"Anchored in Excellence"
Our learners took part in Maths Week participating in a range of different number experiences including a Sumdog contest, making shape monsters, counting our laps in the daily mile and making 3D buildings as part of our shape city! Additionally, the children organised our Macmillan Coffee Morning where the pupils used budgeting, finance and counting the number of raffle tickets sold!
Well done Portpatrick!
The responsibilities for our learners have been chosen
Our learners submitted applications for the school’s Pupil Voice groups. They worked very hard on putting forward their skills, attributes and qualities for the various positions (as they would do in a real job scenario).
The house captains did especially well as they had to do a presentation for their roles.
The following pupils were selected for the following groups:
Lacey: House Captain of Portree and Carter: House captain of Dunskey
Eco Committee members: Callie-Jo, George, Zak, Freya, Harry, Arran and Lacey
Pupil Council: Esme, Kaicie, Layo, Josh, Ella, Adam, Louise and Carter
Digital Leaders: Arran and Adam
STEM leader: Louise
Library Monitors: Louise and Lacey
Dinner Hall monitors: Freya, Louise and Josh
Playground monitors: Carter and Lacey
Cloakroom monitors: Harry and Freya
It was great to be back at Portpatrick school seeing all the pupils’ faces as well as meeting three new children! We had great fun settling back into school.
Our younger pupils had some time playing in their new classroom as well as completing some art tasks and showing us how well they know the alphabet!
Our older pupils logged onto our new education platform – Purple Mash. This can used at home for extra support on various aspects of learning. Parents can also access the platform through a Parent code which will be sent out with homework diaries next week!
Our children played some board games with Barbara and Mrs. Henry. This will be available for children to participate in more this year as the school looks to further our childrens ‘meta-skills’. These skills include developing abilities such as self-management – focusing, integrity, adapting, initiative and Social intelligence – communicating, feeling, collaborating, leading.
Keep your eyes on the blog for all the updates of the fun activities we will be getting stuck in to!
Here’s some photos of our Portpatrick pupils from our first day back…
All the children had a great time and despite the change of date for our Sports Day, the turnout was fantastic! First of all we had the sprint race as well as 9 other races which included: Skipping, Sack, Egg & Spoon, Throw, Obstacle, Distance and Relay. After this we had the eagerly anticipated Parents’ race which was a fiercely competitive end to the day. Well done to house Portree who won the relay race and to all the boys and girls who participated and gave their all during Sports Day!
Article 24: Health, Water, Food, Environment
Global Goals: 3 – Good Health and Wellbeing
SHANARRI: Healthy, Active, Included
Portpatrick Pupils were environmentally aware today. As part of our Eco Schools Scotland action plan on litter and waste, the children have been learning about the negative impact this has on biodiversity.
The children have been working in partnership with our local Community Safety Wardens to design litter awarness posters. These have been made into weather-proof posters to encourage everyone to be responsible to protect our environment & wildlife, and to keep our beautiful village looking spotless for everyone to enjoy. The community safety team escorted the pupils around the village to prominently display our posters for all to see.
We are responsible citizens and effective contributors.
UNCRC Rights of the Child – Article 24: Health, Water, Food & Environment
Sustainable Development Goals: 1 – Life Below Water, 15-Life on Land,
SHANARRI – Responsible
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
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
As part of a very busy last couple of weeks, Portpatrick pupils enjoyed some Easter celebrations.
First of all there was judging for ‘Paint the Egg’. The competition for this was very fierce and lots of hard work were put into all entries. The winners for this were Cameron and Layo.
After judging, the children went on an Easter Egg hunt. They were able to find some sneakily hidden eggs from the teachers and the children cooperated well to find all missing eggs!
Finally as the weather was nice, we went outside to roll Easter Eggs down the hill.
The children thoroughly enjoyed their day while learning about the importance of Easter as a tradition and how it stemmed from Christianity.
UNCRC Rights of the Child –
Article 30 – Minority Culture, Language and Religion, Article 14 – Freedom of Thought and Religion
Sustainable goals – Responsible consumption and production.
SHANARRI – Responsible and Included
