Willowbank School, Kilmarnock* SUCCESSFUL LEARNERS, EFFECTIVE CONTRIBUTORS *
The Planets Class enjoyed working together to create salt dough magic lamps. We split into two teams to carry out this task and really enjoyed forming the dough into lamp shapes.
We painted and decorated our magic lamps to look similar to the lamp in the film ‘Aladdin’.
Finally, we enjoyed using baking soda and vinegar to create a magical eruption from our lamps!
* SUCCESSFUL LEARNERS, RESPONSIBLE CITIZENS *
The Planets class enjoyed some digital learning opportunities this week. We read an interactive e-book called ‘Jake’s First Day’ which related to pirates and treasure maps. We looked at a treasure map and drew different routes to get the pirate to the treasure.
We also used our fine motor skills to colour in tigers and draw our own stripes. We loved doing this!
The Sungazers Class love science and have all participated in various science activities over the term, making lava lamps, volcanoes, sensory snow, and slime. Their favourite experiment is making the cornflour slime as not only is it a good sensory science activity, it’s also good messy fun!
The boys are now able to follow the steps and make their own slime with minimal assistance.
The Sungazers Class have enjoyed exploring different weather types through various science experiments. This week we watched a video all about torandos then had a go at making our own ‘tornados in a jar’ using vinegar, water, food colouring and liquid soap. We even added some sequences to see them get sucked up into our torando. It was great fun!
The Transition class continued studying Peter Pan and all answered their own reading and understanding questions. The boys had different tasks to do and were all Successful Learners. We had two different ways to understand words. We typed some into an online dictionary and read the definition before selecting the correct answers on the quiz and we had help understanding that some characters were ‘looping’ as they flew when loops were drawn on the board. This made it clear for the class.
Some boys sequenced and matched sentences to help the class understand what happened in the chapter and in what order.
Confident Individuals Effective Contributors *Successful Learners
Presently we are unable to access our photographs to blog but we have been very busy in the Stars class.
We planted sunflower seeds in pots for the school meadow. They are growing well and will soon need canes to support them. We also planted sweet pea plants in our garden planter. We’ve built another wigwam for them to climb up.
We continue to enjoy our dinosaurs theme making salt dough fossils and a sediment sand jar to show how fossils were made. We created a mod roc head for our giant dinosaur in class and made dinosaur footprints to compare sizes with our own.
The boys have been working hard on their individual numeracy targets and this week was no different. We traveled around the world again identifying different times in different parts of the world. We had a small shop at the back of the class selling everything from chips to fresh fruit and showering products. One of our boys was setting different challenges and timing everyone how long they take to complete. We also had sorting by size and sorting by different parts of the day. It was a busy classroom indeed.
It’s that time of the year already, when the Transition class begin practicing their sports day skills. The class were Successful Learners when they were learning the finer ‘points’ of the javelin. The boys copied the movements very well and throughout the week their throws got further and further. They also practiced their relay running. I think a bit more training is required to prevent the boys getting out of breath so quickly!
There was some serious landscape gardening going on this week in the Transition class. The boys were Effective Contributors when they were working on their SQA Hobbies and Interests outcomes. The boys were preparing a patch of the garden to take the whole school sunflowers. We hope to plant them all together next week.
The Transition class were Effective Contributors when they took part in their Health and Wellbeing Lessons this week. They were learning skills to play rounders. Each boy practiced hitting the ball and then throwing it towards a target. The Major Baseball League is the obvious next step!
