John Johnston

Earth Day 2023

The Biggies are studying John Muir this term, so that filtered right in with Earth Day 2023.

The day before we had visited Dow’s wood. There we collected natural sights and sounds with our iPads and pencils.

On Friday in class we made composite images of our photos writing & drawing, click on a thumbnail to expand and see all the details:

We also made photos with the text from our favourite John Muir Quotes:

And later on we made some art, could you guess which quote inspired which piece of art:

Universal connection

Wilderness

Exposure to the mountains

A good look at the dark and the light

Forest wilderness

The grand show

Charcoal Flower!

Highlights of the Week 10 Mar 2023

The Biggies did a great job working with the primary 1 & 2s in our ‘makerspace’ this week. Last week they helped the wee one design a mythical creature and this week we got to tether to create cardboard versions. We shall makes these into 3D creatures in the next couple of weeks.

In maths we had a Scratch Challenge:

Scratch Shape Challenge

Josh did a great job, including working out how to use messaging to stop sprites deleting other sprites drawings:

We saw a different sort of shape with this triangle in the playground:

World Book Day

We did a whole lot of World Book Day related tasks yesterday. Including mashing up book titles to make our own handwriting blurbs for them and some blackout poetry.

Miro Inspired Art

We have been looking at some art by Joan Miró and are planning to make some Miró inspired sculpture. We started by trying some pictures inspired by Miró’s work.

The Biggies at Strathclyde Park

The Primary Sevens are visiting Strathclyde park every day this week, for some outdoor learning with Strathclyde Park Outdoor Education Programme.

Here is a collection of short ‘videos’ of the adventures. The playlist will be added to each day.

Monday Outdoors at Strathclyde day 1

Tuesday More Bows & Boats

Tuesday Strathclyde Archery & Climbing

Wednesday Strathclyde Park Bushcraft

Thursday Team Building

Friday: Bikes & Orienteering

Scale Model Dens

Last year, the class went out to the playground and measures lots of the den building materials:

Outdoor learning Day November 2022

This year we took these measurements, scaled them down by a factor of 10 and then made scale models of dens.

the class also made scale models of themselves at the same scale as the dens.

The children then made wee videos of their learning using iMovie or clips.

Model Montage

Show You Scale Models

Dens- scaled models

Scaled Model Dens

There are a couple of videos still to be finished and we will add these to the playlist when done.

Banton Biggies Podcast Episode 7

One on our podcast the class has just posted a new episode. The first this session.

BBP episode 7

The class worked really hard and independently on creating this.

From scripting when we hard a brilliant literacy session, class showed iron concentration, talking, listening and editing for flow. Working on expression and talking for an audience.

And recording.

to making musical ‘stings’ and editing the audio.

And finally Publishing.

Christmas Engineering Challenge Part 1

The NLC Learning Hub has issued a Christmas Engineering Challenge:

The biggies started work this morning. We are making Reindeer from Cardboard and hope to include movement, electrics & coding. It might take a while…

Most of the groups got a lot of their model finished this morning. We used our teamwork, creativity & problem solving skills. On group got on to the moving part:

By lunchtime we had made a lot of progress:

More to do…

Highlights of the Week 2 December

We have had a busy week in the Biggies. The school show practise is well underway and the class are making great progress with expression and clarity.

Football Festival

On Monday half the class went off to the local Football Festival, the remaining children worked on construction of a Christmas tree. We will be decorating it and using some more makedo screws for cardboard construction.

On Wednesday we had a visit from Ms Cooper to help us with scientific enquiry. The class learned about using variables in experiments and mixed some alkali with acid to produce foam.

We have been starting to work on a new podcast for BBPOD. Today the class worked on their scripts. The atmosphere in the class was great. Everyone was really engaged with working with their partners, writing, editing and trying out the word. I am really looking forward to listing to this one.