This term we are learning to be Global citizens as we explore communication. It all started with a letter from a school in Germany. It asked us to explore the questions, how did people communicate in the past? And what are the Pictish stones that we have in our area?
We started by using the 3, 2, 1 bridge tool which is 3 thoughts, 2 questions and 1 example of what we thought communication was.
This then lead on to us researching about the Picts and their life style in the 300th and 400th Century. The pictures on the Pictish stone were a form of communication. We think the symbols on the stones were telling stories of every day life and war.
We then looked at the Vikings as they came after the Picts. They came from Scandinavia and attacked Britain from the North. The language they spoke was Norse. They then settled here as the ground was more fertile and they grow their crops to survive. We don’t all speak Norse because the Viking’s took our language as their own as they started to live with the Saxon’s who spoke English.
Our learning than moved on to Technology. We made a report about technologies in the past to present times, which included the change of the postal service in 1939 -1940 which is still the postal service we have today. China in 105 BC invented the first newspaper. In 1923 Vladimir Zworykin invented the first TV camera. The facts we learned were very interesting as we thought life must have been hard in the olden days to now.
We have been very lucky to be able to have had visitors from all over the world. Jenny Hoff comes in once a week to teach us German words and songs, she makes it really fun to learn.
Also he had Summer, who came from China and she shared how very different a life it is over there as children go to school from 7 am in the morning and finish at 9 pm at night and this is for primary 1 – 7 and secondary school. It was the opinion of all our class that we didn’t want to go to China until we were adults! We also learned that they have 2 different ways one was to talk using prompts when they were small and when they were older they had to learn write using totally different symbols, she told us there was thousand of Chinese symbols to learn.
Mrs Dolina Roy also came and shared with us her experiences of living on a hebridean Isle of Barra. We learned that they only have 1 plane a day to bring people and supplies in the winter months and 2 in the summer. The Island is only 6 miles by 8 miles. We learned that on Barra they speak Gaelic. When Mrs Roy was at school she only spoke Gaelic when she started and had to learn English, she found this hard as her parent’s didn’t speak any English.
Our learning is still ongoing as we are learning more different ways of communicating.
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