Fair Isle Primary School, Shetland

We had a wonderful afternoon on Wednesday where we invited the community to help us weed, strim, de-moss, clean and tidy the playground and garden area. The weather was really kind to us and we had a good few hours working together with trowels and spades in hand. It is always so lovely to work alongside other adults in our tight-knit community. Naturally, if we were digging, we had to have cake so a big thank you to Eileen and Nair from the Bird Observatory for bringing tasty snacks to keep our energy levels topped up.

If you read our blogs regularly, you’ll notice we are quite fortunate here in Fair Isle to have resident artists visiting from all around the world. Lori Deeley came here all the way from Newfoundland in Canada. She kindly came into school to teach us all about what she does. She makes her own paint from natural materials such as shell, ash and bone. We had a go at making and using our own paint using a really cool creative process involving pestle and mortar and Gum Arabic. It was so much fun. We then did some gesture drawing and worked with charcoal which was very interesting and made us think about how to draw people in motion.

More of Lori’s work can be found here: Home | Mysite

Thank you for visiting us, Lori.

It was fantastic to welcome Jennifer, our Active Schools coordinator, to Fair Isle this Friday. The weather was kind and her flight made it here. She did some “Bikeability” training with us, including keeping yourself safe, pedalling and balancing. It was great to see all three of our learners, right from P1 up to P6 accessing these key skills. She even delivered an extra session to our P6 learner focussed on road safety in built up areas, such as signalling and stopping at junctions. Thank you for visiting us, Jennifer.

Today, we were very lucky to have a visit from Claire White. Claire is from mainland Shetland and is a fiddler and singer-songwriter who has been playing for the last thirty years – travelling worldwide performing and teaching music. Therefore, we were very lucky and grateful she chose to visit us here in Fair Isle. She taught us some wonderful songs, wowed us with her beautiful fiddle playing and unleashed our creativity through joint storytelling. For us, it was really fascinating to combine music, heritage and the Shetland dialect (Shaetlan). She even brought her children along too so we could all learn and play together. Thank you for visiting us, Claire!

It has been simply wonderful to welcome our learners back to school after the summer holidays. Our three primary pupils now range from P1 up to P6 and are such a creative and collaborative team already. Seeing as the weather is still nice 59 degrees north here in Fair Isle, we took to the beach at The South Lighthouse on our first day back. We worked together to complete a scavenger hunt (finding objects smooth, transparent, scented and feathery – amongst other items) and did some stone-skimming and limpet racing (who knew that was a spectator sport?). We love being in the outdoors and connecting with nature.

It’s been a lovely (if not typically windy) week here in Fair Isle. One of our favourite people, Carla the Ranger, invited us to take part in a shore watch as part of the work the Bird Observatory does. This is much more technical than you might think: scanning the horizon in specific sections for certain amounts of time. Whilst there were no orcas on display today, we saw plenty of puffins, gannets, arctic terns and other feeding seabirds. We even attracted the attention of a yacht coming into the island.

As ever, we love connecting with nature around our beautiful island.

This week, we spent Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday out on the Mainland, staying overnight in Anderson High School Halls of Residence. It is really important to us as a school that the children have the chance to see their future lodgings for when they leave us in P7 and become familiar with new and exciting surroundings. We were even joined by past pupil, Freyja, who went on an evening wander with us round the Loch and to the Broch (and to Tesco to buy some snacks, of course).

On Tuesday afternoon, we drove to Sandwick Junior High School, who kindly hosted us for the afternoon and let us join in lessons. We had great fun making friends and meeting new people. We also spent Thursday at Sandwick too, joining in with their fabulous Sports Day. Seeing as we are a school of two pupils, we also think it is important to have this experience and Hollie and Jonathan were really impressed with how we joined in with all the different events – from standing long jump to sprinting to welly boot throwing. Everyone was so welcoming and kind to us and we would like to say a massive thank you to Sandwick! We cannot wait to visit again!

Wednesday was our “day in Lerwick”. We took the opportunity to visit the dentist, have one-on-one swimming lessons, spend our pocket money in Harry’s Department Store and visit the cinema to watch Lilo and Stitch. We even met a goat. In the evening, we drove to see Heidi and Harris (who used to live on Fair Isle). It was so lovely to be reunited with our friends for a playdate all evening.

What an adventure!

This term, we have been working on a personal self-directed project. Seeing as we are a pair of brothers who passionately support Manchester United (yes, it has been hard-going this season), we decided that our focus should be something related to this.

After looking at some options, we decided to build a model football stadium based on Old Trafford (The Theatre of Dreams). This has involved skills from subjects such as Technologies, Science, Social Studies and even some Maths (scaling). We have been hard at work with construction, circuitry and research.

Self-directed projects also give us the chance to work on those skills such as communication, collaboration and planning that are important too. Please take a look at our stadium in construction. We are going to play Subbuteo on the pitch when it is completed.

We were really thrilled to be interviewed by Martha Kearney from Radio 4 this week, during one of the cruise ship visits. She wasn’t here on a cruise ship but her and her colleague Alisdair were hear recording for her show. We always love it when a chance comes our way to put Fair Isle Primary School “on the map” and she asked us lots of questions which answered in an entertaining way. She was very lovely and gave us chance to talk lots and lots. Thank you Martha. We can’t wait to listen to the radio show when it comes out.

The puffin is a bird that is synonymous with Shetland and Fair Isle. They arrive at the end of April and can be seen on the coastal cliffs here, nesting in burrows. The weather has been so beautiful here on the isle recently so we could not resist setting off on a puffin search on Buness – the cliffs behind the haven.

They did not disappoint us! We encountered SO many puffins who let us creep really close to them. It is clear they are starting to use the burrows to establish their nests and it was fascinating to watch their movements.

Fun Fact: “Tammie Norrie” is a Scots word for puffin, usually used most in Shetland and Orkney.

We even had time for a game of beach cricket with one of our favourite people – Luke from the Bird Observatory.