Thank goodness for that, not huge fans of January. February’s a shorty as well, with a holiday in there, so before you know it we’ll be in March! We’re longing for longer days, the warmer climes, the hope of better things to come …….. Been busy at school, as ever, just getting the head down and working hard. Couple of things hanging over from Christmas to tell you about though….

We were pleased to send off the £75 raised through our Missio Christmas Baubles, we’ll be back on the fundraising path for SCIAF for Lent – it’s not that far away. It was also cool to complete Sarah’s Advent calendar over the course of December. Our Glee Club participants did us proud, we were delighted to see them all perform during the last week – they were super. We had some fun doing some Nativity Drama the first week back. We were supposed to take our performances to Outdoor Learning but the weather beat us – we headed over to the Learning Lodge instead. We all did very well with our World Cup project and congratulations to Umair Z who won ‘the sweep’. A few of us took part in a Maths Challenge, which we did well in too, something a wee bit different.

The major thing of note in January has been this ‘Learning Expedition’ thing that you may have heard about. Basically all classes in the school have been given the topic, ‘Life Beyond Land’. A wide topic indeed with lots of different possibilities. The idea is that we, the pupils (in each class), decide where to take it, follow our own interests, our questions. At the same time, and presumably under the direction of him, show off different skills, different tasks, cover different areas of the curriculum. It’s early days and the first time we’ve done it but it’s quite exciting. We’ve come up with 4 Big Questions that we’re going to investigate before Easter, the first one being: ‘What are some of the traits / characteristics / workings / features of the living things found in our waters?’ We then came up with about fifty little questions that we were going to answer in our small groups. These might lead to new questions and so on…… At the same time we’ve come up with all these different tasks, involving the different curricular areas, that we could complete to show the learning taking place. A new way of working at certain times during the week, but initial thoughts are that we like it.

Not a huge amount else to report in the 3 weeks or so that we’ve been back. We are currently in the middle of Languages Week where we’ve tried out a French tongue twister (and Lily’s mum and dad taught her a couple in Mandarin). We’ve also been practising hard for this coming Friday’s ‘St Cadoc’s does Eurovision’ contest. Mr Burns wanted us to learn some sort of Gypsy Kings song, Bamboleo??? From 1988?!? We said no and opted for Un Poco Loco from Coco. We’ve had a laugh, and should be a laugh on Friday, and tried hard so that’s the main thing. We’ve had an interesting few weeks during Writing where we did three Persuasive Letters – the first one was with Mr Burns – a letter to Andy Robertson to try and get him to come and coach us. The second one, Mr Burns was involved a bit, but we had homework research to do on the cost of living crisis and then write to Nicola Sturgeon to do something about it. We wrote most of that ourselves having been told what a persuasive letter should contain the previous time. Then the third letter was entirely our own choice – further practise at the persuasive skills learned. So, watch out mum and dad! Here I come for that puppy I want, fully armed with a host of persuasive techniques. Did you know that you are the best parents in the world and I love you dearly? We also took part in an online lesson, carrying on from our litter collection week, about an organisation based on picking up litter whilst out walking dogs. Quite a simple idea but an inspirational lady. We managed some raft building at Outdoor Learning and whilst, as you can see from the photo of the girls, we do P.E. in all weathers, we were confined to barracks once and got involved in some crazy dancing. That’s about it for now, nice to catch up!

P5B