What a week we have had! Finally the event we have all been working towards arrived. We all had a blast at our Virgin Money Make £5 grow day. Here are some photos of our stalls and of our keen customers! Then some photos of us counting our money! We made over £800 in our class alone – a committee will be created of all the P7 winners who will decide on how the money should be spent to enhance our prom and end of year experience.
Here is a breakdown of our amazing STEM week experiences
Monday
Kicking off our STEM week we were visited by the charity SmartSTEMS . We heard a presentation and took part in a Q and A session with James McCullagh, who works for the company Seric. After this we participated in a fantastic engineering challenge across the whole of the P7 stage.
This afternoon we were fortunate to welcome teachers from Eastwood High who talked to us about engineering and gave us instructions on how to create our very own Seismometers. This gave us an opportunity to work in teams and to practise some technology skills.
Tuesday
Today we spent much of the day working on our shelter designs. We are looking at the whole design process and beginning to understand how it work in real life. Basically every design challenge involves creating something for someone for some purpose.
Wednesday
FemEng members and biomendical engineering university students Hannah and Olivia visited and treated us to an incredibly interesting presentation. They then showed us how to make a simple bionic hand using every day craft materials. They gave us instructions and we worked in pairs to create our own bionic hand.
STEM leaders from Mearns Castle visited us and gave us a design challenge to create a basket to safely store an egg to travel down a zip slide. There was a great buzz in our classrooms as we worked in groups to design and create the fastest device to match the challenge.
Continuing with the engineering theme we spent some time this afternoon designing and creating in response to given challenges using Kapla block. What a versatile and dynamic resource!
Thursday
Today we learned about microorganisms and how they have both negative and beneficial effects on our bodies. We created a poster to show the benefits like creating tasty food and drink and to aid the digestive system.
Friday
Today we were fortunate to have Sarah Jardine, CEO of epipole , visit and present to us. She was inspiring and engaging and we all learned a lot listening to her. She set us a challenge to work in teams to design a solution to a problem we were passionate about solving. We worked together with 7.26 and some of us presented our plans – Sarah was really impressed with our inventive solutions and abilities as well as our work ethic, manners and enthusiasm!
Despite being a short school week we have packed lots in!
On Monday we spent time outdoors learning, exploring and challenging ourselves on our knowledge of angles.
On Thursday we enjoyed some world book day activities creating a word picture of our favourite authors, sharing summaries of our favourite books, writing reviews and making bookmarks to name but a few.
Friday saw our first bikeability session for this year. We made sure our bikes and clothing were safe before taking part in four fun activities to help us learn important skills before completing our level 2 on road bikeability training over the next few weeks.
We also took part in a quick design challenge where we created a random brief then worked in groups to come up with a suggested design solution….all in half an hour! The buzz and creativity racing through the class was phenomenal!
This week we have been continuing to learn more about fractions decimals and percentages and have been creating games to help each other understand new concepts more deeply.
On Wednesday we attended a Holocaust exhibition run by ‘Gathering the Voices’ at Calderwood Lodge. It was a very serious and somber visit as we heard from some children of Holocaust survivors tell their parents’ stories. We learned of some of the horrors they went through and showed great respect throughout our trip.
In the afternoon we joined a National Assembly to celebrate Robert Burns run by education Scotland. We heard pupils from across Scotland recite poems and also heard from a teacher from Banff Academy who recited To a Mouse.
In school we had a Burns Celebration where we heard from children across the school who were judged by professional judges who visited us for the day.
we rounded off the week by learning a bit more about drawing and shading. Some of our final products were incredible.
This week our first group created their own six course tasting menu which has been successfully planned, ordered (within budget), prepared and cooked after some tremendously dedicated effort and strong team work. Here are some photos of us during this week’s cooking session. Huge thanks to our parent volunteer, without your help this would not have worked out so well.
We engaged in some great collaborative learning tasks week as we explored and reinforced our understanding of fractions together.
Although Friday morning was chilly we had a great outdoor session playing one of our own recently created games. It was a great success enjoyed by all after the creating team adapted and improved the rules following feedback from the rest of the class.
Despite it being a four day week after the October holiday, we managed to pack a lot in!
Here are some of the activities and learning we’ve been involved in this week:
M&M theatre company presented us with Sleeping Beauty. Thanks to the PTA for funding this.
Our Spark Park fundraising sports event was great fun, we completed all the challenges and were lucky enough to have lots of pupil volunteers from Mearns Castle who helped it all run really smoothly.
Miss Hunter was invited to visit our class on Wednesday as we wanted her to see how well we were working in teams to improve our reading skills as we played ‘Reading Race’ in the classroom. She was really impressed and said we should definitely try to share our method with others to help them improve their skills in reading carefully and answering questions in a more in depth way.
Our Mearns Masters Showcase took place on Thursday. We invited the Primary five classes to our computer arcade and they played the three level games we created in our coding masterclasses. Everyone had a great time and the P5s were really impressed with our games.
Friday saw us outside on a rather chilly and wet morning to play some more of the games we created ourselves a few weeks ago. Everyone enjoyed their chance to teach and learn new games. We also took part in some peer assessment and worked really well on offering suggestions for improvements on each of the games.
On Wednesday we joined with the rest of the school in a commemoration assembly for Queen Elizabeth who sadly passed away last Thursday.
We then went outside and spent some time learning about scale and created some scale pictures of the Queen having studied a profile picture of her from a stamp. I am sure you will agree we made a tremendous job using sticks, stones and cones to create these.
In the afternoon we enjoyed some jam sandwiches, shortbread and a wee chat about our experiences of the royal family before starting on some grid art and pop art pictures of Queen Elizabeth.
Writing
We worked in groups to investigate how to enhance descriptions in our writing. We used pictures to stimulate discussion and created some fantastic pieces of writing as a result. The buzz in the class as we worked together was immense.
Star writers from last week were proud to receive their certificates and we heard one of them read out her story to us too.
PE
Outside for PE this week we started sharing some of the games we have been creating in our groups. We worked on stamina and accuracy this week and really enjoyed teaching and learning from each other.
This week has flown in! Here are some of the things we have been up to this week
Maths games
Learning is always so much more fun when we do it with others and play games as we go. Mrs Kelly introduced us to Tarsia cards and we also used some challenge cards and played hit the button to improve our speed and accuracy with multiplication tables.
Group reading
After reading the first few chapters of our class novel Holes, we worked together to analyse the setting, the characters and some of the techniques the author used to engage us in the story.
Announcement of prefects
Miss Hunter came round our classes this week and announced the prefects. She said it was a really tough decision as there had been so many worthwhile candidates. Fortunately there are lots of other leadership roles available in Primary 7 and lots we can create for ourselves too, so those who didn’t make it as prefects have plenty of other things to aim for!
Congratulations to our new prefects pictured below.
Another fabulous week in primary seven has flown past!
Here we are enjoying some outdoor time learning to follow instructions and create pictures marking different types of angles with different natural materials.
Here is a photo of our star writers for the week.
We did well completing homework this week and we have discussed how to make it even better, neater and more meaningful next week too.
Well what a fabulous first full week back we have had!
We started our week enjoying some fun lessons focussing on children’s rights and creating our class charter, then Mrs Short worked with us on the topic of growth mindsets.
On Wednesday we were really fortunate to have a visit from the author, , who encouraged us to draw some of the characters from her books. Later in the day we learned about how to punctuate dialogue correctly and created som short pieces of writing using this skill.
Thursday was a bright and sunny day for most of the time, so after some digital learning in the morning, we headed outside for some orienteering and maths work before beginning to make some wind chimes while focusing on developing our teamwork and creativity skills.
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