Welcome back everyone!

We are loving this new Spring-like weather, albeit still a little chilly!

This month, in Literacy, we have been focusing on punctuation, direct speech, confusing words and auxiliary verbs, in Grammar.

In Writing, our focus has been on story writing, using a narrative voice, to carefully and coherently communicate our imaginative ideas to tell a story. We also progressed to develop characters, using the 5 points of characterisation – physical appearance, inner thoughts, actions, reactions & speech – delving deeper than what may appear on the surface. This was fairly tricky at first but we worked extremely hard & have described some brilliant characters! This week, we will be tasked with writing another story, inspired by an unexplained image, which we will bring to life by incorporating another character description. This morning, as our grammar task, we took some more time to use a thesaurus effectively to locate synonyms to describe a character we had sketched, from head to toe!

In Maths, the Cones have made brilliant progress in their learning of data-handling, interpreting and drawing a range of charts and graphs, as well as collecting their own data to display. The Pyramids learnt about a range of shapes and their properties, as well as number patterns, and also touched upon pie charts recently. The Triangular Prisms have shown perseverance when focusing on a tricky new topic – mixed and improper fractions.

This week, we will be making our pitches to persuade our audience that our products are unbeatable! We are going to use persuasive language, visually engaging aids, as well as our presentation skills to communicate this. We have a classroom sensory experience, a safety detection watch, a pet home, amongst other innovative ideas on offer!

Last week, we had an impromptu debate in class focused on – ‘Which is more important: the heart or the brain?’ This was a tricky one as we presented convincing and valid points on both sides. It also linked in nicely with our Science learning about the vital organs. We then viewed the dissection of an animal heart, to see the arteries and vessels. This also led to a discussion about heart attacks, cardiovascular issues, how to keep our hearts healthy, and we even learnt how to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre, as well as CPR!

This week, as we have now finished our reading of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, we are going to watch the film together as a class; this will give us an opportunity to draw comparisons with the book. We have also been working on our Book Reviews, which we will share at the end of this week!

Finally, we are really looking forward to sharing our Expedition PowerPoint presentation with you this week! Keep an eye on Google Classroom for this!

Can you believe that is Term 2 almost over? We can’t believe it is the Easter holidays already. We hope everyone enjoys a wonderful, restful & well-deserved break when it comes!

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Welcome back to our P7D blog for February’s update!

We are enjoying the lighter, brighter weather although it is very cold. This afternoon, we enjoyed some team games outside for P.E. and practised our ball skills, playing basketball.

We have had a busy February. We began another Engineering project, inspired by James Dyson, this time looking at various engineering disciplines, such as design, mechanical & civil types. We then analysed Dyson technology within certain products – the hair wrap & the Animal vacuum.  We even took apart one of its parts to look at it more closely & put it back together,  using effective team-working skills – this allowed us to see just how much goes into the creation of each and every piece developed. We then moved on to sketch our own products, adhering to our specific design brief and think about the materials, dimensions and costs involved in its production. Today, we calculated our profit margin, by researching manufacturing costs and came up with a suitable selling price, based on our competitors’ existing products. Many of us felt that our higher price points were justified, as our products have so much to offer! We are at the early stages of design and build – we will continue this tomorrow. We understand that the design/build process is iterative and constantly evolving. We also designated a ‘lead’ engineer to delegate responsibilities to ensure effective working in the time given.

Through this project, we are developing many of our meta-skills and are now more able to articulate these. For instance, we have been collaborating incredibly well, yet focusing and making sense of things on our own when this is required. We are becoming far more skilled at making judgements and taking initiative. Our communication with one another is also improving through these kinds of tasks and also our Expedition work, which has seen us create models, Canva presentations, a rap and videos. We are looking forward to sharing this learning with you at the end of March!

We thoroughly enjoyed our first visit as a class to St. Ninian’s yesterday. We all behaved exceptionally well and loved doing different activities in Design & Tech, Business etc… It was great to experience a ‘day-in-the-life’ experience of high school, as it’s only a few more months until we’ll be there full-time!

That’s all for now. We hope you enjoyed reading about what we’ve been up to. Speak to you soon!

Primary 7D & Mrs Fraser 🙂