and it looks set to be enjoyed by many for generations to come.
Below are some photos of the children enjoying the new equipment. Big smiles all around! 😀
As part of Book Week Scotland activities, P4-7 have combined their digital technology skills with literacy to create their very own nativity story books.
They have used software called Book Creator to organise, write and record audio voice-overs to retell the Christmas story in their own words. They have even created their own front cover illustrations for each of their books.
Alba
Atticus
Ava Lily
Izzy
Jack
Lillie
Lewis
Maya
Robin
Ruby
Tilly
Our younger pupils will enjoy accessing the books and having them read automatically to them with the ‘read to me’ option. Click on the links below to enjoy reading and listening to our interactive story creations.
The boys and girls recently entered artwork on the theme of Remembrance Day to the Morrisons Poppy Day competition. We are delighted to announce that Miss Lillie Baker is a winner in the primary 7 category and has been presented with a goodie bag as a prize.
You may have enjoyed looking at the children’s creations when shopping in the store. All of the entries were of a high standard from primary schools across the Stranraer cluster, which makes Lillie’s achievement all the more noteworthy.
Portpatrick Primary are demonstrating that we are responsible citizens this week. As part of Anti-Bullying Week, we are discussing and sharing ours views on the subject of bullying.
The boys and girls came to school dressed in odd socks to celebrate difference. We designed our own odd socks and chatted about how all of our differences made us unique and special.
Both classes held virtual assemblies, as provided by the Anti-Bullying Alliance, hosted by BBC presenter Andy, with special guests including Mo Farah and Anne-Marie!
P4-7 carried out a scrunching paper activity to demonstrate the impact of mean behaviour towards others. We started off with a smooth sheet of blank paper, representing our unblemished feelings. Each child then wrote down examples of mean things that someone might say to another. For every comment, we scrunched our paper a little bit. By the end of the task we had a crumbled ball. We then tried to smooth our paper to get it back to the way it was before all of the mean words. We realised, that the paper could never be returned to the way it was after its experience, just in the same way that hurtful words and deeds can cause lasting upset to a child.
What might a bully say?
Our damaged paper feelings
Hurt feelings stay hurt
P4-7 moved on to define what is meant by the term bullying. We identified strategies to tackle this issue. We then used this knowledge to create our own anti-bullying advice posters and displayed them in our hall; along with our fabulously colourful odd sock artwork.
Wow! Portpatrick Primary pupils have gone that extra mile to support this year’s Children In Need.
Our day started with a parade of all our wonderful onesies, pj’s and spotty attire. Don’t the boys and girls look fabulous?
Next up, we jumped into action to participate in the final session of Joe Wick’s 24 hour workout. It was hot work, but we gave it our all.
The children then enjoyed decorating Pudsey’s face, hand crafted by Kim, with small change that our families very kindly sent in. It makes a pretty picture. Mrs Ross brought in her penny jar to add to our loose change collection. Thank you!
Class 1 get creative
Our finished Pudsey
We opened our Pudsey shop for the final time. The children generously bought Pudsey ears and Pudsey badges. They also had a final go of guessing the name of the penguin. The boys and girls also used their maths skills to estimate many cubes were in the jar.
Class one get their ears on.
Have a go!
Conor and Scott won our cute penguin by selecting the name Icicle. There were 264 cubes in the jar. Ruby was the winner with her closest estimate.
Meet Icicle
Ruby estimates to win
We then used our maths skills to sort and count up all of the coins and notes we had collected. After our fund raising efforts, £174 will be going to Children In Need, which is great result for a wee school.
We received many kind donations and contributions from our fundraising team -the Pineapple Squad, our families, the wider community and even the King Slayer move crew at Dunskey. Thank you very much everyone. Your kindness will help change children’s lives.
The boys and girls of Portpatrick Primary have commemorated the occasion of Remembrance Day as Responsible Citizens and Effective Contributors.
Our Pineapple Squad (a.k.a. Maya, Izzy and Ava Lily) have taken it upon themselves to organise an enterprising project to raise funds for Poppy Scotland. The girls decided to create a wide range of hand crafted items to sell. The team have been busy, giving up their break times and working in the evenings at home, to design and make hand-crafted book marks and loom band bracelets to sell. We have received orders from pupils, family and friends of the school. With sales and donations to the girl’s projects, they have raised a grand total of £30.50. This is such a great result for their efforts.
Fund Raising Heroes
Open for Business
Beautiful Work
Our Merchandise
The pupils have also been buying poppies; the proceeds going directly to Poppy Scotland. We raised £13.64 selling poppies.
Our grand total raised to support Poppy Scotland is £43.64!
The children have created beautiful poppy artwork which is now on display in Morrison’s for all to see and admire. Here are just a couple of examples from Ruby and Izzy to share with you.
In addition, Primary 4- 7 have been learning the famous World War One poem, In Flander’s Fields by John McCrae. Please have a listen to their reciting the poem as a team by copying and pasting the link below.
Maths Primary 1 pupils enjoyed some woodland addition and subtraction by using sticks as concrete materials and writing the answers in chalk in the tree trunks. Pupils then tried to count beyond 20 and made piles of sticks in groups of ten. Primary 2 pupils were on hand to show the boys and girls how to count in 10’s and together the counted up to 100. Primary 2-4 were exploring different types of 2D shapes and discussing the properties. First, we used sticks to individually make the different shapes and check our prior knowledge. After, pupils then had a group task where they worked in threes to investigate the different types of triangles. We spoke about equilateral, isosceles, scalene and right angled triangles. We learned that all triangles must add up to 180° and that different triangles have different properties.
Literacy Shortly after our break we had story time where the boys and girls listened and enjoyed a lovely exciting story about a witch. We talked about the language used in the story to describe the characters and how to build characterisation. Next, we made our own characters using natural materials that we found around us. Each group had to describe their characters and write some of the describing words down using chalk.
STEM
Pupils created leaf necklaces using dry autumn leaves, a piece of string and a small twig which was used to pierce the leafs. The results were beautiful!
In the afternoon we went a walk down the beach and enjoyed some sand castle STEM building using natural materials that’s we found on the beach. Recently, we are trying to identify the different employability skills and how play can help us develop as young adults. We discussed how we used cooperation, collaboration and communication skills to create our sandcastles.
Global Citizenship/ Sustainable Development Education When we were at the beach we also discussed the amount of litter and plastic that was washed up in the seaweed. We spoke about how damaging plastic can be and when we returned to school we decided that we would try to raise awareness of the damages of plastic. The children spoke about how people were using lots of plastic because of the pandemic- and thought this was maybe because it was disposable- we said that we would try to do our bit by bringing our reusable plastic bottles into school and always putting our litter in the bin. Next week we will create some posters and a short film clip to explain what we can all do to help reduce the amount of plastic we use.
Below are some photos from the day;
Maths
Literacy
STEM &
Global Citizenship/ Sustainable Development Education
Today we made full use of National Outdoor Learning Day. Bright and early, we headed up to Dunskey Woods to take part in a range of learning activities across the curriculum.
Observational Zones – Maths & Science
First on the agenda was a combined maths and science challenge. The children used a metre stick to find a natural stick of equivalent length. We then used that stick as a measure to locate 3 more. We formed a metre square area with our sticks as boundary markers. We then observed the natural objects that were present in our study zone. There was a wide variety of items; from pine needles to leaves and larvae to beetles. The class created a tally chart of the objects they observed in each group zone. Finally, we used digital technology to present our data as a bar graph to interpret our results more readily.
Getting organised
Measuring using standard measures
Measuring our sticks
What can we see?
We’ve a tree in our square
Tally Chart
Graphical Representation
Tower Building – Engineering
The next challenge was to see which group could build the tallest free standing tower using just sticks. There was a lot of discussion on how to tackle this problem. Some opted for a layered square tower, whilst other groups made use of a conical shape. The children quickly realised that balancing the sticks to a centre point gave the most height. They also concluded that they needed a key stick with a ‘Y’ shaped branch formation to help support the structure. Maya, Ava Lily, Tilly and Izzy were the winning team with a final height of an impressive 2.5 metres! This was even after their first tower of 2 metres got knocked down by accident. They rebuilt in super quick time, even taller than before. Well done on your resilience girls.
Busy layering our sticks
The stacking method
What shape of support stick shall we use
Criss cross squares
Stable structure
Winning team
Mud Monsters – Art /Language (follow up task for tomorrow)
Everyone then moved on to create mud monsters. The children combined water and soil to create just the right consistency of mud to bind and adhere to tree trunks. They then used their inventiveness to imagine a monster character. They used foraged materials such as twigs, leaves, moss and pine needles to create the facial features for their monsters. You will see from the photos below that it is an interesting rogues gallery.
We made sure we had gloves for those who wanted to use them, water and wet wipes to wash our hands, and hand sanitiser to ensure we kept as clean as possible.
The follow up creative writing task will require the children to write a fact sheet to describe their mud monster character, its personality characteristics and what it likes to do. We will focus on the use of similes, alliteration and metaphors as figurative language tools.
After lunch, we chose to take a closer look at our everyday, familiar surroundings with a fresh focus. The children went on a forage hunt around the school playground, selecting appealing items that they found interesting. Each little treasure was tied carefully to a stick they had brought back from the woods to make a traditional Journey Stick. We talked about our objects and why we selected them. Further talking and listening skills will be used to describe our objects in more detail.
Throughout the day, the children demonstrated great interpersonal skills. They all cooperated, shared ideas and thinking and supported each other fully. They took care of their environment and made sure they left everything as they should. They were a pleasure to spend a grand day outdoors with.
P4-7 have been busy applying their computational thinking to programme dance animations. Computational thinking allows us to take a problem, understand what the problem is and develop solutions. We can then present these solutions in a way that a computer, a human, or both, can understand.
The children have been using and applying logic skills to create algorithms with sequenced coding command blocks. They have had to filter unnecessary lines of code using abstraction and then debug their coding algorithm to ensure it satisfies the task requirement. Busy bees!
Copy and paste the links below to watch a sample of their avatars boogie on down!
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