This term we have started learning about John Muir. John Muir is one of the most famous explorers and conservationists. John Muir was born in Dunbar, near Edinburgh in 1838. He became known for his fascination with nature and how to conserve it. He introduced the concept of National Parks. These days, there is a charity named after John Muir called the John Muir Trust and various walks and paths in his name.
So far, to gain the John Muir Award we have:
conducted litter picks
created a portrait of John Muir
conducted a Tree Health Survey
created natural art using various pieces of nature from our school grounds
conducted a bird count
clear an area to help us conserve our grounds
worked with the Neilston Development Trust to plan various vegetables
We will be continuing to work towards gaining the John Muir Award and are looking forward to completing our journey!
our science topic has been the Solar System this term. So far we have created posters, newspaper reports, leaflets and power points during our writing. We were learning to create informative texts.
We used our newspaper reports about the first ever moon landing and we changed them into a script for a news report. You can see some examples on our school Twitter. We also have been working on taking notes from a text. We watched informative videos on the planets and took notes then created a mind map poster.
We have also made power points to share information about all of the 8 planets in our solar system.
During art, we created papier-mache planets using different sized balloons to try and make scaled down replicas. We have not yet finished but we are well on our way to a classroom sized solar system.
Jessica and Beth S making JupiterLaurie and Callum making Venus
Our class trip was to the Science Centre this year. We went with P5a , Miss Macdonald, Miss Watt, Mrs Muir and our parent helper – Mrs Korabinska. A huge thanks to Mrs Korabinska for coming with us to help out.
We visited each of the three floors in the science centre. We had our lunch outside as it was a beautiful day. We also visited the shop.
We also took part in a Crazy Construction lab where we made cars from junk materials. We used a battery powered propeller and then raced our cars. We had a super day!
Grace – My favourite thing was the hurricane. It was lot’s of fun.
Darryl – I liked the lab best because we got to make the cars and I liked using the hot glue gun.
Connor – I liked the pull up bars on the second floor .
In Science we were learning about sound. We researched how animals communicate. We learned about dolphins, whales, bats and elephants. We used a search engine to find good websites and then took notes. We used these notes in our writing lesson to make a leaflet about animal communication.
We also conducted an experiment to show how sound travels. We conducted a string telephone experiment. We worked in pairs using string , scissors and two plastic cups to make a string telephone.
Cameron – If you pulled the string tighter you could hear better.
Taylor – If the string wasn’t pulled tight you could not hear.
Olivia – Sometimes the voices were very loud and I got a fright.
In Science we are learning about how sound vibrations are carried by waves throught the air. We used the Read to Learn strategy to identify the key words in a text all about the five senses. We then used these key words to create a new text of our own which was a poster all about the five senses. We drew an illustration of each of the five senses , describing them using key words and scientific vocabularly.
We chose an appropriate lauout for our posters and used a range of punctuation, openers, connectives and WOW words.
