On Monday, we had a fantastic time on our school trip to Stirling Castle and the Wallace Monument. The weather was a bit wet in the morning but it didn’t spoil our fun. Here we are with Sir Oliphant who led us on our tour around the castle…

Next, we went to the Education Room and looked at the weapons that were used during the Scottish Wars of Independence. We learned that King Edward I built the largest trebuchet in the world and called it ‘War Wolf.’ It was like a giant catapult and he used it to knock down the walls of Stirling Castle…

Next we went off to explore the castle. Here we are in the Great Hall where Kings and Queens would sit on a dais and hold great big parties…

We loved Stirling Castle and we still had the Wallace Monument to look forward to! Here we are before our huge climb to the top…

And here we are on our wall up the 246 steps to the top…!

Finally, here we are at the very top looking out over at Stirling Castle…

What a super day! Mrs McLean was very pleased with each and very child who represented their school exceptionally well.

This has been another busy week in Primary 6! We have been learning about perimeter and area and today we explored the formula for calculating both by playing some maths games…

The it was time to present our talks that we’ve been working so hard on at home. Mrs McLean was very proud of all the children who presented today. Each and every one was fantastic…

Very well done boys and girls. It’s been such a busy day that we will have to hear the rest of the talks next Tuesday. Looking forward to it!

And finally, we practised for Sports Day today…

We can’t wait until next Friday!

Don’t forget it’s our class trip on Monday. Waterproof jackets, warm clothing and a school shirt and tie must be worn so that we are prepared for all weather! Don’t forget packed lunches too. have a great weekend!

This week we have been taking a tour around the human circulatory system. We learned about the heart and how it’s a muscle that pumps blood around our bodies. Arteries are tubes that take blood, oxygen and nutrients from the heart into the body. Veins take the blood back into the heart. We made models of the circulatory system:

We labeled our diagrams and one group even named their model!

We displayed them next to our digestive system models…

Next stop…the immune system!

Here are our Star Writers this week…

Very well done! Mrs McLean enjoyed reading your very clear instructions on how to make a model digestive system!

Have a great holiday weekend everyone.

Today we created group models of the organs in the body that form part of the digestive system. We were given a set of materials each and we had 40 minutes to work collaboratively to finish and label our model. Mrs McLean was super impressed. No two models were made the same way and we all managed to complete them in the time given. Here we are working hard on them…

We all met the success criteria with flying colours! Next, we had 4 minutes to prepare a group presentation. We used our models to explain to the rest of the class how the digestive system works. Here are our finished models:

Well done boys and girls for your hard work!

We learned about the Digestive System today by carrying out a group experiment then conducting further research on the internet. We learned that digestion begins in the mouth where food is chewed and mixed with saliva. After it is swallowed , food passes down a tube called the oesophagus into the stomach…that’s when the gross stuff starts to happen as you can see from some of our faces…

We found out that food mixes in the stomach with gastric juices and enzymes. Then it passes into the small intestine where all the nutrients from the food are passed back into the body. The stuff the body doesn’t need (waste) is passed into the large intestine. You can see this process demonstrated by the tights in the pictures. The waste then passes out of the body as poo! We all got rather squeamish about this..!

Today we celebrated a very special mass with Bishop Toal and the whole school as part of our Festival of Faith. In the afternoon Valerie from Scripture Union took us through the Book of Genesis and it was fascinating. Here were are learning the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah…

Thank you Valerie!

Have a great long weekend everyone.

We have re-visited persuasive writing this week to write an email to a friend who has tried smoking and is considering doing it again. We looked a some arguments against smoking and ordered them according to their importance:

We had lots of interesting discussion around the facts on the cards and our own opinions as to which reasons were most important.

In the afternoon, we worked in small groups to travel around different stations in order to find out more about the heart, lungs and brain and how smoking can affect them.

At this station, we made a model lung to try to understand how the lungs work. We learned that the body system that helps us breathe is called the ‘respiratory system’…

Here we are learning about the effects that smoking has on the lungs and how a smoker’s cough develops:

At this station we learned about the parts and function of the heart. We learned that smoking can block arteries which are massive veins that supply blood to the heart. This can cause heart attacks and poor circulation…

At this station, we learned about the different parts of the brain and how smoking can lead to strokes…

We decided that there are no health benefits to smoking whatsoever!

We are beginning to explore the effects that smoking can have on the human body. We carried out some research and found out that cigarettes contain hundreds of harmful chemicals including tar (the black stuff they put on the roads!), acetone (that you remove nail polish with!), cyanide (a deadly poison!) and ammonia (toilet cleaner!). We worked in pairs/trios to create posters about our findings…

We have also started to study a type of dance called ‘street dance’ and we looked at videos of some ‘street crews’ today, including a really famous one called ‘Diversity.’ Some of us were a bit reluctant at first to dance but every single one of us performed for our classmates and did an excellent job…

Next week, we’re going to form our own ‘street crews’ and develop our skills even further.

We have gotten off to a fantastic start to our final term in Primary 6.

We have been working hard to understand the link between fractions, decimals and percentages and our novel studies are well underway.

Our new topic is called ‘Biological Systems.’ We decided as a class that we would like to learn about the different organs in the body and how diseases and illnesses occur. We also decided that we would like to make models, carry out internet research, play games and quizzes and take part in investigative activities in order to learn about our new topic. We can’t wait to get started.

Today, we learned about different stereotypes that exist in our society. As always, we impressed Mrs McLean with the maturity of our discussions and we presented a role-play in groups, to demonstrate different examples of stereotyping. This group were demonstrating that children are sometimes judged as ‘thugs’ just because they wear hooded tops and hang about in groups…

Other stereotypes we identified were based on gender. For example, girls are not good at sports and boys should not become ballet dancers. We know that it can be wrong and hurtful to judge people in this way.

Finally, we have taking full advantage of the lovely weather this week. Yesterday we played tennis in the sunshine and today, we took our art lesson about Paul Klee outside…

What a great start to the term!

This morning we’re here decorating our eggs for the egg competition. We thank all the parents who helped their children bring in everything they needed today. We have many designs here today like cupcakes and ninjas and much much more. Here we are decorating our hearts out!

Were all really excited to see who the winner will be so good luck to everyone!!!

By Rachael Marie Carlin