Fair Isle Primary School, Shetland

A second installment of our Christmas festivities for all our eager blog readers. Seeing as it is the last week of term, we have been holding some exciting events. Our wonderful parents, Alice and Eileen, cooked us a School Christmas Dinner on Tuesday where we invited all the staff who have helped us this year to join us. We designed placemats for everyone, helped to set the table and had a wonderful time pulling crackers and telling jokes.

We then hosted our Christmas Party with some classic games including the “hat, scarf and gloves” chocolate game, music statues and pass the parcel. There were some funky dance moves on show.

It was such a lovely day though, so we could not resist getting out and about for a walk in the morning (to really earn all those tatties). The midwinter sun put on a spectacular show. At this time of the year in Fair Isle, the sun does not rise until 9:00am and has usually set by 3:00pm so it makes our sunrises all the more special. Stay tuned for pantomime photos!

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas here at Fair Isle Primary School. We have been having great fun decorating our setting for the festive season. As ever, we love collaborating and working as a team and have made sure that there’s a little bit of extra sparkle here in school. From writing some beautiful Advent Acrostic Poems to Christmas-themed Maths challenges, there’s been some fabulous learning. We even teamed up with our friends at Sandwick Junior High School to watch the dress rehearsal of their Christmas show (thank you linking us in) and we are going to show them ours this coming week.

The final week is going to be action-packed. Our parents very kindly cook us a school Christmas Lunch and we have our own Christmas show on Thursday. Stay tuned for “Part 2” of our Christmas festivities.

So far this year, we have been very lucky to have lots of visitors (both virtually and in person) who have shown generosity and kindness toward our peerie school.

Firstly, you might remember seeing our fabulous artwork created with visiting resident artist Lori Deeley, where we made our own paint by grinding up different materials. Lori lives in Newfoundland in Canada and sent us the most beautiful book about her home, which also can be sung. It is about wanting to live by the sea in harmony with nature and not in a big city. So it is just perfect for Newfoundland as well as Fair Isle. Thank you Lori.

Secondly, we met a lovely teacher in the Summer Holidays called Mr Shields, who works at Eton College in England. Eton is a very different school to ours and we had fun exploring the differences. But, what unites us is a love of reading. Eton asked us if we would like some books as they often have fundraisers and send books to other schools as well as their own. We looked through our own library and put together a wishlist. Very kindly and generously, funds were raised to buy the whole list! Here are some pictures of us with some of the books, with a whole ferry-load to follow in January.

We may be a school of four children, but we love making links and getting to know folk far and wide.

Today was, quite simply, an epic day. Children in Need is a charity that Fair Isle has been proud to support for many years, especially the Radio Shetland fundraising appeal. We don’t do things “by halves” here at our peerie school so, to raise as much money as we could, we planned a “Lighthouse to Lighthouse Ramble” from one end of our island to the other. This is (wait for it) 4.1 miles! We invited members of our community to join us and our Pudsey teddies joined in too.

It was a glorious day. A (mercifully) gentle wind was behind us all the way and, as you can see from the pictures, the conditions were perfect. We are so proud all our children managed the distance, from our 5 year old P1 up to P6. Our wonderful nursery child joined in from his grandparents house and walked the final 1.5 miles (sensational rambling from him, we thought).

We completed the distance in just under 2 hours! We then mingled, munched and recounted with community members during a cake and coffee afternoon with our mums and other helpers busy baking some delicious goodies as we had a well-deserved rest.

So far, the total we raised is a phenomenal £650. The generosity and kindness of the community here is what makes our isle special. We even appeared on Radio Shetland.
Good Evening Shetland – 25/11/2025 – BBC Sounds (listen from around 25 minutes).

A huge thank you to everyone who supported us. We may be four children living on an island, but we know how important it is to support less fortunate children through the work of this wonderful charity.

We are very busy immersing ourselves in some performing arts this term, which will culminate in us performing our very own pantomime for the community here at the end of term. We stage our show in the hall and it is always an event to look forward toward.

This week, we used our own green screen to produce a “Panto Teaser”. It was great fun getting to grips with this technology and working on our filming and performance skills. We used excellent persuasive and advertisement features in our writing and then collaborated using iPad technology and different apps to make a movie! Here are some photos of us in action. We would love to share our “Panto Teaser” with you so please click on this link to see our finished product:

Panto Trailer

We are very fortunate here in Fair Isle to have support from the community and (of course) our wonderful parents, who love visiting school to work with our children.

Recently, one of our parents, Alice, has been joining us to deliver some yoga sessions. Alice does fitness and yoga sessions with the community three times a week so she thought we would like to have a “children’s yoga” sessions. Naturally, we said yes! She has been teaching us all sorts of poses, with intriguing animal names. We cannot wait to have more sessions with her and want to say a big thank you to her for volunteering to work with us. Yoga is so important for our physical and mental health. Namaste!

School trips are really important to us. So, after being unlucky with the weather before the October break, we bravely set off to Lerwick this week for a two day trip. After a bit of a bumpy flight on the way out, we travelled to Sandwick Junior High School and spent some time in larger classes with our peers. This is always exciting and enjoyable. Thank you to Mr Clark and teachers at Sandwick for welcoming us so warmly.

We then travelled back to the Anderson High School Hostel. This is where our children stay overnight when they leave us and attend High School so we like getting comfortable with our future surroundings. As one child remarked, “the dynamics of the building are good and it is easy to navigate”. Plus, they do delicious food and we can spend time with Freyja (our Fair Isle friend who is now in S2). In the evening, we had a beautiful moonlit wander to Clickimin Broch and enjoyed how it was illuminated at night.

When morning arrived, it was gloriously clear but Tingwall Airport rang us to say fog was on the way. Yikes! We nevertheless managed to make our swimming lessons and have time with instructors. Well done to our P6 for passing his “Deep End Test”.

We are now safely home. We would like to say a massive well done to our P1 learner. This was her first ever trip (and sleepover) away from home. She was an absolute superstar and we are really proud of how resilient she is.

Ready to leave school on Tuesday morning…

The plane has landed.

The coolest passenger, travelling in style…

Enjoying ourselves at the hostel (this is where
we eventually stay when we go to High School).

Who doesn’t love a bunkbed?

Nighttime wanders to Clickimin Broch.

Swimming lessons are really important to us.

Returning home to Fair Isle.

Spooky goings-on today in school as we had a day devoted to Halloween. The children pulled out the stops with some sensational costumes (and make-up). We did pumpkin carving, STEM activities with flapping bats and made our own jam jar lanterns using cotton wool and glow sticks (ideal for guising later on this evening). We even looked at the science behind objects which glow in the dark. A common misconception is that light sources need heat but this is not true, as we proved by looking at bioluminescence and even chemiluminescence (an amazing word, we thought).

The clocks may have gone back but the days are just as beautiful here in Fair Isle. We recently returned from our October holidays so what better way to catch up with each other than a proper outdoor wander around the isle. We picked a stunning morning when there was hardly a cloud in the sky, inspected the wind turbines and watched the seabirds tumbling off Sheep Rock (our favourite Fair Isle landmark). We love being in the outdoors and even tested our own photography skills with some landscape and selfie shots.

We had Lucy visiting us this week, which was lovely. Lucy helped to teach us before Jonathan arrived in April and it was fabulous to have her back in Fair Isle (she travelled all the way from Skye after Storm Amy). We hope she’ll come back again at some point this year.

During the week, we have been learning about data handling. On Wednesday we braved the wind to visit Dave who has LOTS of data for Fair Isle weather! We used data to construct bar and line graphs and then interpreted each others graphs. In P1, we made 2 fantastic pictograms of everyone’s favourite weather and her croft animals.

Some other highlights of our week were Ninja moves in daily mile, making papier mache dragon eggs in art with Fiona and creating our own dragons. Enjoy the photos!