As part of Maths Week Scotland, we have been learning about Alan Turing a famous mathematician, best known for his role as a code-breaker in World War II.
Here are some of the facts we discovered about him:
Alan Turing was a British mathematician. During the Second World War, he worked as a codebreaker, cracking German codes created by Enigma machines. His work helped shorten the war by 2 years.
Alan Turing was born on 23rd June 1912. He had an older brother called John. Their father worked for the British civil service in India.
Turing’s parents wanted their sons to be raised in Britain so the boys stayed with family friends while their parents were in India.
In 1936, Turing created the idea of a special machine that could follow simple codes. He called this the Universal Machine.
These machines are now known as a Universal Turing Machine and they formed a lot of the ideas behind computing.
Turing died in 1952
On 15th July 2019, the Bank of England announced that Alan Turing’s image would be featured on the new £50 note to celebrate his pioneering work with computers.
Our finished profiles have now been displayed on our maths week board and we hope that other classes in the school will learn more about him from reading our work!
In literacy we have been working on our own project in school and at home – creating our very own novels on Book Creator! As a class we love imaginative writing and were excited to write our very own story. The class has chosen a wide range of genres including adventure, comedy, action, horror and sports.
Before we began writing we looked at the important features of a beginning, middle and end to a story. We worked together on identifying the who, where, when and what for our opening chapter. Then we moved onto planning the build up/dilemma of a story should which needed to build up a sense of excitement that something is going to happen, create a challenging problem and eventually have a resolution. Lastly, we decided if our story would end on a cliff-hanger, with a twist or a happy ending.
Using the chromebooks, we then designed the front cover of our novel and uploaded it onto our class library.
We will continue to work on our novels this term and we are very excited to share our different stories soon!
In our final week before our showcase our designers groups were busy creating our own advertising campaigns for our new eco-homes.
We created a brochure online which outlined key features of our build as well as the price, location and unique features. We had to consider the colours, layout and presentation to make sure that these would attract buyers and stand out.
W are now looking forward to our virtual showcase on Thursday the 7th of October at 2pm.
Today in 6.22, we took our maths learning outdoors and created our own co-ordinate grids using chalk and metre sticks.
Once our groups had completed our grids, we labelled our axis and went on a class nature walk. In our forest we collected a range of different items from leaves to sticks to small pine cones.
Afterwards we returned to the playground and placed items that we collected onto our grids. Then we made a list of all co-ordinate points, for example leaf (14,2), flower (6,16).
We have been very busy Designers in 6.22 as we started the build of our eco-homes. Our classroom was transformed for the day into our own workshop and we took on a series of different roles from builders, to planners and wood cutters.
We used a range of different materials during our build including wood, tape, lollipop sticks, rubber bands, cardboard and glue.
We created a range of different eco-houses including a tree house, earth covered homes and soon to be rotating eco-dome.
Yesterday the whole school competed in our first House Challenge of the year – Highland games. Our pitch was transformed into a series of different challenges and activities. We completed an obstacle course, discuss throw, shot put and a caber toss.
6.22 showed excellent resilience and team spirit, with all of us encouraging others throughout the different stations! We are all looking forward to our next house challenge.
Over the last few weeks we have been enjoying our P.E lessons out on the pitch and have developed our hockey skills!
We started out with passing and dribbling and enjoyed doing various drills and games in our teams.
Today we played a round robin tournament of matches – some great skills were on display and lots of goals were scored. Next week we are going to move onto defending!
In 6.22, we have started our first block of Mearns Masters – Designers! In our first lesson we discussed the advantages of modern, renewable energy and investigated how solar panels produce energy which can power houses. We then decided as a class that we would like to design our own eco-friendly home as our project in order to help towards building a more sustainable community.
First we had to design what we thought an eco-friendly home should look like, then following some research all of the groups changed our designs when we learnt about the wide range of houses that have been developed in recent years. These range from a rotating solar panel dome, to Earth covered houses to environmentally friendly treehouses!
After our period designing our houses, our class learned about the problems of unsustainable housing and why it was important that we solve these issues through our eco-homes. We voted and decided that reducing CO2 emissions was the biggest problem that we want to solve during our Mearns Masters.
We can’t wait for our next Mearns Masters where we will be investigating different types of structures for our homes and outline our design process ready for our build!
We were very busy in 6.22 throughout week 3, particularly in Numeracy and Mathematics. As a class we discussed all of the different facts that we could like to calculate and measure in the school. This ranged from what the perimeter of the pitch is, to the width of our class library, the height of our climbing wall in the playground and the number of desks that are required for the entire school.
We used a range of different measuring tools but our favourites were the meter stick and the trundle wheel. In our groups we collected data in our class and outside and shared with others.
We also created a map of our school with co-ordinates, plotting the various points of interest and making a key.
We are looking forward to developing our measuring skills further in the coming weeks!
We enjoyed taking part in the special live Scottish screening of “The Promise”, a short animated climate film about how one person can make the world greener and fairer.
We watched the animated film, listened to the book and discussed/took notes. We analysed the imagery used in the film to communicate the main ideas. We identified the supporting detail used to help us understand the text. Inspired by our discussions, we listened to the poem, “A Spell for Acorns” from Robert MacFarlane’s book, “The Lost Words: A Spell Book”, and created our own poems.
Just another blogs.glowscotland.org.uk – East Renfrewshire site
Glow Blogs uses cookies to enhance your experience on our service. By using this service or
closing this message you consent to our use of those cookies. Please read our Cookie Policy.
Once our groups had completed our grids, we labelled our axis and went on a class nature walk. In our forest we collected a range of different items from leaves to sticks to small pine cones.
