Book Week Scotland

This week we have been celebrating Book Week Scotland. This year the theme was hope. We worked in groups to create a book chain with books that we have read. and that we feel have a theme of hope in them.

Some of the books included:

Wonder: Hope of making friends and being accepted.

Harry Potter: A story not just of magic, but of friendship, love, bravery, and, most of all, of hope and love.

WW2

We also learned about the Blitz during WW2. We created fact sheets on Google slides and also created a Blitz art using paints and black paper for building silhouettes. These turned out great.

Last week we presented our inventions to Miss Tenby and finished our Apprentice topic! This week we have started our WW2 topic and it has been a busy one!

Time line of key events 

We worked in pairs to research key events from World War 2. Different events including:

• Germany invading Poland
• The Battle of France
• The Blitz
• The Dambusters Raid

We then created a big class timeline for our topic wall.

Allies and Axis

After completing our timeline we spent an afternoon learning about the allies and the axis. We then used atlases to plot the different allies and axis by giving it a key.

Propaganda posters

As part of our persuasive writing unit, we explored different propaganda posters that were used during WW2 to persuade people to:

• stop wasting food,
• send their children to the countryside
• work in factories (women)
• reuse clothes
• grow their own food.

Then we had a go at creating our very own propaganda posters!

We are now at our final task for our Apprentice topic. This is where we will combine all the skills that we have used and developed over the last few weeks and bring it all together into one task.

In our teams, we have come up with one new invention and have been busy creating a logo, branding campaign, advertising campaign and pricing strategy. We have linked this with our writing and wrote a persuasive letter to Dragon’s Den to persuade them to invest in our product.

Next week we will present our invention pitches to another teacher who will score us based on our passion, presentation and product.

Watch this space!

First week back after the October week sure has been a busy one! This week we focussed on a sales task for our Apprentice topic. We had the challenge of selling biscuits for tokens. We had to:

• Create a pricing strategy
• Come up with special offers
• Make posters for our stalls
• Persuade/convince customers to buy from us.

Friday was day of selling and we set up our stalls then opened for business. Primary 7C came to buy from us and we went shopping in Primary 7A. It was so much fun!

We watched the short clip on Literacy shed called Alma and have completed many activities on this. For the last 2 weeks we have been exploring the character of Alma. Her appearance, her actions, her thoughts and her feelings. We explored the definitions of the words:

• Temptation
• Curiosity
• Rebellion
• Consequence

Then linked these to Alma and how she represented each one in the short movie. We then went on to write our very own character descriptions based on Alma.

Tim Burton

We made some lovely masterpieces inspired by Tim Burton. We linked this to our Alma project by creating doll portraits from the clip Alma. We used charcoal and created shadows and highlight on the faces. These turned out amazing!

Another busy week in Primary 7! This week we had an exciting day on Thursday in which we took part in the Climate Ready Classrooms workshop along with many other schools. This involved watching live lessons to learn about biodiversity, habitats and ecosystems and how these are being affected by humans and climate change. We took part in a series of tasks which helped us understand better the effects of climate change and how we contribute towards it. We ended the day by writing up action plans on how we plan to make our classroom and school more climate friendly. We have yet to finalise our main actions but here are some ideas that we came up with:

• Build a bug hotel.
• Raise money to buy planters.
• Recycle our old clothes and toys.
• Write to an MP to ask for funding for solar panels.
• Recycling bins in the playground.

Have a look at some of the pictures from that day.

We have been exploring ‘Maths through stories’ for Maths Week Scotland.

The Maths Curse

We linked this with our Apprentice topic and had to create a maths themed story book for this week’s challenge. We read the book called ‘The Math Curse’ which is about a girl who overcomes lots of maths challenges in a day. We worked in our groups to then create our own story book about maths problems in a real life context. These books will be displayed in our maths area in class.

Bean Thirteen

We also read the story Bean Thirteen. This book explored prime numbers and we had a go at finding all the prime numbers within 100.

Escape Rooms

We had a go at solving escape room puzzles on chrome books. They were quite challenging but fun at the same time.

This week for our Apprentice topic we had to complete a branding task. We were given a challenge to create branding and marketing for a chocolate brand called ‘Blazin Raisins’. We worked in our teams to draft different design options before selecting the one we were going to go for. We had to think about:

colour

pictures

slogans

Once we were finished we had a discussion about what went well in our team and reviewed our project managers. Primary 7a voted for their favourite bars for us and this was the result:

1st place: Team Alpha Mines

2nd place: Team Aqua Velocity

3rd place: Team Starlight Odyssey

Well done to the rest of the teams! Next week a new challenge awaits!

We started our new topic this week and it has been a great start! Our topic is the theme of enterprise and is called: ‘The Apprentice’

We were put in to teams of 4 and had our first team building challenge! We were given an a3 sheet split into 4 and had to create a house. We were only allowed to draw on our section of paper and were not allowed to touch others. This required a lot of communication and planning.

We also decided our team names. This is what we have so far:

Atomic Extinct

Alpha mines

Team Love

Team Sapphire

Alpha Velocity

Next week we will get our first team challenge! We know it is a branding task but that is all.

We have had a very productive week in 7b! Here is a little overview of everything that we got up to:

Poetry

We continued exploring poetry and wrote our very own cinquain, limericks and haikus. We also had a go at writing a group poem with the theme ‘The Door’.

Imagery

We explored how authors and poets use imagery in their writing to create clearer pictures in the readers mind. We then were given a challenge of reading a poem and drawing what we pictured while reading. Everyone had different images and in the end Mrs Rasul revealed that the poem was actually about a tiger!

The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse

Having explored the themes of friendship, kindness and love, we created a class book inspired by the author and illustrater Charlie Mackesy. We each created our page inspired by his famous book, and then made a class version. Tia and Aarohi kindly offered to make the front cover. This book will now be in our cosy corner for anyone to read.

Vedic Square for maths

As part of maths, we learned about John Napier, one of Scotland’s most famous mathematicians. We then went on to look at maths patterns through a story called the Napier code. The first chapter had us exploring Vedic squares. These squares crate shape patterns based on the positioning of the numbers.