This week we continued our health and wellbeing focus of learning about growth mindset.  We understand the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset.  Our learning this week has been about parts of the brain and how they can influence our behaviour.  We created models of the brain using knex to show the prefrontal cortex (the wise leader), the amygdala (the guard dog), the hippocampus (the librarian) and the neurons (the connections).

Thank you to everyone who visited our class on Wednesday and Thursday this week. The learners really enjoyed sharing their learning and classroom with you.

Have a lovely weekend!

Over the last few weeks, Primary 6 have been lucky to have several special guests. Our guests have supported us to develop our language learning skills within French and British Sign Language (BSL)! Thank you to the S6 pupils from Eastwood High School who prepared and delivered very interactive and fun experiences over the last three weeks.  We will continue our fantastic BSL lessons with Emma in November and December.

This week P6C had a very exciting week! Mr Atkinson planned a fantastic trip to the Sky Academy Studios in Livingstone. This was an excellent experience for the learners to showcase their learning of AI, whilst also having the opportunity to apply their meta skills and gain first hand experience of working within tv production.

A special thank you to the staff at the Sky Academy for making us feel so welcome and to all the parent volunteers who very kindly gave up their time to support this experience.

Hello to all the P6C blog readers, it’s Mr Atkinson here! As you will know this year I am doing NCCT for P6C with a focus on developing Crookfurs Enquiry Based Learning approach so I wanted to give you an update of what we have been doing.

Building on our knowledge from the P5 Learning Journeys, the class have explored  what can be constructed on land and investigated the pros and cons. They also applied their curiosity by finding out the impact the different land uses have on the environment. Equipped with this information, the pupils utilised their Meta-Skills of collaborating and communicating to prepare for their debates on this issue. I was highly impressed with their thorough research and well-structured arguments resulting in some compelling points being made. In pairs the pupils have also written fact files about how specific flowers have benefited modern society, such as how they are used for medicine and textile, which they presented and shared to their peers.

The class has recently been learning about two new Meta-Skills, leading and feeling. We first discussed how there are many ways to display leadership qualities and that they can be used differently depending on the situation. Then the pupils were challenged to visualise and think of everyday examples of leaders. We also reflected on why it is important to listen to our feelings but also be considerate of others. Following this, everyone drew a picture of their ‘happy place’ which can be used as a strategy to help self-regulate our emotions.

P6C have also just started their new Learning Journey, Evolution of AI. The pupils have divided into groups and are currently researching different themes of how AI has impacted our lives. They will then utilise this knowledge by creating a TV report on their chosen area at the Sky Up Academy Studios which they will be visiting next week!

This week we started our new maths focus: equivalent fractions!  We are applying our knowledge of fractions, whilst training to be hairstylists and barbers.  All our maths tasks will help us become more confident about fractions and understand how they are used in real life.

This week was our final time learning about light and our first learning journey of P6.  The class decided to showcase their learning and invited their P1 buddies to provide them with an opportunity to share their learning.  The class created four stations including a clay symmetry display, a chance for the P1’s to create puppet shadows, they shared their presentation posters that they made with Adobe Express and they shared their jotters too.

Mrs Docherty and I are looking forward to planning more buddy events throughout this year!

I hope you have a lovely October break.

This week P6C celebrated maths week and this years theme was ‘wild maths’.  We had lots of maths focused experiences this week including:

• We learned about symmetry throughout our learning journey.  We created symmetrical buildings with Kapla.
• We continued learning about symmetry and created symmetrical clay models using things we found in the Woodland.  We created prints with natural resources and explored lines of symmetry.  We plan on painting them in a couple of weeks.
• We have also been learning about money.  During one of our tasks we pretended we got a new job as the head cashier at Nandos and we had to calculate the totals and change.
• We also learned about budgeting. We created a weekly meal plan then used supermarket websites to find the total of our weekly food shopping list.
• We had a live lesson with Barclays bank about safe spending and saving.
• We incorporated maths into our PE lessons and created symmetrical balances during our gymnastics lesson.

We hope you have a lovely September weekend!

Our meta skill of the week was cooperation. Although we have also developed our adaptability skills whilst we have continued to work hard in a slightly darker environment last week. It was a spooky coincidence that the lights went out on our first week of our new learning journey: how is light used creatively.

We used our cooperation skills when…

• Revising our French colours and playing twister
• Working together to order the times on our post-it notes without speaking
• Working with a partner during our hockey lesson
• Exploring light and reflections

This week in P6C we have been focusing on the meta-skill creativity.

We used our creativity when…

• Creating triorama’s to present our global goal action plans
• Planning for a debate about deforestation
• Using Numicon to help solve division calculations
• Using Knex to create an invention to help target a global goal
• Creating a model using Kapla to solve a problem in maths

This week we focused on the meta-skill of cooperation and reflected on this today. We had lots of experiences which helped us develop this skill including the Academy Awards problem solving challenge, working together on our fitness stations and the dictionary scavenger hunt.  The class reflected on some of the challenges and set personal targets for next week.

We hope you have a lovely weekend!

Miss McNeil and P6C