December | 2015 | A Day in the Life of a Gourock Primary Pupil

At the start of Primary 7, we came together as a class to discuss ways in which we could develop our leadership skills. Due to the great success we had leading and organising our school sports day last year, we wanted to find a way to build on these skills. The first thing we did was to decide on all the different skills and qualities needed to be a successful Sports Leader. Here’s what we came up with…

At the start of term, each class was given an extra gym slot to make up our 2.5 hours of PE a week and for our class this was great news! We try to use one of our slots of PE to focus on developing leadership skills. Many of us have had the chance to lead warm ups and games, referee matches and demonstrate sport and specific skills to our peers. Throughout our PE slots we have been taking part in various activities such as team invasion games, fitness circuits, skipping and running around the world. We manage to fit so much into the hour and that’s why we like to be called the Sporty Sevens!

Gourock Primary recently completed our Sponsored Skip to raise money for school funds. This has become an annual event and it’s great fun!

Primary 7 have re-launched ‘Super Skipper’. This was a further opportunity to build our confidence when we delivered skipping workshops to all the classes in the school. The class I taught was P3/2 and in my opinion I think they enjoyed the gym session as they smiled and tried hard the whole time. Super Skipper works like this; we have ten minutes each week to improve our skipping skills and tricks then we are timed for one minute to see how many skips we can manage in that time. Afterwards, our scores are recorded. In our class, this is by a member of the Fit4Life team. We love it because it is a fun way to keep fit and challenge yourself.

Our recent contribution towards developing our sports leadership skills, was the leadership course delivered by Lynne, Inverclyde’s PE Lead Officer and her colleague, Gillian, who is an Active Schools Coordinator. Today we finally completed it and can’t wait to be awarded our certificates. Throughout it, we were leading groups, creating activities and giving feedback. We will update you in our next blog post!

During this term, primary 7 have been learning about WWII. One of our favourite themes of our topic has been evacuation. We loved getting to dress up as evacuees for the day, deciding what we would bring to our new home in the countryside, making up our own stories and creating our own evacuee display!

To bring our classroom walls to life, 3 pupils designed and painted ‘Emily’ and ‘Matthew’, our two evacuees that are now displayed on one of our WWII walls. Mrs Mclean, our classroom assistant also worked alongside some of our classmates to create a background for Emily and Matthew showing their journey from the dangers of the city bombing to the safety of the countryside.

We are nearly finished reading our much loved class novel, “Goodnight Mister Tom”. It’s really helped us understand what life would be like for some evacuees living in the country and that some children weren’t treated as nice as others. We plan to watch the movie after reading the rest of the book.

“I can’t wait for the end of the book and to watch the movie, the book is quite sad but it is still really good”- Peter

As part of understanding what it felt like to be an evacuee we got to come dressed up in what we thought one might look like.

It was fun taking part in a group role play. We performed tableaux to our other classmates. A few of us already knew what tableaux were from taking part in drama clubs and helped explain to the rest of the class. To begin our role plays we started with a freeze frame scene. Next we added movement and dialogue.

“It was very fun getting to work in groups, my favourite bit was adding movement and dialogue to our tableaux”- Conor