Today on our second field trip of the week, we went to Amsterdam to visit the museum of the world-renown artist Vincent Van Gogh.

Our first task of the day was to find out who Vincent was? Well, we know him as a famous artist, known throughout the world but when he was alive he was unknown and poor. After his death, his painting completely changed the way the World looked at painting and some of his paintings are the most recognisable images in history.

Vincent has also inspired many other artists from writers, filmmakers and musicians.

After viewing some of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings, the children were inspired to create their own masterpieces.

The first artwork is this recreation of one of Van Gogh’s self-portraits by Jamie. It’s a great likeness!

Above is Dylan’s interpretation of the painting Sunflowers.

Lucy has created this wonderful version of sunflowers. Vincent’s work is all about vibrancy and Lucy has definitely captured this here.

Both George (above) and Zac (below) recreated one of my favourite Van Gogh paintings, Starry Night.

Alesha also draws inspiration from Starry Night.

Looks like this painting is one of your favourites too. Here’s Gregor with his version.

Daniel has completed his Virtual Field Trip Logbook for today.

Here is a closer look at his sunflower sketch.

Ibrahim has also finished his logbook entry for the Van Gogh Museum and I’m sure art historians will be pleased that he thinks that Vincent was “a decent artist.”

Here are a few presentations that I received yesterday after the blog was published.

Lucy completed her animal research with the sloth.

Lucy has also created a very colourful and creative food web for the sloth. I love the happy fruit 😃!

This is Kameron’s Kola PowerPoint.

Here is another tiger presentation from Dylan.

Daniel completed his Virtual Field Trip Logbook for yesterday’s trip to San Diego Zoo.

Ibrahim’s logbook.

This is Alesha’s logbook entry on elephants…

… a close look at her beautiful sketch. Fantastic!

Delisha looked at panda when we went to San Diego.

Finally, this is Jamie’s presentation on the honey badger. I’m sure that you agree that the children have been working very hard so far in Field Trip Week.

Today is the first day in our Field Trip Week where we get a chance to take our learning beyond the confines of our Google classroom. I have chosen San Diego Zoo our the first stop, giving the children the opportunity to research into one particular animal of their choice.

I also took advantage of Field Trip Week to launch our interactive classroom.  It contains almost everything that Google classroom does but looks more visually appealing and a bit bit more fun for pupils.

The children were asked to prepare a report ion their animal in any format they wished. This could be a written report, a PowerPoint presentation, a video, a blue screen video, a stop motion animation, a Chatter Pix video, etc. The list is endless! Zac decided to do his report in PowerPoint on Polar bears. I have converted this to a video to allow us to play it in our blog post.

Ibrahim has produced this presentation on tigers.

Aatish’s presentation on jaguars.

Alesha created this informative and fun presentation on elephants.

Alex had decided to visually recreate his animal of choice, the giraffe.

Lewis did his research on leopard sharks and…

… also completed a food chain.

Kara has decided to complete her report on cheetahs using video. Well done, a lot of hard work here!

Jamie has filled in his daily Field Trip Logbook for Day 1 and he enjoyed watching the live cams from San Diego Zoo.

On the final day of Emoji Week, we were writing emoji book summaries. To kick us off I created this summary for E B White’s “Charlotte’s web”.

Now that the gauntlet has well and truly been thrown down, have a look at the amazing book summaries the children created.

Jamie’s summary of “The Land of Roar”by Jenny McLachlan.

Wint summarised “Kensuke’s Kingdom” by Michael Morpurgo.

“The Beast of Buckingham Palace” by David Walliams is summarised by Lewis.

And finally, Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr Fox”  by Alesha. A great way to finish Emoji Week I’m sure you’ll agree.

I’ve decided that we need to take our learning outside the classroom and that’s why I’m announcing that it’s Field Trip Week next week. We are planning on visiting a different location every week and take part in some fun activities along the way.

Super exciting news!

I sent off our interview questions to Abi yesterday afternoon and I heard back from her that evening. Despite having one toddler and one 8-week old baby, she found time to video her response to all of our questions. So, this morning I have been busy editing the children’s questions and Abi’s answers together, and I can finally share the results with you below.

Wasn’t that awesome? Again, I would like to say a huge thank you to Abi and the children who took the time to participate in this fantastic opportunity.

Following on from yesterday’s Design an Emoji task, Lewis has designed not one but two great emojis.  These emojis express perfectly the emotion when your team is winning or losing. I assume these emojis come in different colours other than St Mirren’s 😂. Excellent job!👍

The Say it with Emojis activity is testimony to the fact that you can express anything with emojis. The above one is Lea’s.

This is Lucy’s completed questionnaire.  Inspired by our interview with Abi, I created this short questionnaire for the children to complete first in writing then in emoji.

I think they have done a great job with this task. This is Alex’s.

Ibrahim’s Say it with Emojis.

And finally, Lewis’s questionnaire answers. Now for something more challenging tomorrow.

I received great news today, Abi Elphinstone, the author of our class novel Sky Song, replied to our email and she hopes to answers our interview questions in the next few weeks 🤞. She is currently on maternity leave, as she has just had her baby, and also has a toddler running around the house, so she is doing us a big favour. Thanks Abi!

In Numeracy and Mathematics today, we were reinforcing our skills with plotting coordinates on a Cartesian diagram and the results were hopefully in keeping with this week’s theme 😉.  This is Jamie coordinate emoji 😍.

This is Lea’s 😍.

And two from Wint 😍 😉

Every year, the Unicode Consortium, a group of tech companies and volunteers with backgrounds in coding, technology, and linguistics, approve about 50 to 100 emojis from thousands of ideas submitted from people all over the world.

In order for the panel to consider it, the emoji must be one that can be used often, as well as one that is different from existing emojis. Today, the children were asked to design their own emoji that might be considered for inclusion in their catalogue of emojis.

Above we can see Lea’s emoji and she has used a digital drawing app to create hers. Great job!

How did you do in yesterday’s Teacher Name Emoji quiz? Lucy and Jamie did very well, guessing all 10 names correctly which is amazing considering some of the names were a huge stretch 😂.

👩 ⚡ ❌T (sorry Mrs Curran)

We are discovering that we can use emojis in many different ways this week.  Just like learning any other language, once you have the rules you can decode anything. In Numeracy and Mathematics, we have been breaking the code and discovering that

👦👦👦👧👩‍🦽🏥🕛🌕

into Midnight Gang by David Walliams. Later this week, we will be accurately summarising whole novels just using emojis.

Today, I emailed Abi Elphinstone our interview question. The questions that the children came up with were amazing so 🤞 she replies back soon.

As the title implies this is the start of Emoji Week 😀 We 🦵kicked off the week with a nice easy quiz, or at least I 💭 thought it was until I started receiving lots of comments from the children on Google classroom 😂.

Why don’t you give it a go?

Try to work out the 🧑‍🏫 teachers from their emoji clues. Sorry, the colours are ❌ not correct but this happened when converting the 🎁 📁presentation file from Google Slides to Microsoft PowerPoint.

I will hopefully have lots more emoji fun to share with you in the next few days. 👍

Next week is June and I thought it would be a great time to inject a little bit of fun into Google classroom as I assume that a lot of us are over it by now. That is why I am officially naming next week Emoji Week!

Originally, I was very opposed to using emojis particularly in a classroom setting but recently I have learned the importance of using them to convey the thoughts and feelings behind our written words. Communicating solely with pupils through typed comments and blog posts, misunderstandings can happen and the tone of messages can be lost or even altered.

For example, when you respond with “Ok…” it appears that you are frustrated or feeling impatient. When you utilize emojis and instead respond with “Ok… 😊” it causes less worry and more displays a true understanding from the sender.

Further research illustrated the importance and far-reaching effect of these modern-day pictographs, as Oxford Dictionaries named the “face with tears of joy” pictograph its Word of the Year 2015. Educational scholars have indicated that emojis can help pupils link ideas and can lead to greater understanding, engagement and learning. So who am I to disagree?

All that’s left to be said is

🌞🏡😎🍹🍔👋

How did you get on with yesterday’s Book Island Quiz? Answers are posted on Google classroom if you want to check.

Quizzes were one of the things that were highlighted in my recent Distance Learning Evaluation form: the children have really enjoyed participating in them and have asked for more quizzes. Therefore, I thought it might be fun if the children created their own Book Island Quiz. One of today’s activities was to create your own book character island, littering the island with visual clues to who lives there. Unfortunately, I can’t share any of the islands with you at the moment, because that would give it away, but rest assured that the children have been sharing lots of great drawings.

I will create a new Book Island Quiz using the children’s work in the next week or so.

A few late entries from last week’s themed Lego Week. Delisha has made her time-lapse Lego build movie using captions.

Hibah build a speed boat here.

And finally, Alesha builds a scooter for her minifigure.

The questions for Abi Elphinstone have been arriving and I will hopefully select which ones we will put to the author. So far, more than 50 questions have been submitted and I will have to get them down to a more reasonable figure.

Welcome back! I hope everyone enjoyed their long weekend break.

EXCITING NEWS!

Over the last few weeks, I have been busy organising something exciting in the background and I finally revealed what it is on Google classroom this morning. Our topic last term was “Our Frozen Worlds” as this was the ecosystem assigned to Primary 6 as part of the “Our Planet” STEM fortnight. Through this topic, we learned about the people, animals and environments in the frozen poles of our world.  A core part of this topic was our class novel Sky Song. I chose this novel for many reasons: the setting was in the frozen North, the author is Scottish but many because it is a great adventure story that would challenge the children.

As I thought, the children really loved this story of a boy and girl on a quest to save their world. We used the book as an inspiration for many activities in and out of school:  Ice Queen portraits, Winterfang Palace 3D models, Letters to Ma, Eska’s diary entries, Erkenwald cartography, animal fact files, inventing villains and magical creatures, and much, much more.

I am so impressed with their work that I contacted the author, Abi Elphinstone, and told her all about P623. She was so pleased to hear about all the things we have been doing that she agreed to be interviewed by our class and even hinted about an exclusive gift that she would like to give the children.

I have asked the children to submit any questions they would like to ask Abi and I will keep you informed of how this is progressing.

A few weeks ago, I posted my first Book Island quiz on Google classroom and I asked the children to identify which book character lives on each of the islands.

Today, I post the second Book Island quiz. Can you identify who lives on each island?