We were transported to a Victorian classroom in 1884 during our visit to Scotland Street Museum.

Boys wore a traditional waistcoat and collar and girls were dressed in a smock. We were seated in individual wooden desks and had to address our teacher as Madam.

We were tested on our mental arithmetic and handwriting. We wrote on traditional chalk boards and used a quill with ink.

We learned Victorian children were caned or given the belt for talking, being late, having untidy appearance or untidy work. We thought our teacher was absolutely trerrifying and were thankful that she was just an actress!

At the end we took part in drill and had to follow strict instructions.

We all thoroughly enjoyed our afternoon but were pleased to be returning to 2019 and Cross Arthurlie Primary.

As part of our Victorians topic, we have been learning about famous inventions and inventors.  We were given the task to become inventors and create our very own invention and then present it to the class in a Dragons Den style lesson.

We had to think carefully about our invention, its purpose and whether it solved any modern day problems.  We had to be prepared to answer a range of challenging questions from the judges and audience. Some people wrote feedback slips for each inventor and gave them a star rating. 

We throughly enjoyed trying to win over the Dragons with our inventions. Have a look at our creative inventions below. 

We were pleased to welcome our local MSP Tom Arthur to extend our learning about The Scottish Parliament. We posed a range of questions  on issues including Brexit and Scottish Independence.

We all had a WILD day out at Edinburgh Zoo.

Our first stop was to the Confucius Classroom to share our Mandarin skills and learn some new words.

Then of course we had to see the pandas next. We had to be very quiet so we didn’t disturb his sleep.

The weather stayed dry as we explored to see penguins, birds, koalas, wallabies, monkeys, tigers and lions.

We had an action packed morning working with the rugby coach from Whitecraigs Rugby Club. We improved our passing and defending skills playing a range of games.

We loved welcoming all our visitors to share our learning about the Victorians and artist William Morris.

We created our own wallpaper patterns by carving a ‘natural or floral’ design into a polystyrene square. We then printed each square using natural colours such as green, yellow, brown or red.

Election Day was a great success with everyone casting their vote for their favourite political party after listening to the leader’s speech and the party manifesto.

We learned that votes are cast in a ‘Polling Station’ and each person must get checked off the voting register so no one can vote twice.

Each person is given a ballot paper to vote and they must mark a X cross next to the party to be a valid vote, if the person does not do this then it is known as a ‘spoiled vote’. One person in our class forgot this rule and when counting votes we discovered a ballot paper with a tick on it so we did not count this as a valid vote.

Successful candidates…

Congratulations to the Wild Life Party who had a landslide victory. Well done on all your hard work and preparation.

We had an exciting afternoon campaigning for votes. Our party leaders gave interesting speeches to persuade voters and the rest of the party handed out their party propaganda.

We have learned so much about the process of making a new law, devolved and reserved powers and even found out the current political issues about Brexit.

But most importantly we have been busy writing our own manifesto,   party leader’s speech and designing advertising posters for our Election Campaign. Each party will present their policies and persuade as many voters as they can on Thursday afternoon and our polling station will open on Friday.

Good luck to all the parties.

As part of our learning in Social Studies we are focusing on The Scottish Parliament. We don’t know much about what the Parliament does and we are looking forward to learning lots of important information about the features of a democracy.

Today we were organised into ‘Political Parties’ and agreed on our party colour, logo and name and designed our party rosette.

Watch out for updates as our Election Campaign gets underway…