Primary 7 are kicking off by working in groups to research famous mathematicians and explore the impact they have had on the world!
Famous Mathematicians
Multiplication and Division by 10, 100 and 1000
We were using people to represent numbers and moving them a certain number of places in the place value order. We were multiplying and dividing by 10, 100 and 1000. We used a hoop to represent our decimal point.
Tomorrow’s Inventors
Today we presented our inventions and innovations to the dragons. Miss Edmonston, Mr Connor and Mrs Maxwell came to judge our inventions and pitches. Some were a bargain, too good refuse, offering over 20% of their company for only £1000, for an item they would be charging £150 for! That would make the dragons a huge profit if successful. Others priced themselves out the market looking for a slightly unrealistic ten trillion pounds investment! Over the course of the topic we researched gaps in the market and everyday problems people would like us to solve. We used a logbook to record and date all our ideas. We then checked if anything similar already existed. If it did we didn’t give up straight away, we thought about innovations to improve the existing product. We considered our target market and where our product would sell, we researched how much similar items cost and thought about our materials. Ecofriendly items were a big plus! We then created posters to advertise our product, leaflets to explain them and used our graphic skills to produce a labelled diagram to use during our dragon pitch. In the end SpecTators won, Stretchable Soccer came second and Refuse Reducer came in third. The dragons were impressed with every pitch! We all enjoyed the topic, especially the celebration afterwards.
Space
This week we have been learning about the number of moons each planet has and why this number is not always the same from one year to the next. We also designed our own satellites and made rockets. Alasdair told us about NASA’s recent success in landing a reuseable rocket. This is a huge achievement and will impact on space travel greatly! We tested the rockets and used our knowledge of distance, speed and time to calculate their speed. It was a lot of fun!
Sumdog
Congratulations P6a! You finished this week in 8th place overall, out of 111 East Renfrewshire classes that competed and qualified to enter . Your average score was 850! Wonderful work!
Abby’s final position was actually joint 7th place with three pupils from other schools, with 985/1000. Great work, Abby! Tom was joint 14th in the authority and Cameron was joint 42nd with 981 and 954, respectively. As you can see the competition was stiff! There were 2739 pupils competing so this is quite an achievement!
Next time we compete it will be a national contest with 1450 classes currently entered. As always there are 1000 questions, aimed at your level, and accuracy is key. If we all answer our 1000 questions we can climb even further up the table as the score is a class average for correct calculations, no matter how many you answerred. Last year Mrs Horne and Mrs Jamieson’s class won access to all areas of sumdog, not only maths, which was an exciting tool for their class to use while learning in P7.
Mark the 3rd – 9th of May in your diaries!
Sumdog Update
We are now in 8th position in the East Renfrrewshire contest. Congratulations to Abby who has completed 1000 questions and is currently in 8th position overall with 985 correct answers! There is still time to climb up the leaderboard. The contest ends at 8pm tonight. Good luck!
Sumdog – Wednesday
This week we are participating in the ‘East Renfrewshire Sumdog Challenge’. P6a are currently sitting in 10th postion with an average score of over 300 points! Keep it up!
Our P6a Coke and Mentos Experiment
In P6a we have been busy we have been doing some experiments! The coke and mentos eruption, browning apples and also…dancing raisins.
Each time we did the coke experiments we changed our variable. It was very intriguing. After we had done the experiments we all went into groups. One was looking at different types of cokes, another one was the different types of mentos, there were two more groups. In our groups we made bar charts and information boxes telling the person who was reading our poster about what we were doing. We drew the graphs but also made them on computers using excel. This was very confusing because we have had to learn something new but it was great fun! We also wrote a report about it in our writing jotters and stuck in some charts in the results section.
The dancing raisins were hilarious because they just kept jumping up because when Alka Seltzer was added to water it produced gas which attached to the raisins and made them go up and down. We wrote a report in our writing jotters, but with less help this time. It was very enjoyable!
Making Soup And Pizza
In class we made soup and pizza.In the soup we cubed potatoes, cut onions, peeled carrots and then we chopped them too. We also put in stock pots and carefully cleaned lentils. Then we stirred it. For the pizza we had groups. We had flour and we made dough. We put it in a tray, covered it and left it for a while. My group put sweetcorn, mozzarella and some normal cheese on top. We put in the oven and waited. When it was done it looked so good and it was better than Dominoes. My group was proud of our pizza.
 
John Muir Outdoor Project
We researched John Muir in class, creating fact files. We then chose an aspect of the outdoors to focus on as part of our project homework. We made dens, grew flowers, studied insects and trees, made rafts to sail, made bird feeders and homes for hedgehogs. We then delivered really interesting solo talks telling the class about our investigations and creations.
