Raasay Primary School

We are grateful to Iona MacKinnon who is very kindly providing an excellent weekly After School Sports Club. At present they are focusing on Basketball skills as the P5/6 pupils will be attending the annual Basketball Festival at Portree High School on Friday 16th March.

At Raasay Primary School we like to make good use of our natural environment and what could be better than exercising outdoors using our woodlands and playground as a gym! We followed some activities from the Forestry Woodland Activities booklet to create our own unique P.E. session. We are also able to make use of the new smartboard for indoor sessions – one of our favourite websites is ‘Go Noodle’ which encourages healthy activity in a fun way!

As part of our Gaelic Placenames project we are delighted that we have been given a ‘drone’ to enable us to record photographs of the relevant areas from the air. Presently each family is taking the drone home on a weekly basis to become familiar with it and to photograph areas for the placenames map. Here are some of the fantastic aerial images that we have managed to capture so far.

Pupils at Raasay Primary School celebrated World Book Day on Thursday 1st March. They came to school dressed as their favourite character from a book and enjoyed sharing their favourite stories with the class. Raasay Primary School will be sending a cheque to the World Book Day Charity – Book Aid International for £20.

There was a lot of measuring, weighing, pouring and mixing involved in making pancakes for Pancake Day. As part of their writing the younger pupils practised writing a sequence of how to make pancakes. The results were delicious!

On Thursday 22^nd February Alexander attended the Book Bug session at Broadford library where he had the opportunity to meet with other 2 years olds in the area for storytime. Of course the trip on the ferry was also very exciting!

The Leanne Fund is based in Stornoway and is the foremost Cystic Fibrosis charity in Scotland, working with individuals and families across the Highlands, Islands and Grampian to provide vital social, practical, emotional and financial assistance – supporting the whole family.

This charity inspired us to undertake a ‘dress in your whackiest and brightest clothes day’, learn all about Cystic Fibrosis through assembly and share what we learnt with our local community by way of a ‘Whacky Walk’ whereby we ‘encouraged’ contributions from people who we met en route. We were delighted to raise the fantastic total of £82.05.

Our Rainbow Raiser was great fun and the children were really engaged throughout the day and as a small island school we thoroughly enjoyed focusing on a charity in the Western Isles – our island neighbours!

This term has seen the introduction of an after school Lego Club on Monday afternoons. We are very grateful to Della Cheshire for getting this underway and giving of her time to run the club each week.

Pupils were thoroughly entertained by the Portree Community Pantomime Group’s production of Peter Pan at ‘The Venue’ Portree High School on Friday 9th February. Thank you also to Henry – who kindly came along to the school when we returned and took the children for storytime – very much appreciated by all!

Our weekly ‘Weaving Club’ is now underway – all the children were delighted with what they managed to achieve on the very first day and are looking forward to the forthcoming sessions.

This week children had the opportunity to learn local Gaelic place names from John William Gillies who kindly came along to help us to ‘map’ various locations and learn their Gaelic meaning. This workshop has been provided by Aros’ year-long community arts programme for Skye and Raasay: Tha Seo Math Dhuibh – Good for You.  The programme is supported by the Highland Culture Strategic Board and the Highland Council and Creative Scotland Take Pride, Take Part Investment Fund.