John Johnston

Highlights of the week 28 Feb 2020

The main highlight of my week was the Sharing of Learning for Parents on Thursday. The class made me really proud. Even though we only rehearsed this week, they did a brilliant job, speaking clearly, dancing and singing well. For a wee school Banton makes a lot of noise.

We shared our news films about the Scottish Wars of Independence. For a first try at a large project using iMovie and a green screen the class did really well. Better than their research or ICT skills was the way the pupils worked together. Last weeks, mind-maps show the skills we used (I’ll add more to that post next week)

The movie turned out to be a bit big to show on the blog but I think the parents enjoyed watching.

At maths time the pupils continue to astonish me with their mental maths. Some of the p4 and 5s in particular really aim high. All of the pupils are really making progress with their number talks and explain how they ‘do’ mental maths.

We are looking forward to World Book day next week.

Movie Skills

We have been working hard on creating news programs for some of the main events in the Scottish Wars of independence.

This has involve, research, writing, finding images and audio to use (and attributing those), filming against a green screen and editing. We think we have used many different categories of skill.

Today we took a break and made some mindmaps of some of the skills we used. We used the Kilsyth Academy Skills Framework to help us thing about these skills.

There are a few more to finish and add to the gallery above…

Maths Escape!

The Biggies had a very exciting morning with Mr Dorman from the @PedagogyTeamNLC.

Quick reactions included:

We enjoyed the challenge. It made us use different sets of skills. It really made us think. We used our maths skill.

We will reflect on our learning and post some more.

Greenscreen

We used a ton of skills this morning.

The Bantiraptors

A week ago we looked at the poem Sweetieraptors which as a lot of Scot’s words and is great fun. The biggies wrote their own verses, being careful to rhyme and follow the rhythm of the original.

We put together the movie to show our poems. Each pupil made a keynote slide to cary the text and used the green screen feature of iMovie to add that text onto of their movies. They then added the voice.

Everyone AirDropped their movies to Aaron who put them altogether into one longer video.

First Week Highlights 2020

A few nice things from this school week.

We were doing some character description in our writing today. We watched The OceanMaker, which is a great video and the pupils wrote short pieces of text focusing on describing Katrina. They produced some great work.

Jonah came up with:

Katrina was gently holding her big wound. Glancing at her bloody hand, washing all the blood away with her painful tears.

We have been working on the grid method of multiplication I challenged some of the children to make something to teach younger children about this. Heather & Rhea made this video.

I hope there will be some more videos next week.

We have a new pupil, Kaitlyn, who is setting in well and working hard: Welcome to the Biggies Kaitlyn.

We had a visit from a Pedagogy teacher Mr Dorman today he lead the class in some Number Talks, the pupils worked hard, behaved perfectly and enjoyed the lesson. We look forward to Mr Dorman coming in over the next few weeks to help with our maths lesson.

I posted earlier about:

Cardboard Engineers

Brilliant teamwork!

Finally we have been trying Minecraft Education Edition to support our maths, here is some Minecraft Multiplication Visualisation!

Cardboard Engineers

The Biggies are always enthusiastic about making things. Today we spent an hour reviewing and making examples of different ways we could join Cardboard.

Making a 3d poster of cardboard modelling techniques

The joins included, flanges, gussets, L- Braces, slots, tabs and several more techniques.
We hope this will stand us in good stead later in the term.

Christmas Art 2019

A while back the Biggies created some Christmas Art on their iPads for the NLC Christmas Art Competition. We had a Winner. But here are all our entries. The Class are getting really skilful at using the Brushes App for painting. Many show great understanding of layers and how to use them.

A micro:bit Christmas

We decorated our “Tree of Gratitude” with some micro:bit bobbles. We programmed them to animate when receiving a signal from another micro:bit!

Highlights of the Week 29-11-2019

We have crammed in so much this week that it is hard to remember it all. We also were so busy that we took far fewer photos than usual.

We continued our preparation for the Christmas Fayre, 3 group organising the making tree ornaments, Santa faces and some cookies.

Rubbing in Butter

Measuring

Howe many decorations

Sparkle

The J team

Christmas Hat

The children did really well under the pressure of a deadline.

The Fayre went really well too, the class selling the decorations they produced, their Christmas Calandars and other items.

For Sale

Christmas Fayre

Busy!

These activities targeted our food preparation skills, especially measuring and kneading.

After all the fun of the fair on Thursday we had some more fun on Friday, we made fruit skewers and cooked them over the fire pit. This gave us more practise of our cooking skills, chopping and cutting. Some children practised using lives safely to cut kindling and we were all safe around the fire. We were so busy looking at what as going on we didn’t even get one photo! The class were brilliant and keeping safe and following or fire pit rules. they built, lit and fed the fire. We even managed a bit of literacy, thinking of adjective and alliteration.

During all of this we found time to practise our Christmas show, this was made very enjoyable for the staff by the excellent behaviour and enthusiasm of the whole school.

Finally playtime saw the invention of The Banton Snack Van!

Imagination, creativity and practical skills in the playground. The Banton Snack Van serving up fresh piles of tasty leaves. pic.twitter.com/vRCIUi6EzN

— Banton Primary (@Banton_Pr) November 28, 2019