John Johnston

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.

Kindness

Kindness makes us feel like this.

Last week was #AntiBullingWeek We took some ideas from the Anti-Bullying Alliance to discuss.

We were thinking about when people had been kind to us and how that made us feel.

Outdoor learning Day November 2022

On Wednesday the Biggies had one of our outdoor learning days. We started with a treasure hunt to find words to treasure. We will share some of the words later on.

Then we worked on some measure for maths. We were measuring some of the pallets, tarps and other things we use for den building.

Finally we split into teams and built some dens. We ere working on our playing, leadership, communication, problem solving and practical skills.

A few days ago we as a class went out side and practiced using adjectives, nouns and verbs and how we did that was we described autumn on coloured paper basically to make a short poem.
For maths we done measuring and how we that was we brought out all of the different things in the shed and got partners to measure them in meter and centimetres.

Hazel

Yesterday it was our outdoor day. We stared the day off by doing some literacy, at literacy we we got some pieces of paper, the thing on the front would show what ever we see that is in that category, adjective, noun or verb. Wwe would write on the back. A the end we made leaf drawings. put those word in it.
Then for maths we had gathered all the Palettes and tarps, we went in groups and we had to measure those items. after lunch we used all of those Items to make a den and the den which was the best won.

Josh

On Wednesday it was an out door leaning day and when we were doing maths we put out the pallets, planks and tadpoles we measured them and took a photo to show the measurements of the pallets, plank and tarpaulins. Alex

Poppy Day

We have been learning a little about Remembrance Day

Earlier this week the Biggies followed this great video to make some beautiful poppies.

We have been collecting money for Poppy Scotland

Leafing through some words

Today we took some of the words we had found in the playground to the gym. This gave us a bit of space to spread out and play with nouns, verbs and adjective. We made colour coded adjective, now, verb phrases that were poetic, somewhat were silly and some that were just weird!

Watch this space to see our words blow in the wind…

Wild Flower Seeding

Last week we took the next step in our Bee Hotel Project and planted the Bee Buffets with wild flower seeds. We will see what comes up in the spring.

We might try and make the hotel itself even more welcoming to insects as some will be wanting somewhere cosy to bed down for the winter.

thanks to the Rotary Club of Kilsyth for all their help with the project.

Halloween Image Editing

Before the Halloween party last Friday the Biggies got their photos taken against our green screen (A big bit of green cloth).

Today they remove the background from their pictures. They used Keynote to create a layered image with their picture on a suitable background. They then exported this to a jpeg image.

As well as creativity the class used their ICT skills. They are getting an understanding of layering and cropping, exporting images to a suitable format and beginning to understand using Creative commons images with attribution!

Click through to see the individual images:

Halloween monsters inc 👻

The nice purple witch 🧙‍♀️

Stranger things Halloween 🎃

Halloween in the upside down 👻

Minion Madness

Wednesday Adams

Micro:bit Halloween Challange

We had our Halloween party on Friday afternoon, hopefully we will post some costume pictures next week. On Friday Morning the Biggies had a microbit coding challenge.

The idea was to make the micro:bit show a face on the pumpkin if one button was pressed, a ghost if the other one was pressed. The next part was to scare the ghost away with a noise.

As you can see from the video the pupils rose to the challenge.

Abstract Landscapes

As part of our topic on Scottish Landscapes we did some painting. We looked at the work of Artist Katherine Sandoz.
and photos of Scottish Landscapes like this:

We abstracted the shapes and intensified the colours to make some interesting images (click for a larger version):

The next step will be to edit our images digitally and see if we can improve or change them.

Busy Biggies, Moving a Ton

Last session the biggies made a bee hotel and started making small gardens to act as a bee cafe.

Last week we had a ton of soil delivered to fill up our gardens. Despite the rain The biggies got down to work this afternoon and moved the ton of soil into the gardens.

Today in school we when outside and put down the little wooden gardens.
We set the up got a wheelbarrow, 2 shovels and buckets then started.
Mr Johnston took off the cover of the soil and turn after turn children got to scoop soil into people’s buckets.
It started raining no child cared but Mr Johnston did, with the buckets we had full of soil we dumped in the little wooden gardens and filled them up, We filled up all three little wooden gardens to the top. In the end we were all muddy and wet.
Olivia Rose

This afternoon we continued on our project with the Kilsyth rotary club. After lunch we came into the class and sat down like normal. After that we had to get suited and booted (as some people would say.)

After we got ‘suited and booted,’ we headed outside to finally take the tarp away from the massive ton of dirt. We adventured the playground getting buckets and shovels for the bug buffets (as it was named.)
Charlie

Today we put soil into our buckets and filed them up . We did it to help climate and bees were going to plant wild flowers in the buckets for the Bees to eat the-pollen soon . The soil vanished after we put all the soil in them.
Alex

This afternoon me and my class last year made collars for bee restaurants. There was 3 groups when we did this 2 of the groups just did grass and trees and 1 group did bees in space. But last year the soil didn’t come in time so we had to fill them up today. We all took shots of filling the buckets. When we were finished filling the buckets we poured them in to the collars. When we came inside we had to wash up and take our water proofs off.
Elise

We got a delivery of a ton of soil, an actual ton, and we filled up the bee buffets that the Biggies made last year. We will plant wild flowers in them so the bees can collect the pollen.
Rory

This afternoon me and my classmates where making bee restaurants. Last year some of the people from this class made a bee hotel and they painted planks of wood to make the bee restaurants. So then the soil got delivered a few days ago. Then today we filled buckets up with soil and when we finished filling them up we poured them in to the collars and then when we where finished we washed our hands and then took our water proofs off.
Mia