planning and organising | GPS Sensational Sevens!

In preparation for our Burns Supper this year we have created Tartan Art to be displayed in the gym hall. We started this by looking up our family or clan tartan or making up our own if we don’t have one. It was important to look at the pattern involved in the tartan and how it all fitted together. We had to either use the colours of our chosen tartan or create our own complimentary coloured tartan design.

First of all, everybody had to draw straight lines in their chosen colour on to special cartridge paper. We did this using Oil Pastel so that we could get the Wax Resist effect. Next, we had to paint over the lines in a wash of the background colour of our tartan. This had to be a thin mixture of pallet paint or our paint would be too thick and the oil pastel wouldn’t show through. It was great when we saw our pattern all come together! We had to do this 3 times so that we had some spare pieces to make tartan place cards for the Burns Supper.

After our paint had dried, we got a piece of small, black paper and another piece of our tartan. We looked at a silhouette of Rabbie Burns, then drew our own onto one of our tartan papers. Then we carefully cut it out and glued it on the black piece of paper. After that we decided to cut the black bit of paper into an oval as we thought it looked better than a rectangle.

Last of all we had to carefully glue the black paper with the tartan Robert Burns silhouette onto a full page of tartan that was the same as the one on Burns. We had to be patient when copying our tartan as some of the designs were really tricky. Everybody in the class really enjoyed it! By Martin P7

To complete our learning on the Victorians, we organised a Victorian themed Fairtrade Cafe for our school community. In preparation for our cafe, we each worked in co-operative groups to investigate a different area of the Victorian era. Groups researched areas such as Victorian education, famous Victorians and inventors, rich and poor lifestyles and jobs for example, chimney sweeps, servants and working down in the mines. We prepared to showcase our learning by delegating tasks. As a group, we decided who would create the powerpoint, design games for our visitors to play and who would dress as a Victorian for the day! Alongside this, we also had to plan for the running of our cafe. We split into groups to work on a homebaking stall, serving the tea and coffee, selling Fairtrade Christmas products and raise awareness of Fairtrade by talking to our visitors to the cafe. Our P7 Fairtrade group members headed up each group and kept things running smoothly. Have a look at some of our pictures below to see how we got on!