Today we all said farewell to Kayleigh. This is her last week at school …

she’s off to Australia next week! We’ll really miss her, but it’s fantastic

that she can keep in touch by posting her adventures on her individual

blog. She’s already made friends over there because we are in touch

with the  AllStars

Check out the comments

she’s been receiving! She’s going to a different part of Australia (they’re in Sydney, she’s off to Perth), but maybe they’ll meet up sometime – who knows!

Mrs V made some Anzac biscuits and even some Lamington cakes.

We found the recipes for  them here   …. They were yummy!!

Anzac Biscuits

Traditional biscuits baked by anxious wives and mothers during World War I, packed in food parcels, and sent to the Australian soldiers in the trenches.

INGREDIENTS
1 cup rolled oats
3/4 cup desiccated coconut
1 cup plain flour
1 cup sugar
125g (4oz) butter
2 tablespoons golden syrup
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda, 1 tablespoon water

Preheat oven to 300F (150C)

Mix oats, flour, sugar and coconut together.
Melt syrup and butter together.
Mix soda with boiling water and add to melted butter and syrup.
Add to dry ingredients.
Place 1 tablespoonfuls of mixture on greased tray (allow room for spreading).
Bake for 20 minutes.
Loosen while warm, cool on trays.
(makes about 35)

Earlier in the day, Neil (Mrs Green’s son) came to school and played the Digiridoo for us …. the videos are uploading now and will be on here soon!

Miss Burton brought in her digiridoo to show us because we’re learning about Australia. James and Rachael are holding it. It looks (and sounds) super! Ryan and Sophie interviewed her to find out more. You can listen to the podcast below.

 Please click on the name below ….. and it will take you to another window. Press the little arrow to begin the podcast.

Ms Burton

Recently we’ve found ourselves mentioned in some very influential blogs!

David Gilmour from East Lothian Council had this to say on his blog.

We’d like to thank him for his great support – he helped us set up our individual blogs and he’s always there to help when we need it (we’ll need to email him again, though …. but this time it’s to tell him that we’re Carronshore Primary and not Carronvale Primary 🙂 !)

We’ve also had a mention on Ewan McIntosh’s blog. He’s always got great ideas about  new ‘blogging tools’ like bubbleshare and pbwikis. Mrs V has learned loads from reading his blog regularly  ….. but we’ll need to email him too, to tell him that the competition winners were chosen before the individual blogs were set up 🙂

The ‘judges’ came to our school and spoke to the pupils about our class blog and our wikis. A few weeks later, we received an email to say we’d won a prize – but we didn’t know what it was until the  ICT fair!

Here we are with our prize – all looking very proud!

We got a silver award – well done all of you!

I’m sorry you couldn’t all come to Carronvale House! It was a lovely afternooon and there were lots of great ICT stalls.

We caught some of the action on our camera. 

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Laura (Mrs V’s niece who helped out in our class a while ago) has just sent a text to say that she will be going to Glasow University soon to study to be a teacher …. good luck, Laura!

John came to our class recently to help us learn how to edit our photograhs for our photoaday project. His mum is a teacher in our school and she told us that he has been named as The Young Photographer of the Year because he came first in the Scottish Photography Press Awards competition (First Scotrail Press Photography Awards 2006).

Well done, John!!

His mum showed us his trophy.

We also interviewed Mrs Tait. She is new to Falkirk Council and she told us all about her job ……… the camera card was full and we were not able to record the answer to the last question so we’ll write it here:

” The highlight of my job is working with pupils in schools. Visiting Carronshore and making this video has been great. On Tuesday of this week, I helped P1s in Airth Primary School with Reading. Working with all th children in all the schools is the highlight of my job.”

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We’d like to say a big ‘Thank You’ to Mrs P and the 07 Allstars (we ‘borrowed’ this picture from their blog) who have offered to help us with our ‘Australia’ topic. They sent an email to say that they would like to be part of our new wiki project ….. it’s going to be very exciting learning together!!

The groups have chosen their topics and have begun to set up their individual spaces. Well done to Marc – his group is investigating Australian Celebrations and he has found a link to help them get started.

Mrs Wells (one of our classroom helpers) visited Australia last year and she has brought in her beautiful photograph albums for us to look at. We’re hoping to interview her next week!

We returned to school today after our Easter break to find the most wonderful surprise! Our friends Mrs P and the AllStars have sent us a beautiful book all about Australia …. and the card is fantastic, too!

We contacted them a few weeks ago and asked for some advice about our new topic, ‘Australia’. They gave us some great ideas and now we’ve set up a wiki and we’re going to write our own ‘Online Book’ based on the tips they gave us about what aspects to study. You can keep tabs on our progress by visiting our wiki Here. Thank you, too, to Mr Upton and the miniLegends for the links they sent us. They are going to be very useful.

We’re really looking forward to getting started on this, and we’d love to hear what you think. We’ll post regular updates on our individual blogs as well! We’d especially like to hear comments from anyone in Australia – what a great opportunity we have here to link our two cultures.

Many, many thanks again to Mrs P and the AllStars 🙂

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 Recently we went on a trip to find out more about life during WW2. We were split into 2 groups. One group was ‘evacuated’ – they really got a feel of what it must have been like … it was scary!

The other group went into a room and looked at real artifacts from the war. They talked about what they had found out.

The groups then swapped over …. it was great!

We took a short video of part of our visit. In it, we are just about to go and get the train to our destination in the countryside. When we got there, a man introduced us to the lady who had agreed to let us live with her. She wasn’t happy with the small amount of money she was given to feed us. She hoped we were very fond of cabbage soup!

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 Next term, we’re going to be learning all about Australia. We contacted some of our Australian ‘blogging’ friends for some advice.

Mr Upton and the mini Legends  sent us this email.

Hi Everyone

I’m the teacher of the Year 3 miniLegends in South Australia. We go to
Glenelg School which is in probably the most famous beach of Adelaide. I
see you are studying Australia – we brainstormed this morning about
different aspects you might like to research. My class were going to leave
some comments and suggestions – I don’t know if that happened. Probably
most of them just said “your blog is really cool” … because it is 🙂

Might I suggest using a couple of websites as springboards to your learning
Check out this excellent site by Jackie Miers
http://www.teachers.ash.org.au/jmresources/
and the equally wonderful one by Sue Lemmer
http://www.teachers.ash.org.au/suel/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page  – and don’t forget to search
Wikipedia

You’re the stars, may your wishes come true

Cheers, Al (sometimes they call me Mr Upton)

Our ’07 AllStars’ friends from Sydney gave us this advice

Hello Carronshore,
How exciting that you are studying Australia. Here are some ideas to get you started – we will have another think later and get back to you!

Settlement – who & when
Landmarks
Australian Aborigines
Aussie slang
Aussie animals
Celebrations

Can’t wait to see your Aboriginal Artworks.

We are studying “Identity” this year too.

What do you know about Australia already?

AllStars

We don’t know vey much yet ….. but all this advice is just great. We’ll be making a start in a couple of weeks and we’ll post regularly about all the things we learn!

Thomas had the children’s full attention as he read them his Easter Bunny story ….. even Sean and Marc look engrossed!!

Sophie really enjoyed sharing her story – all eyes were on her as she told her tale!

Adam, Danni and Jamie had great fun involving the ‘wee ones’ actively as they became great ‘Story Tellers’.

After the story telling session, the Primary One pupils told us how much they had enjoyed the experience …. and the Primary Seven pupils really appreciated their great audience!!

Today we decided to write Easter Bunny tales for our Primary 1 pupils. We are going to visit them tomorrow and read them our stories. We hope they like them (we’ll let you know)!

Jeanan and lisa wrote one called King Bouncer.

Ryan and Sophie wrote a tale called The Easter Bunny.

Maybe you’ll enjoy them, too ….. let us know (and don’t forget to check out all our classmates’ Easter Bunny stories as well!).

Today in class, we began to self assess our recent pieces of writing. We gave ourselves 2 stars………….2 good things about our writing

…… and 1 wish ………. something we thought we could improve.

Unfortunately, the computers began to ‘freeze’ and we had to give up! We’ll try again tomorrow ……… meanwhile, why don’t you visit Marc and Nicola’s blogs because they were lucky and managed to put on their posts before this began to happen.

Thank you to Lisa for suggesting we read our writing ‘through the eyes of a geovisitor’ ….. great idea! 🙂

It’s been a while since we’ve used our PBwiki writing spaces, but today we managed to find the time to write on our pages.

 Thomas wrote about his hobby on his personal writing page.

Jeanan wrote about a girl who was always up to mischief on her imaginative writing page

We didn’t have time to finish because we all went out for football.

It would be great if anyone could find the time to read anything on our writing spaces and give us an audience for our writing by leaving a comment!

We had a party this afternoon to say goodbye and thank you to Miss Goodsir. She has been in our class for over two months now and she taught us lots of new things. She’s going back to university for a few weeks and then she’ll qualify as a teacher. We think she’ll be a great teacher! We  took more pictures at our party and we’re going to put them on our individual blogs tomorrow in a Bubbleshare slideshow.

Next week we are going to visit Callendar House in Falkirk as part of our WW2 topic. We have access to our videos again, so we’ll try to put one on here to show a ‘snippet’ of what happens – we’ve heard it’s good fun!

We have also been asked to give a short individual talk on an aspect of WW2 that has been studied in class. We are going to put a comment on our individual blogs when we’ve decided on a talk. We’ll let you know when we’ve done this by leaving a ‘sticky note’.

You can check our progress by clicking here!

Our ‘Google’ Videos have been blocked at school and I’m looking for alternative ways of showing them on our class blog. This method seems to work on our Photoaday blog, but it doesn’t look the same on here (and last time it wasn’t visible in school anyway!)

 I wonder if others can view it?

http://s3.amazonaws.com/dl.mux.am/D8B6E96F011166345BD2114801E12F6D.mp4

We had a visitor in school yesterday and she told us lots of interesting things she had seen on her visits to the Brazilian Rainforest (press the little ‘go’ arrow on the left-hand side to start the presentation … no-one knows the age of the old lady in the slideshow … even the villagers had no idea. They do not ‘count’ ages ).

You can find out more by visiting Lisa’s Blog. Other people in the class have been up-dating their new blogs, too … check out Mark’s Blog for some more info on our interesting visitor yesterday.

In fact, why not check out all our new individual Blogs … please encourage us by leaving comments.

Thank you to David from East Lothian for helping us set up these Blogs – we’re really looking forward to making them interesting for our readers.

This album is powered by BubbleShare – Add to my blog

We looked at the lgshine phone and brainstormed educational uses! There were LOADS – so we were allowed to bring in our own phones, too! Maybe we will be able to use them in class soon!

lgshine phone and brainstormed all the educational uses we could think of. We were even allowed to bring in our own phones to examine as well! We found loads of great tools that we’d love to be allowed to use in class. We made these posters to show some of our findings.

Mrs V got the idea from this blog.

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Two of our nursery pupils were not available when the ‘winners’ photo was taken. We’ve added them here – don’t they look proud?!

Here are all the poetry ‘Stars’! Well done to them all! Well done, too, to all the pupils from Carron Primary ……. it was a very close contest. Our trophy will look great in the entrance hall this year. We are all feeling very proud!!

John came in to school this morning and gave us some great ‘hints and tips’ for taking and editing our photographs. He even took the time to take some pictures of our poetry winners with his professional camera. We’ll put some on here when we get them. He was very helpful and taught us a lot of really cool stuff …… he’s going to come back again in a few weeks to give us even more advice – thank you John (Mrs Summers’ son).

 Lisa interviewed Danni and Jeanan to find out their views on the new lg shine phone  (the ‘podcast’ icon doesn’t work, so please click on the text instead). 

Check back soon to view our persuasive posters ….. can we persuade you that the lg phone is worth having?

Click the link below to listen to the podcast.

  shine-podcast.mp3

 Our Scottish Poetry Competition is on Wednesday evening! Some of the pupils in Primary 7 have been chosen to represent Carronshore. Please watch our videos and tell us what you think!

Please be patient while it loads ….. and if it ‘sticks’ a bit, just push the wee arrow back to let it ‘catch up’! (poem number 3 will be added shortly)

Not sure how to leave a comment? Just leave us a sticky note! Press here

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Well done to Stuart and Liam from primary 7S for managing to make a great game for us all to enjoy on Sploder. You can have a go, too! Just follow this link here

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We used our new lg shine camera today to take some pictures around the school ….. check them out – they’re great – and we don’t even know very much about taking photos! 

Next week John is coming in to school to talk to us about taking pictures for our new Photo a Day for Schools project. We’re going to show him our new camera phone!