Hi P5b readers, I wanted to update you on what we have been doing in our most recent Learning Journeys since my last entry.

I am delighted to share that the pupils confidently applied many of the Meta Skills when constructing their wonderful models for stopping and collecting marine litter. Whilst working in their groups the pupils displayed brilliant adapting, initiative, collaborating, leading, communicating and critical thinking when proposing and designing a solution to address this global issue. Thank you for the donations of materials, it was greatly appreciated! The class has also utilised their curiosity when investigating different types of litter and then they researched how long it takes for them to degrade. Pupils were shocked to learn about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the state of Arrochar’s beach after discovering it was acting as a sink where litter gathered when it washed ashore. Inspired from the Keep Scotland Beautiful online lesson, the children took notes on the cleanliness of a variety of Scottish waterways and explored what was being done to prevent them being polluted. To help illustrate how marine litter can travel all around the world the children created a map and tracked the journey of 28,000 plastic bath toys that fell overboard and were surprised to learn that even after all these years some rubber ducks were being found in America and Scotland! To deepen their knowledge of the conditions of oceans, the class typed up ‘blogs’ about major environmental incidents and they shared their views on the damage these have had on marine life.  We also discussed how using different colours, shapes, artistic styles and materials can help evoke emotions when looking at artwork. With this in mind, everyone created their own marine themed artwork using tissue paper and litter to highlight the impact humans have on sea life.

This week we started our new Learning Journey called the cost of tourism. This will involve exploring the links between travelling and the impact tourism can have on the environment. P5B have begun to translate  different types of vehicles and common phrases that you might use at an airport into French. The class was then challenged to construct modes of transport using K’Nex and create labels for them in French.

This week we have been learning some ceilidh dances. It’s been great fun!

We have been researching Scotland and Robert Burns and creating presentations to share with the class.

This afternoon was our House Spirit Afternoon, where we had the chance to play games and get to know other people in our house.

This week we have been learning about air resistance and how items like helmets, cars and wheelchairs can be streamlined to help increased speed during races. We investigated air resistance by creating different sized parachutes and seeing how fast they fell. We had a great time!

This week we had a great time creating and performing some drama related to our learning in RME. We recorded videos of each group’s drama performance and loved being able to watch them. They were so creative and the acting was very expressive!

This week we were excited to share our writing with each other. It was all about what didn’t happen during our holidays!

We created Dragon Racers to explore and investigate friction. We have been learning why friction can be useful especially with the weather at the moment!

This week we have been very busy with lots of Christmas themed activities. We used Tinkercard to design shelters for reindeer, completed Christmas co-ordinates and had our Christmas party. It has been a lot of fun!

During writing we wrote a dialogue inspired by ‘The Longest Journey’ advert. We created scripts about the conversation the snowpeople had when the snowman returned from his journey. We looked at the punctuation we had to use and how to set out the conversation. We then acted these out and enjoyed hearing the conversations.

We have had a great time this week creating our Sock Snowmen for the Christmas Fair. We were very creative and even created backstories for our snowmen!

This week we had a taekwondo taster session. It was great fun! We used the pads and developed different punching and kicking skills.

We also said goodbye to Mr Ferguson who has been working  with us for the last five weeks. We have loved having him join our class and will miss him.

Preparations are underway for our Christmas performance!

This week we have been very busy designing and building our own castles. We worked in small groups to gather our ideas and knowledge about the different features of castles. We used the ‘Make Do’ to build our castles, they look fantastic! We really enjoyed having our parents and carers visiting our classroom to help us with the construction. We were also researching different jobs within a castle and completing applications forms for the jobs that we would have liked to have done. In addition, we were learning about various weapons that would have been used in castles.