Raasay Primary School

Pupils at Raasay Primary School wanted to support the DEC Appeal for the recent Turkey/Syria earthquake. It was decided to have a collection at the Nourish Raasay lunch event and also have a donation tub in the shop for anyone who wanted to help. A fantastic total of £195 was raised and has been sent to the Disasters Emergency Committee. This amount will help many families and people affected by the tragedy. To give an idea of how your money will help, DEC provide the following information: £10 can provide blankets to keep two people warm; £25 can provide emergency food for a family for ten days; £50 can provide emergency shelter for two families.

Thank you so much to all who donated, your support is very much appreciated and thank you to Nourish Raasay and Raasay Stores for facilitating our collection.

Raasay Primary School pupils enjoyed celebrating World Book Day on Thursday 2nd March. They were able to come to school dressed as a character or theme from a book/story – or simply come in comfy loungewear to enjoy reading. The day started off with a World Book Day Assembly and pupils also undertook activities such as book bingo, crosswords and online stories. They also brought in some favourite books which they very much enjoyed sharing with their classmates. To finish off with, they created their own World Book Day t-shirts with the theme of a favourite book or story.

You can see some more of our World Book Day activities by following this link to our Padlet:

Pupils and staff attended the wonderful Nourish Raasay event on 14th February. This was a lovely way to bring the community together once again to share some delicious food and good company. Raasay pupils once again helped by escorting people to their seats, serving food and clearing away. The theme this week was Valentine’s Day and the ladies had gone to a lot of effort to mark the day with heart shaped bread on the soup, heart shaped willow place markers and even heart shaped butter pats! Pupils then celebrated Valentine’s Day by sharing with the community the poems they had written in class. Their poems had a ‘love’ theme – what they loved about nature and the environment. The boys received wonderful feedback on the lovely way they interacted with the guests and carried out their responsibilities.

As part of a follow on from the Treoir Project, pupils will be working with Gaelic Singer Anne Martin over the next few weeks. This project is called ‘Oran a chall’ (Lost Songs) and the aim is to breathe new life into the traditional Gaelic songs that have been ‘lost’. Anne will be holding workshops with the boys so that they can learn them and share them with the community so that they can be ‘found’ again.

Our P6 pupil attends shinty sessions with pupils in P6/7 in Portree Primary every Wednesday after school. They had a successful qualifying tournament for the national finals in Fort William and made it through to the semi-finals. The boys showed resilience and determination and they missed out by a small margin to some very strong opponents. Congratulations to all who participated and a big well done to our P6 for his representing the school and Raasay as part of the team.

This year the Chinese community celebrated their New Year on January 22nd. The year 2023 is the year of the Rabbit and their personality traits are meant to be kindness, confidence and strength. As part of their learning pupils studied the Chinese Zodiak and were able to find the animal relating to their year of birth. They also made their own paper fortune tellers. As part of the celebrations, Ann – our school cook, produced a delicious school lunch of traditional chicken with noodles followed by custart tart. The challenge was then to eat as much as possible using chopsticks!

Pupils attended The Newton Rooms Science Workshop on Wednesday 18th January in the Community Centre Portree. This was in association with the Glasgow Science Centre and brings the Learning Lab to Skye. The topic was ‘Salmon and Aquaculture’ and pupils were able to learn about the lifecycle of the salmon as well as their habitat, migration and threats to their survival.

On Tuesday 17th January, pupils at Raasay Primary joined community members for the Nourish Raasay lunch event at the Hall. Pupils helped to usher people to their seats before helping to serve the food. They then joined community members for the lunch which included delicious leek and potato soup, apple cake, chocolate brownie and a variety of delicious breads. Pupils then sang their Gaelic song ‘Tobhta Fearna’ which was thoroughly appreciated by those present. It was a beautiful, snowy day which added to the atmosphere – pupils then returned to school for a ‘snowy’ P.E. session. Thank you to all involved for inviting us and for organising such a lovely event. We hope to be able to attend the next lunch event in February.

On Friday 13th January, pupils attended an outreach concert at Bun-sgoil Gaidhlig Phort Righ organised by ‘Live Music Now Scotland’. The performance was by pianist Ethan Loch who has been blind since birth. Ethan played a variety of compositions including classical and modern – the children particularly enjoyed guessing the film that the music related to. At the end of the session, four pupils from BSGP and Raasay were chosen to go down to the piano and choose a note each – Ethan then proceeded to instantly play a tune of his own composition using just these four notes. The boys were very engaged and impressed with the whole performance and Ethan’s skills and idenfitied that he was resilient in achieving what he has and not giving up.

Pupils enjoyed a fabulous Christmas Lunch prepared by Ann, our School Cook, followed by a party with lots of fun Christmas games. Our Christmas party wouldn’t be complete without a visit from Santa – and we were delighted that he could take time out of his busy schedule to be with us for the afternoon. Sometimes the conditions aren’t quite right for a sleigh and reindeers, and on this occasion, Santa turned up on his lawnmower – complete with two helper Elves! Thank you to Santa and his Elves for making the day extra special.