Portpatrick Primary

The children were excited to become App designers  today!

Francis Wallace, Principal Engineer of the Make It Happen Club joined us this morning to offer us the opportunity to take part in an exciting App Design challenge.  The children have the chance to enter their own app design creations into a competitition just for the North Rhins Partnership. The winning design from across our three schools will be made into reality for everyone to enjoy and use!

To help prepare children to develop their creations, Francis discussed the various apps that we use in our everyday life, chatting about who would use them and what they do.  She then shared examples of winning designs from previous years that had been made into real apps.

 

 

 

 

 

Have a look here to see the wonderfully creative apps that children have designed in the past. Click on the Winners tab.

Our boys and girls spent a little time reviewing the features of past winning apps, before moving on to design their own.  Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) were are the fore, as childrem analysed, applied, created and evaluated their concept design.

This ‘unplugged’ activity helps develop children’s digital  literacy and computational thinking.  It also builds an awareness of technological developments through representing concepts and products through the use of graphic media.  We will share our design shortly, not wanting to reveal our entries too soon. 😉

Good Luck Team Portpatrick!

Update:  Here are the results:

North Rhins ‘Make It Happen’

The children of the North Rhins Partnership were excited to become App designers.

Go to this Sway

# Successful Learners

 

Digital Leaders from Kirkcolm, Leswalt and Portpatrick came together for a training session today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The children covered a lot of areas as part of today’s agenda:

• Roles and Responsibilities
• Correctly handling, storing and charging devices
• Login – personal information, successfully accessing sites
• Bookmarking favourites and displaying our favourites bar
• Adding tiles to personal Glow launch pads e.g. Teams, Email, One Drive etc.
• Creating and sending emails with attachments to the correct recipient
• Discussing possible breaktime clubs e.g. Scratch Coding

Our inventive team decided that they would like to collaborate with each other across the partnership to plan events such as Safety Internet Day.  We have now set up an email group just for our digital leaders so they can communicate with each other.

The session was very productive and our team are ready to support their classmates in any way they can.

Here is a useful guide for parents to support their child online:

Digital-Learning-Parental-Leaflet-2022_23-2

# Responsible Citizens

Each Friday this term, we are very lucky to have Neve from Wigtownshire Rugby Club coming in to coach the whole school in rugby skills! Neve makes the sessions very interactive and engaging whilst teaching us new rugby skills.  She is developing our ability to throw, catch and deflect along with  e safe tackling.

This is the start of a 6 week block of lessons and our boys and girls will be out every Friday with Neve.

# Successful Learners

We are proud to share our elected Pupil Voice Representatives for 2022 – 2023

Eco Council

Pupil Council

House Captains

Digital Leaders

# Responsible Citizens

What better way is there to celebrate growing our own tatties for the Dandelion Great Tattie Growing Project than turning them into a delicious pot of tattie soup!

Coming together over a meal and cooking together, with the satisfaction of eating our produce, gives our children a sense of achievement and connects them to their environment.

We created a plant based meal as part of looking after our planet and helping children eat more vegetables. We scrubbed, scrapped and chopped our home grown tatties along with leaks, carrots and onions and lentils to make a MASSIVE pot of delicious soup.

 

Everyone enjoyed tucking in to a tasty bowl of home made soup, sharing our meal together. Some even had seconds!  Erin commented that, “You can taste the pototoes are home grown.  They have more flavour.”

Not only does this event celebrate our tattie crop harvest for the Dandelion Project, it also fits in with the Royal Horticultural Society’s Big Soup Share. We are promoting healthy eating, and social experiences to help support children’s wellbeing.

# Effective Contributors

Yesterday, the boys and girls of Portpatrick had a visit from our local Community Safety Team for the West of Dumfries and Galloway!

The Safety Officers took this opportunity to remind pupils about how they can stay safe in and around the community and keep their community and surrounding safe for others. 

We discussed issues related to dog fouling and litter – things that just don’t make for the nicest surroundings… Pupils were reminded of the laws regarding these issues and were informed of what can happen to offenders. We also discussed the rising issue with Gulls in the area – no longer seagulls but urban gulls!

The officers introduced a competition to design a ‘gull proof’ bin, which we could certainly do with at our school.  The winning design might even actually be constructed by D & G council! The officer promised to send details very soon

We had a lot of great discussions based around how we can keep ourselves and our community safe and the boys and girls proved to be superstar listeners. 

# Responsible Citizens

This term, Primary 5 – 7 are participating in a series of workshops organised by the Glasgow Science Centre, where we will be exploring the future of energy.

Through investigation of renewables technologies and the pathway to net zero, our pupils will discover opportunities in the energy sector and explore how their skills could change the world.

Our first learning experience focussed on electricity generation by wind turbines.  The blades of a turbine rotate when they are moved by the wind.  The slow rotation of the turbine blades can be transformed into a fast rotation needed for a generator.

To model this process, we created gears of different circumferences.  We aligned them on boards so the cog teeth interlocked when turned.  We were able to predict and test the direction of travel of each gear (clockwise or anti-clockwise).  We also calculated the r.p.m. of the gears to identify the increase in rotation rate from the larger to the smaller gears.  We used observation with a digital stopwatch, compared results and calculated our class average r.p.m. to make a fair test.

 

 

# Successful Learners

School children across Scotland have taken part in a national growing project.  Everyone grew potatoes both at home and in school.

Here is our School harvest!

We planted different varieties of tatties at home: Caledonian Rose & Gemson.  We applied maths to weigh our crop of both types.

We grew 2.7kg of Gemson.

We grew 0.6kg of Caledonian Rose.

Our families have been sending in photographs of their home harvest.  Feel free to share any snaps of your gardening success.  Here is Arran and Lewis with their green fingered Grandad.

This week sees the start of Scottish Food & Drink Fortnight. This event celebrates locally grown food.  We will be making ‘tattie’ soup with the potatoes we harvested in school on Friday and everyone will come together as a partnership soon to host a Harvest Festival.  Watch this space!

# Effective Contributors

It was great to see everyone back to school this morning with such enthusiastic and smiling faces. There was lots of excited chatter from the boys and girls.  Everyone was particularly thrilled to welcome our two wee new P1 boys – Josh and Zak.

The boys were a wee bit camera shy first thing, so didn’t join in our group photo.  However, they soon came out of their shells and enjoyed their classroom activities, playtimes with friends and also tucking into lunch with their classmates.

A great day was had by all!

# Confident Individuals

Our Primary 7 pupils had a blast at a Stranraer Watersports Association activity day at Loch Ryan today.

First order of the day was being kitted out with wet suits (which was a fun experience trying to squeeze into tight lycra).

 

Our initial challenge was a couple of team problem solving puzzles. Gripping a rope, the children had to get everyone inside the rope without crossing their arms. Next, they had to sort themselves from tallest to smallest whilst keeping one foot on a rope line. Through giggles,  discussion and teamwork,  both challenges were solved.

Everyone then waded out into the water to get acclimatised. Super resilient, all the children were soon dunked, with just a  few screams to be heard on that initial dip!

Once suitably used to the water temperature, the pupils came back out, split into two groups and had a quick land-based instruction with the equipment before having a go at paddle boarded and kayaking. Our ‘gung-ho’ water heroes were quickly performing like water sports pro’s. The paddleboards were ditched and everyone balanced on the kayaks in a cooperation challenge.

Paddleboards

Kayaking

A Bit Soggy

Soon, the rumbles from famished tums could be heard from some distance away. So, lunch was called and everyone tucked in with gusto.  Luke even managed to squeeze in a quick power nap, soaking up the glorious sunshine.

Lunch

 

The wind picked up a little in the afternoon  so we left the kayaks on the beach and created a giant paddleboard raft by linking the individual ones together. Everyone piled on-board as a balancing challenge.

There was enough time for a splash about to see how which team would be the first to get all their members on one paddleboard. The laws of physics caused a topple or two before one team was declared victorious with no less than 7 pupils making it out of the water balanced on one raft!

Rafts

 

There was even a wee treat at the end of the day courtesy of Mr White, who bough everyone a choc ice lolly to enjoy.  There was even enough for the adults to indulge. Thank you Mr White!

Our adventurous P7s were invigorated and highly motivated throughout the whole session. We couldn’t fault the enthusiasm and professionalism of our instructors Zack and Max, and also the volunteer helpers.  Our thanks go to the  watersports team for allowing us to experience such a thrilling and enjoyable day!

# Confident Individuals