Portpatrick Primary

As part of our bid to achieve national accreditation for the Digital Schools Award, we have selected 4 Digital Leaders to help drive our work forward. They are responsible for supporting staff and pupils in the use of ICT by sharing their skills; helping to maintain ICT equipment; leading lunch time ICT clubs; and organising parent sessions to develop their skills and knowledge.

All the Digital Leaders from Portpatrick, Leswalt and Kirkcolm came together on Tuesday for a Digital Leaders training day. They were all so enthusiastic and keen to get going! Pupils were taught how to upload, print and laminate photographs, and how to access Glow and send an email attachment to a teacher for the blog. They worked in pairs to come up with activities for Safer Internet Day on 5th February, and shared their suggestions for lunchtime ICT clubs that they could run back at school.

Everyone had a thoroughly enjoyable morning mixing with other pupils from the different schools and are all away back to their own school ready and raring to go as our Digital Leaders!

On the 21st of January, Lee and Myles attended the annual Rotary Lunch to represent our school.  The children were able to mingle and chat with guest speaker, Adam Gray.  Mr Gray is the Development Manager for the Scottish Rugby Union and has a distinguished career in Scottish Rugby.  The invited guests took the opportunity to ask many relevant and probing questions of Mr Gray to find out more about his life in the field of rugby.  The boys were excellent representatives for Portpatrick Primary. It was an entertaining and enjoyable experience for everyone.

# Responsible Citizens

 

 

Pupils at Portpatrick Primary put on their glamorous frocks and stylish shirts for their Christmas party on Wednesday. The afternoon kicked off with a festive feast provided by our school cook, Barbara. After filling our bellies with some sweet and savoury treats, we headed into the hall to start the fun and games!

We enjoyed various dances such as Military Two-Step, Canadian Barn Dance and Grand Old Duke of York, and played lots of fun games including Christmas Corners, Musical Islands, Pass the Parcel and the team game Christmas Story.

After a loud chorus of Jingle Bells, a special visitor came in to see the boys and girls! Santa had very kindly brought a present for each pupil. Everyone had a wonderful afternoon!

The boys and girls of Portpatrick Primary were all treated to a generous meal and party night at the Mount Stewart hotel in the village.  Pupils all tucked into a tasty turkey dinner and pud, accompanied by some festive tunes on the piano. 

A special surprise visitor, in the form of Santa , even managed to fit a visit in his busy schedule to reward all the good boys and girls of Portpatrick.

Many thanks must go to all at The Mount Stewart hotel for their hospitality and generosity.

On the 17^th of December, the boys and girls of Portpatrick Primary performed their annual Christmas show. As always, they put lots of effort and sparkle into it; performing to the senior members of the community in the afternoon. The evening performance was delivered to mums, dads and families. Every day in the afternoon we had to go up to the hall and practice for the play.  We had to do this before the day of the play.  The skills we used were listening, remembering our lines, having the confidence to project our voices in front of an audience and using expression. Our play was called It’s Christmaaaaaaas! There were many songs and they were excellent and uplifting.

Blog written by Rowan, Livvy, Lee, Myles, Rhian (P7 Pupils)

#Confident Individuals

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!

#Confident Individuals

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

#Successful Learners

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!

# Effective Contributors.

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.

# Successful Learners