Visit Report : Kilmory Primary School

School: Kilmory Primary School
Location: Isle of Arran
Date: 22/11/2017
Duration: Half Day (AM)
Modules: Earth, Sun and Moon : P1 – P7
Solar System : P1 – P7
Nature of Light : P1 – P7
Pupil Participants: 17
Adult Participants: 3
Visit Activity: n/a



Description:

The team arranged to spend the night close to the school, and despite it being out of season, the landlord of the local pub kindly managed to find a lovely warm cottage (Bumbley Cottage) for us to stay in. Kilmory is the site of the Torrylinn Creamery, which is the home of the award-winning Isle of Arran Cheddar. Sadly, we were too busy to visit the cheese shop, but maybe next time. We only had the morning with the students of Kilmory, due to the fact that we had to catch the 13:45 ferry from Lochranza to Kintyre, in order to then catch the last ferry to the Isle of Gigha for the following day. As Kilmory only had 17 pupils, we decided to present our programme to the whole school, and to be fair, the younger students coped really well, albeit with some support from older pupils during the hands-on tasks. We started the day with the Earth, Sun and Moon module, closely followed by the Solar System. Once again, the 4K resolution screen proved a huge hit, and allowed students to see our planetary system in much greater detail. We ended our morning visit with a few demonstrations from our ‘Nature of Light’ module, which hopefully helped students to understand that there are different kinds of light that are not visible to the human eye, but which astronomers use special equipment to look at. The demonstrations went down really well. Sadly, we had to rush off at the start of lunch, but had an enjoyable drive up the west coast of Arran and managed to grab lunch from the Isle of Arran distillery (only place to get a takeaway sandwich – honest!) before boarding the hour-long ferry to the fishing village of Tarbert.