Category Archives: Building our ‘Toolbox of Skills’

Building our 'Toolbox of Skills', Health and Wellbeing

Developing Sports Leadership Skills

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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…

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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!

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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!

 

Building our 'Toolbox of Skills', Health and Wellbeing, Outdoor Learning

Cycling Success!

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Primary 7 achieved Bikeability level 2 during the summer term of Primary 6. This level gets you onto the roads, and able to deal with traffic such as cycling to school and other short journeys. Until we were ready for the real thing, we learned the rules of the road in the playground, using the painted road markings.

Once we were all competent, we ventured out with Inverclyde’s Road Safety Officers to a quiet road near our school.

 

Last week, we participated in a Inverclyde Cycling Competition at Lady Alice Primary. There were two pupils representing each of the Inverclyde Schools. We had great fun cycling through the mock road course.

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Before heading out into the rain to start the cycling, we completed a question sheet about road safety and cycling.

The course included traffic lights, a roundabout, junctions, slalom and a parked car. Our favourite was the roundabout because it was a new experience for us. Even though it was pouring , we still managed to complete it. It really improved our bike ability skills. The most challenging part was the junction as we had to cross a mock road that cars would have been on and move from one road position to another.

After both girls and boys had finished the test, everyone was excited to hear the results. Eventually, the results were announced. Andrew came second! We were so pleased!

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The cycling competition was a great experience and we would gladly do it again. Thanks to Inverclyde Phoenix Car Club for organising the competition!

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Andrew and Eve

 

Building our 'Toolbox of Skills', Health and Wellbeing, IDL

Animation Aspirations

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Recently we’ve had a World of Work week, where lots people came in and talked about their jobs. This made a lot of us think about the career we would like to have in the future. I’ve decided that I’d like to be an animator.

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An animator is someone who creates hundreds of different drawings and puts them together. They then play them one after the other really quickly to create the illusion that they’re moving. This takes a lot of time and hard work and can be very repetitive.

I want to be an animator because I love drawing and creating stories. I got inspired to animate through animations that people have uploaded on YouTube.

To be an animator you need to be good at art, have creativity and a good animation, meet deadlines, have a lot of patience and accuracy and attention to detail. Communication and presentation skills are also essential.

Previously, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be an author or artist. I decided that I want to be an animator so I could put my stories into hundreds of different drawings. I’m already animating on an app on my tablet. At the moment, the quality of my animation isn’t very good, but it’s improving and if I keep practicing, my animations might even become as good as Walt Disney’s!

It might get challenging at times if I’d need to get an animation done very quickly or if there’s a lot of movement in the animation, but it’s better to have a challenge every once in a while rather than an easy boring job!

World of Work has taught us that we have to have a job that we love so that it’s as if we aren’t working at all. I love animating and I hope that I get this career in the future!

Building our 'Toolbox of Skills', Health and Wellbeing, IDL

World of Work- My Future Career as a Film Director

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Recently we have been learning about the world of work and we were thinking about what we would like to be in later life. My future ambition is to become a film director. A film director makes lots of the creative decisions for a movie and also edits scenes.

My future!
My future!

To become a film director a lot of experience is needed. The experience can come from working around movie sets such as being an actor/actress or cameraman or by creating your own short films and animations too. Creativity, time keeping, management and communication skills are also very useful for film directing.

I would like to become a movie director because I am imaginative and creative. This would be good for movie directing because I would need to come up with imaginative ideas for the storyline and make creative decisions for the movie. Another reason I would like to do this job in the future is because I like writing and reading stories and this would be like putting them into action. I also like making short films and skits at home with my friends too.

The challenge I might face if I become a movie director is trying to stay in budget when I have good ideas. I’ll also need to be able to solve and adapt to problems that occur on set like if someone is working around the area I was filming in and is making too much noise I could change set or film the scene another day.  I would like to gain some of my own experience in acting so that I would be able to advise and guide the famous stars I may be fortunate to be working with! I really admire, Emma Watson from the Harry Potter film series and my dream come true would be to work with her on set.

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I am very passionate about movie directing and that’s what you need to be for any job. Even though I will face challenges and things won’t always go as planned, I would love to be a film director and will work hard to achieve it.

CUT!

Eve P6

Building our 'Toolbox of Skills', GPS Groups, Health and Wellbeing

A Try For Gourock!

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click here to ‘Watch the Action!’

Over the past few weeks, Primary 6 have been taught Rugby tactics by coaches Brendan and Sam. The coaches have been teaching us the essential skills needed to play rugby.

We interviewed Hollie and she said “I have really liked learning how to pass and dodge”.

For the first month, Primary Six trained out in the school field. We learned the basic skills and techniques for passing the ball, how to tackle, a scrum etc.

Matthew showing off his tackling skills!
Matthew showing off his tackling skills!

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On Wednesday 1st October, a few schools competed against each other in a Rugby Festival for the boy’s trophy and girl’s trophy. After a few bumps, bruises and sprains, (and lots of fun!) it was time to announce the winners! All the schools had performed amazingly well, but there could only be one winner!

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The girls with their positive role models from Greenock Wanderers Woman's team
The girls with their positive role models from Greenock Wanderers Woman’s team

1st place for the girls was St Ninian’s Primary, great job!

Gooooooo Aimee!
Gooooooo Aimee!

It was a rough day for the boys as there were a lot of tries and bumps and bruises but they fought on until the end. The overall winners in the boy’s category was, in 1st place… MoorfootPrimary! Congrats!

Conor: 'Peter can't keep me down!'
Conor: ‘Peter can’t keep me down!’
The boys showing off their Rugby faces!
The boys showing off their Rugby faces!

Thank you to all the schools who competed in the tournament and a special thanks to Brendan and all the other staff who organised festival. We had such a brilliant day!!!

Our class celebrating after their tiring but rewarding day!
Our class celebrating after their tiring but rewarding day!

We hope you have enjoyed our first blog post!

The Journalists
The Journalists

The Journalists

Building our 'Toolbox of Skills', GPS Groups, Health and Wellbeing

Global Citizens – 90kg Rice Challenge

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Gourock Primary first embarked on Just Trading Scotland’s 90kg Rice Challenge earlier this year and has a dedicated team of pupils who market the fairly traded Kilombero rice to our school community.

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This has been a huge success and we have now sold 3 batches of the delicious Kilombero rice. Our Global Citizen group are very enthusiastic about the challenge and are passionate about selling because they believe they can make a huge difference to Malawian child’s life.

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The pupils have gained many skills for learning, life and work. They are only too aware of how important education is for creating opportunities in a child’s future and decided to produce a rice recipe book to accompany each bag sold, alongside an information leaflet which educates customers about the benefits of buying. We’re ready to receive our next batch!

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Blogging, Building our 'Toolbox of Skills'

Introducing ‘Blogger of the Week’

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To encourage Primary 6 to continue to write for a purpose, Mrs Falconer is introducing “Blogger of the Week,”.

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This weekly award will be given to a pupil who has made a real effort to blog (as a guest writer), comment on posts and share ideas/examples of their work.

The prize? Aside from class recognition and glory? A lunch time spent with a friend on one of our laptops.

Blogging has been proven to improve children’s writing, confidence and e-safety awareness. It will give your writing an audience and will allow others to see what wonderful and talented writers we have in Gourock Primary.

Things I will be looking out for to find the Blogger of the Week:

Pupils who try to showcase their fantastic writing by either – writing a story, book review, review of their day, answering the Question of the Week or any other interesting post.

Pupils who take time to read and comment on other people’s posts.

Pupils who take time with punctuation and spelling.

It will not be the person who blogs the most, it will be down to pupils who have really made an effort to blog meaningful and interesting posts.
How to write good blog posts:

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How to comment on other’s posts:

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Good luck Primary 6! I look forward to reading and rewarding your hard work!

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Building our 'Toolbox of Skills'

A ❤️ of learning!

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Primary 6 were asked the question:

If you could do something you love for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Here are some of our responses…

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We talked about what we were passionate about, what our interests and hobbies are, what we wonder about and what touches our hearts.

Today we were introduced to GENIUS TIME.

We were asked to start thinking about a personal Passion Project that we could embark on, something we could really get our teeth in to. We were told we could build something, make something, create something, design something or collect something. Whatever we choose to do we must research it and then present it to an audience.

We have to take ownership of it.

There were so many ideas!!! We decided to think of some possible research questions we could ask to guide our projects. Here are just some of the ideas presented….

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We’re going to be using our research skills, organisation skills, reading non-fiction articles, developing questions, writing, preparing and presenting!