Topic/Learning Context

Our Learning Context for this term will be:

Natural Disasters

We will be looking at various natural disasters and extreme weather systems. We will the impact these events have on the people whose lives are affected by them and the impact they have on the economy and the landscape. We will also be learning about the impact Climate Change is having on these systems and what our responsibilities are.

Health and Wellbeing

We will be learning about:

• Friendships, relationships and families
• Physical and emotional changes during puberty
• Body image and self-worth/emotional wellbeing
• Menstruation, reproduction, pregnancy and birth
• Correct vocabulary for male and female body parts including reproductive organs
• Maintaining a healthy body/personal hygiene
• Risk awareness of keeping myself safe
• Parenting and responsibility, caring for a child/baby

Literacy

We will be:

• Learning about persuasive features of texts
• Learning to write persuasively using emotive language
• Learn note taking skills and how to effectively skim and scan for information.
• Continue to improve our written work and story writing skills through focusing on some of the technical aspects of our writing, for example, creating plots, settings and character descriptions.
• Continue to work on comprehension skills during our Reading and Language skills through our class novels.
• Continue to learn spelling rules, topic related words and high frequency words to help develop our spelling.
•  Core Numeracy

• Continue to develop our Mental Maths and problem solving skills.
• Learn how to identify types of angles and how to use a protractor to calculate the measurement of an angle
• Investigating common units and different ways to measure time/speed against each other.
• Continue to develop our Money skills will focusing on budgets and strategies to solve money problems.
• Working on calculating durations of time and reading timetables

RME

We will be learning about Christianity and the link between belief systems and how that impacts their outlook on living their lives.

Here is a little overview of what P7M have been learning about this week…

IDL

In our IDL lessons this week we have been learning about another natural disaster; tsunamis. We know that tsunami means ‘harbour wave’ in Japanese and they are caused by underwater earthquakes mostly. They can also be caused by meteorites, volcanoes and landslides.  We learned that tsunamis can travel over 500mph. We created quizzes on the laptops this week. We know lots of facts about tsunamis including what wavelength means, the areas which are at most risk and about the 2004 tsunami as well as the earthquake in Japan in 2011, which caused a tsunami. We have been choosing ways to share our learning. Some people have chosen to create posters, mini movies and news reports.

Maths

In maths this week we have been finding out about calculating durations of time. We counted on in hours and minutes and rounded up to the nearest hour. We have also been doing some revision on how to add and subtract fractions, convert improper fractions to proper fractions and change fractions to percentages. As well as simplifying fractions and working out percentages of any amount.

Food Technology

In Food Tech this week we learned about being vegetarian and vegan. Vegetarians do not eat meat or animal products and vegans do not eat meat, dairy or any other animal products.

P.E

In P.E we have been playing football, badminton and volley ball.

Spelling

We have been learning to spell words linked to our topic. Our focus this week was looking at words linked to tsunamis. BM1 and BM2 have created a ‘riddle’ game to learn their spelling words. Very creative!

Reading

For reading this week we looked at a blooms questions and we also had some comprehension questions about tsunamis. We had to focus on using part of the question as our answer. BM1 has found our class novel very interesting this week as we have been learning about all the stuff refugees have to go through.

Writing

In writing this week we have been writing persuasively. We have been writing to the president of the Philippines after we learned about the preparations put in place in Japan. We tried to persuade the president to spend money on things such as installing coastal walls, plant trees near the coast to absorb the force of the waves and perhaps even thinking about making building more earthquake resistant by adding a ‘base-isolation’ under buildings.

Good afternoon everyone,

Here is a little snippet of what we have been doing in P7M this week…

P.E

In P.E this week we developed our ball skills. We got a choice to play volley-ball, badminton or tennis. With Mrs McGirr we played dodge ball outside. It was a bit different because we didn’t have the benches and had to make some of the rules a little bit different.

Maths

We have been working on ‘time’ this week in maths. We looked at how to calculate duration of time between two given times. We revised how to ‘count on’ when calculating this. We also reminded ourselves how to work out 12 hour and 24 hour time.

Literacy

We finished our 500 word challenge on the laptops and we were going to email them to Mrs McGirr in our technology lesson, but unfortunately most of us have forgotten our Glow password! These will be reset by next week so we can learn how to do this.

We also wrote a persuasive story about natural disasters. We had to summarise the three natural disasters we have learned about so far and persuade our teacher which one was the most destructive. We looked at sentence starters to help us with our persuasive language.

In our reading lessons this week we continued to practice reading fluency, and some of us answered Blooms questions about what we were reading. We also learned about the famous poem by Robert Burns; To a Mouse. We watched a youtube video of it being recited in Scots, and then we heard the modern translation to help us understand the words. Some of us will recite a poem at the Burns competition in February.

In our reading comprehension lesson we looked at volcanoes around the world. Some of us were comparing and contrasting different volcanoes.

IDL

We learned about what volcanoes are and what active, dormant and extinct means. We looked at a PowerPoint about volcanoes and took notes. With our notes and some books we have in the classroom, we created information posters. These look fab!

Technologies

We have been playing SumDog, accessing code.org and cool maths games this week. We also learned how to quickly save a document once we had named it.

Scots Assembly

This week we have been learning a song by The Proclaimers. We learned to sing the song ‘500 miles’ and Mr Swan played his guitar for us. We performed at our Scots assembly on Thursday. We also said goodbye to Mrs Ainsley and Miss Robinson at our assembly.

Music

In music we were learning to play chords on the keyboard and played a little rhythm on the drum pads.

Just a wee reminder that our P7 Leaver Hoodie letters need to be back ASAP to allow us to order them in plenty of time.

This week has been another busy one.

Literacy

In Literacy this week we have thinking about our class novel, The Boy at the Back of the Class. We have been developing our understanding of the text through comprehension lessons. We have learned about the flag of Syria, about the conflict and what it means to be a refugee. We made PowerPoint presentations about Syria and had to include; the population, the language spoken, food eaten, currency used, famous people, landmarks and about the neighbouring countries. We also watched the BBC live lesson about creating a 500 word story. We have started our own 5o0 word stories and will continue these next week.

Maths and Numeracy

We have continued to look at algebra and percentages in maths this week.

Science

We have learned about energy transfer in food chains. We were introduced to the words; producer, primary consumer, secondary consumer and tertiary consumer. We will look at food webs next week.

IDL

We learned about the layers of the earth’s crust and started learning about wildfires. We created information leaflets about the wildfires and we know what to do before, during and after a wildfire. We will move on to learn about volcanoes next week.

Art

On Tuesday we completed a mixed media piece of art which used the map of Australia and a picture showing the devastation inside. Our art work was very effective and it has been displayed in our classroom.

SSPCA Visit

We had a visit from the SSPCA and we got to programme a ‘robocat’ as we learned all about how to look after animals and prevent cruelty.

Welcome to our first blog post of the decade! Happy New Year!

This week we have been a little more tired than normal but we had lots of learning to do, so it was business as usual.

In P.E we have been working on our stamina and fitness and completed the 6 minute run and the beep test. Some people recorded how many laps their partner did in the time. We are going to use this data to create a bar graph and see if our fitness improves. We also played dodge ball and R’s team were the overall winners!

We learned about different religions and food that people eat. We watched some videos about special ceremonies. We learned about Sikhism, Buddhism and Judaism. We looked at all of this with Mrs Tavendale in Food Technology.

In our Literacy work this week we have been working on punctuating direct speech correctly. We used this to write our own newspaper reports on the Nepal earthquake. We have also started a new class novel, The Boy at the Back of the Class. We made predictions about what the story will be about and used evidence from the text so far. We had lots of great ideas such as the new boy being; a spy from America, from a family of lions or from the most wanted list for dangerous crimes! We have since found out that the new boy is in fact a refugee from Syria.

During reading comprehension this week we read a passage about earthquakes and we focussed on writing the answers to the questions using full sentences.

In Maths this week we looked at time durations and we had to figure out how much time had passed between two given times. We shared the strategies that we used. We also looked at algebra and can now all figure out what numbers the letters represent and some of us even learned how to change side, change sign. Lastly, we had a look at graphs for information on how many earthquakes happened in the year 2012. We found out there were more earthquakes in Europe than in Africa.