John Johnston

Highlights of the Week 26 Sep 2019

We have just returned from our joint sports day at Chapelgreen where Banton were again victorious. Even better the behaviour and attitude of all the children was brilliant.

Our teams lead by their team leaders all worked hard. Alana was mentioned by several staff from both schools as being particularly encouraging to her teammates. Grace did a great job of helping the primary one child in her team.

We had two successful learners this week:

Jonah showed he was a successful learner when he listened and joined in with the assembly about litter. He demonstrated his learning by going home, making a poster and posting it to his e-Portfolio!

Caelan has shown himself to be a very successful learner in maths. He calculates very quickly and accurately and can now successfully convert fractions and mixed numbers to decimals and back.

Aaron really showed his ICT skills when designing a fact sheet about Highland Cattle. His layout and design were excellent and the way he used a background image and then the cow head with a drop shadow, was great.

Our Victorious Team Captains

Aaron’s Factsheet

Dow’s Wood, the Beginnings of Autumn

Yesterday we went to Dow’s Wood with Mr & Mrs Carter. We found many signs of autumn, seeds, plants and signs of wildlife.

The Children have written a little about their finds, click the thumbnails to read more.

Pine cone

Fungi facts

Hazel nuts

elderberry

Beech mast facts

Knapweed by Rhea

Jessica’s Water Cycle

Sycamore seeds

Fox poo

Shield bug

Swallows by Hannah

Thistle Facts

Autumn Leaves 🍁

Fireweed

Ferns

Skeleton mouse

Highlights of the Week

As usual the Biggies have been a delightful company. Here are a few things that have stood out for me.

Jess painted a marvellous picture of a poppy. She did a brilliant job of tinting and shading.

Rhea worked very independently in literacy. She researched the meaning and pronunciation of some new words using an online dictionary, wrote sentence to show she understood the meanings and recorded her self reading the sentences showing she had learnt how to pronounce the words correctly!

We started our e-Portfolios by adding our first targets of the year. The children in primary four and five had not used e-Portfolios before. I was amazed to see that 3 of them had posted to their e-portfolios from home. Not only that they had customised their blogs even though I had only mentioned that it could be done. Well done Grace, Rhuraidh M and Alice. Grace posted a beautiful picture taken from her window, Rhuraidh some lovely ones of his family’s cat. Alice found some Red Tractor labels while food shopping after we had been talking about them in class.

Jess’s Poppy

Rhuraid’s Cat

Alice’s Red Tractor

Grace’s Sky

A Biggie Bye Bye to Primary 7

The primary 6s and 5s told the Primary sevens what they really think of them!

We wish them all the best in their new schools next year and will miss them all here.

Robot Microbit Guitar Music

Transferring Through Rectangles

Living Room

Under the Sea with the fishatron

We have been working on out Micro:bit guitar project.
We started by Hacking our headphones to work with the micro:bits Microbit Guitars

We made guitars with our artist skills and programmed the micro:bits to react to light and acceleration to make ‘Music” Micro:bit guitars part 2

We then make Robot masks, and video or still image backgrounds for our performance.

We videoed ourselves playing our guitars in from of the green screen and used iMovie to add these to our background Movies.

Dow’s Wood in June

Along the path

Hunting Damselflies

Taking a Break

Exploring

We had another visit to Dow’s wood today.

Our tasks were:

To take photos of flowers.
Gather tinder for firelighting.
Create shelters from some lost woodland ‘wee folk’.

Damselfly

Speedwell

Young Millipede

Foxglove

Buttercup and Friend

Damselfly

Escaping!

Shelters for the wee people

Shelter

Wood People

Shelter Building

Wood People Shelter

Builders

Wee people shelter

K’nex Semi Final

We are very proud of two of the Biggies who reached the primary 6 semi final of the Glasgow Science Festival Creating Engineers Competition this year.

Microbit Guitars

The Biggies have been using their coding and craft skills to build electric microbic guitars.

They had to learn to hack their headphones, make a guitar and code the microbits to play music controlled by light.

There is more to do, but we though it was worth sharing now!

Hacking Headphones

Guitar Design

Putting it all together

Function Machines

The Biggies have been learning about Function Machines during maths. They made their own machines using scratch.

Here are links to the first ones finished, click through and see if you can guess or work out what the functions are:

Robot rob function by Heather

Bear function machine by Rylan

Bat function machine Rhea

Owl function Machine Jessica

Function Machine Aaron

Function Machine Aaliyah

Function baaaachine

Function machine – David

We will add more machines next week.

Finger Licking Marshmallows

Kindling

Careful

Toasting

Eating

Yesterday we made a fire in the fire pit and toasted marshmallows.

We cut kindling, and made fire bricks out of newspaper.

We had a fire queen and king controlling the movement in the fire circle.

We learnt to be safe with fire and knives.
We found out how to use a burn kit (we did not need it).
We had to cooperate to cut the kindling and to keep safe around the fire.
We had to be responsible for our own and others safety.
We had a safe and good time, mostly burning our marshmallows.

Post text provided by the Biggies.