Here is a Sway about our trip to Ardmay last week created by Jamie and Zander in P7.
Tag Archives: Skills for learning
SLF 2015
We are blogging live from the Scottish Learning Festival. Scott, Ellie, Mrs Hunter and I have just presented about how we blog in the classroom . We talked about why we blog, how we organise it and how we write our posts. It was a bit nerve-wracking but we were confident and spoke with a loud clear voice! At the end everybody told us that they enjoyed our presentation and going to look at our blog. We have enjoyed looking at all the stands and we got to control a robot using coding! We also loved getting lots of freebies like pens, badges, bags and pencils!
Read all about it from John Johnson here!
Our Buddies
In Primary 7 we have the responsibility to help the P1s settle into school. We are their buddies and look after them. It’s important that they feel safe, nurtured and included in our school. We had to show them little things like where their seat was and also help them change into their coat and shoes for going into class and out into the playground. I think they are all very happy, especially my buddy! I am very happy Mrs Reid and Mrs Hunter picked me for my buddy. He is a lot more confident and he is talking to me and my friends more. Mrs Hunter says that I have really helped him come out of his shell. I had to find out things to talk to him about that he liked and his favourite things are Mickey Mouse and Wreck it Ralph. He always talks about it, he is very funny and likes the song head shoulders knees and toes. When I do it with him he says ‘again, again’ because he likes it so much! We have all loved working with our buddies and we go down to Primary 1 every Friday to help them learn skills like literacy and maths. One of our favourite things to do with our buddies is read with them. We have to be really expressive when we tell a story to keep them interested. Then we use our Talking Round Corners questioning skills to ask them about the story we just read.
How to Knit using a Loom
HereToday Ellie taught us how to knit using a special loom. Ellie has been busy making lots of knitted hats for babies and we were all really interested in how she made them.  Ellie plans to hand them in to a baby unit in our local hospital – how thoughtful! What a wonderful Whinhill girl! Here is a ‘how to’ video so you can learn to knit too!
Here is what Ellie had to say: It was so fun creating my hat ‘how to’ video for you. I love to knit. As I said in the tutorial, I am making the little baby hats for the babies in the hospital. This great idea came to my mind and I thought, why not? You can get all different sizes of looms. It is so handy to have this equipment because if it’s a cold wintery day you never have to go out and buy a hat why not knit one? Thank you so much for watching and if you did watch I hope this tutorial helped you. Please leave a comment below! By Ellie
Sports Leaders
We have been learning sports leadership skills and leading sessions with our buddies in P1. The first thing we had to do was in a group we planned our session using the STEPS principles which is Space, Time, Equipment, People and Speed. We had to organise a warm up, main activity and a cool down. Since we have a wheelchair user in P1, it was really important to think about the activities and how he would be able to take part in our session. We decided to play Boccia which is a sport that wheelchairs users can play, (my buddy is a wheelchair user) it is like bowls and it is really fun! Then we collected any equipment and practised it first to check the space we needed and timed it.
Leading the session was hard at first because at the start the P1s were a little hyper but we managed to calm them down and then get some of the shy ones to come out of their shell. Sometimes it was hard to stop them from running about and get them to listen. It was good teaching them some cool activities they can play when they are in the playground with their friends or even show their parents. It was our first time teaching P1 and also we were the first P7s in Whinhill to do Sports Leaders.
We will be doing it again tomorrow so we had to reflect on how our last session went and write an evaluation before we planned our next session. The session we planned this week is a bit more advanced. We had to change what sort of sponge balls we were using because we needed bigger ones for the P1s who found it hard and smaller ones to make a challenge for the good ones. The first session went really well and next we are going to work up the classes and lead more sessions. We have learned loads of new skills so far like planning and organising the session and working with others in a group. We hope you enjoyed reading this post by Scott and Nathan in P7.
