Grant to St Fergus Primary School for Leavers' Legacy Wall Bars

Update from Louisa Bradford:



I had the opportunity today to go and visit the result of one of last year’s grants.  We agreed to grant match a school in St. Fergus, near Peterhead, who wanted to raise money to buy an indoor climbing frame for the gym in their school as part of their Leavers’ Legacy.  The Primary 7 students who were leaving and moving to ‘Big School’ would be passing something on to the future students.  Previous projects for the school included revamping the school’s library and buying some playground games.  The children were incredibly excited about it, and rumour has it that the current batch of Primary 6 students are already brainstorming for what they’d like to do.

In order to raise the money for their climbing frame, the students had to work out what they were going to do, and settled on a family Ceilidh evening in March.  They planned the evening, organised posters, table decorations, had a stovies tasting session and even arranged for the local radio station to give them publicity.  I have to say, I was seriously impressed with their entrepreneurship.  All told, they raised £1250, which is a phenomenal effort.  Coupled with the £1000 that we had agreed to provide meant they could get the climbing frame they wanted, and I’m told that each extra bit of money meant a slightly improved climbing frame.  They chose the beautiful apparatus, thoughtfully bearing in mind that the littlest pupils wouldn’t be able to manage it if it was too difficult.

The climbing frame arrived on Friday, and the children only had yesterday to practice a brilliant 5 minute routine for display today.  Everyone took part, and managed to show off their skills, and it was genuinely wonderful to see the happy faces and the result of one of our grants.  Well done, St. Fergus P7s!

By Louisa Bradford, who visited Skillforce, a project the Jo Walters Trust supported with one of the Aberdeenshire grants in 2014. 

I was lucky enough to be able to visit Skillforce at a school in Aberdeen towards the end of last year. The students, aged 13 and 14, were practising for their ‘It’s a Knockout’ tournament, a fun day for primary school children where teams would come and play games for points.  The Skillforce students would have to introduce their game, explain the rules and how points would be scored, and then adjudicate.  This session, they were focussing on the introduction - and you’ve never seen a group of chatty teenagers go so quiet…  By the end of the session, coached by teachers AJ and Michelle, they had all managed to stand up in front of  a group of their peers, introduce themselves, explain the rules of their game and how points would be scored.  It was brilliant to see, even in one session, how these children’s confidence developed, and how they encouraged each other to succeed.

Some photos of the session are below. In the photos, they are doing press ups.  They had to do press ups if they were late/naughty.  I had to do press ups on the day, as I didn’t win the game to get ping pong balls in the bucket. Just in case you were wondering.