P5.2 visited P7.2 to hear about all their Spooky Stories. Primary 5 heard at least two stories before playing ‘Knock over the Ghosts’ and ‘dookin’ for apples. Primary 7 had a lot of fun launching their books and getting into the Halloween spirit with Primary 5.
Many thanks to Primary 5 for being such a lovely audience.
It’s the week of Halloween and P7 have been busy preparing for their Halloween spooky stories book launch. Everyone has been adding the finishing touches to their book and focusing on reading their stories aloud with lots of expression and suspense.
On Monday, P2 visited P7.2 to hear from five different authors who had all written excellent Halloween stories aimed at infants. They all loved hearing the stories from our talented P7 pupils and some even joined in reading or answering questions on the story at the end. Our P7 authors were delighted to hear such positive feedback about their writing and hard work.
Once the children had heard at least two stories, they went outside to play ‘Knock over the Ghosts’. The P2 pupils got 3 attempts to knock over all 6 ghosts to win a house point! Our P7 pupils were very encouraging and welcoming with all the children.
Primary 7 and Primary 2 had a great time getting into the Halloween spirit together. Roll on the 31st October where the rest of our authors will launch their books to P5. 📚👻
P7.2 went on a hunt to find 5 pumpkins that had been cleverly hidden around the school grounds. The children chose to work in teams or on their own to uncover all 5 of the pumpkins that would be used for our observational drawing art lesson later that afternoon. We had great fun! 
Primary 7 love to write and Miss Hamilton set the challenge of writing a short chapter book with a Halloween theme. As a class, we studied various Halloween-themed and horror books. We put them into three categories:
We decided our theme and audience and started to plan our stories. We created our own Success Criteria, stating what we thought would be in an engaging spooky story.
Over the week, we planned, wrote and edited our stories. We used Microsoft Publisher to create our books and covers. Once we had checked our own spelling, punctuation and grammar, we sent our stories off to the publishers (Miss Hamilton) to read them.
If our stories had been published, they would be printed for us to add illustrations. We can’t wait to share our stories with everyone at Halloween!
As part of our World War 2 topic, P7.2 shared their learning with family and the schools. We worked really hard on our presentation skills when performing on stage. Thank you to everyone who supported us in our prepartations and on the day.
P7.2 expressed an interest in cooking and learning how families used their rationed food to create meals. Therefore, we baked an eggless sponge using a recipe similar to one from the 1940s. We had a great afternoon and learned lots of life skills when cooking.
The groups completed their boats, ready to set sail and hold their cargo. The group that designs a boat that carries the most cargo before sinking, wins! We all had lots of fun creating our boats.
We have been investigating BUOYANCY and learning the science behind what makes things float and sink. We have carried out experiments and made close observations, explaining the conclusion using scientific vocabulary.
We understand that the density of an item has a lot to do with its buoyancy so we made predictions before our experiment. We had fun testing a range of items to see if they would float – we were quite surprised by a few! Did you know that a paper clip will sink but a can of Diet Coke will float?
After our experiment, Miss Hamilton launched The Clay Challenge. Each group was given 100g lump of clay which sunk when placed in water. The challenge was to make the clay float by changing its shape. We soon learned that even though density is important in making things float or sink, so is the shape of the object. Most groups managed to get their clay to float. Well done!
We worked together and persevered even when our attempts didn’t work…it soon paid off!
We kept trying until we were successful.
We can’t wait to start our engineering STEM Challenge, Building Boats, next week now that we know so much about Buoyancy. We finished the day with a good sing song…thankfully all of our boats stayed afloat!
Science is so much fun!
Currently, we are learning about World War 2 and the key people and events that played an important part in our history.
We have explored how World War 2 started after the First World War and the rise of Adolf Hitler. Today we took a trip back to 1939 and studied the declaration of war in more depth, learning about key historical dates and events as well as the emotion involved in hearing that our country was now at war.
We later decided to write newspaper articles sharing the devastating news about the war. We studied the key features of newspapers, focusing on their use of layout and lettering to engage the reader.
To bring our newspapers to life, we needed real-life quotes from key politicians and civilians. We got ourselves into our fictional 1939 characters and split into two groups, journalists and interviewees. We had a lot of fun interviewing one another – emotions were high!
We are very proud of our newspaper reports. A lot of effort was taken to ensure they were eye-catching and informative. Stay tuned to see who has been awarded Star Writer for their efforts…
