We were very privileged to have a special visitor this afternoon. Duncan Scott, a former St John’s pupil, came along to share his swimming success story with us.

Duncan recently competed in the Commonwealth Games and won a gold, silver and 4 bronze medals. We had the opportunity to ask Duncan some questions about how he became a competitive swimmer and found out about his journey into Team Scotland.

Duncan also spoke about getting the opportunity to race against his childhood hero, Michael Phelps.

It was a fantastic opportunity for us to hear all about his sport, training and successes. We were very impressed and enjoyed our afternoon finding out about Duncan.

We’ve been busy learning more about The Scottish Parliament this week. We’ve been discussing devolved and reserved powers and have been finding out about some of the key roles and responsibilities within parliament.

Here we are busy learning this week…

I hope you all had a lovely break over Easter and enjoyed plenty of chocolate!

We are back and very busy in class already. Our topic for Term 4 is The Scottish Parliament and we have lots of exciting things planned for this topic. The children have been busy comparing and contrasting the UK and Scottish Parliaments and making notes about what they’ve found out.

We watched the film version of our class novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and made comparisons between the book and film versions of the story. We discussed the difference between how we pictured the setting and characters in our own minds and how they were portrayed in the film.

Pupils and staff from Alloa Academy came along to take us through a Plastics and Recycling workshop this morning.

We were stunned by some of the facts we heard today regarding the amount of pollution in our oceans. We matched rubbish items to the length of time it would take for these items to degrade and learned that it takes 400 years for a plastic bottle to degrade fully.

We have been inspired by what we learned today. Watch this space to see how we are planning to do our bit to help!

We took part in a BBC Authors Live session this morning.  The focus of this session was on Martin Brown, the illustrator of the Horrible Histories books. He gave us some fascinating and gruesome facts from some of the books. One fact that was quite shocking was about a soldier from WW1 who was found to have 10,428 lice in his shirt alone!

We got to put our Young Leader Training into practice today.

P1 came along to be our volunteers today. We demonstrated our leadership skills by leading them through a variety of games and activities that we had planned for them. It was great fun and we got to reflect on any challenges we faced after we’d delivered our activity.

During one of our PE slots this week we were visited by ‘Judo Club Esprit’ and got to experience a little taster of the sport. We all had a great time. We learned how to pin and hold an opponent and we also learned which part of the body lands first when you flip someone over.

We’re having lots of fun dressing up for World Book Day!

Here are a few pictures for you to enjoy…

*We went back in time to remember what it was like to have a picture book read to us in class. This was the story that inspired the costumes of the staff in the Purple Wing.*

We had a really busy week this week preparing for The Big Sing at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. The event was a great success and we formed part of a 2000 strong choir to sing the songs we’d been learning at school.

The sound was amazing and the children represented a Redwell beautifully.