Author: John Johnston

Steady Hands Stage 1

We have started a new STEM project. Building some Steady Hand games for our Christmas Fayre.

Children working on making a steady hand game with wire & cardboard boxes

Yesterday me and my class were making steady hand games in the makerspace for the Christmas fayre. The games that buzz at you when you touch a shaped wire with a hoop.

Nathaniel

We were making a steady hand game it is a game you need to get all the way across if it beeps you are out. We were in the maker space and mr j wanted us to make a cool game. We made it because all the classes need to make thing for the Christmas fair so people would pay 10p to play and if they win the game you will get a sweet.

Alex

I also used my skills to make a box which is stable enough which was done using the make-do so that I can connect the metal wire to the box and have it not fall over.
I have also included a light and buzzer but doing that made the buzzer take all the power and the light wouldn’t turn on and the buzzer barely went.

Harry

I was with Alexia we had some mistakes like when we were duck taping the crocodile clips but the thing kept falling off it was frustrating but we got to the end eventually we just have to connect the wire.

Faith

In the MakerSpace me and my partner learned how to solve problems, one of the main problems we had was when one of the wires was not working, although it was tedious my partner and I got all the wires tested and turns out the one to actually play the game with was broken, when we found that out we had to swap the wire and wire the game up and it was worth it because it worked really well afterwards.

Olivia
6 steady hand games

The pupils worked really well with their partners, using their experience with circuits and working with cardboard. I a looking forward to seeing them when they are finished.

We have a couple more stages to go and will be making other games for the attendees of our Christmas Fayre.

Arcade Fun

Yesterday the class joined in with the Create-a-long session broadcast in Teams by Digital NL and Education Scotland as part of #CSScotland23.

We had a bit of bother with the sound, so had get caught up this morning.

The session showed how to make a simple maze game with Microsoft MakeCode Arcade. The class changed the games a little to have a Christmas theme, we hope to use them at our Christmas Farye.

I was impressed by how easily the class managed to work around any problems. Their experience with micro:bit coding and scratch helped.

After we finished the game we started loading them onto our kitronic arcade devices. This took a bit of patience as our AirDrop has become flaky recently.

A montage of screenshots some makecode arcade games.
Screenshot of the games online

The children have lots of ideas on how to extend the games and are exploring the tutorials to find other ones that we can use. Here are links to some of the games. I’ve not got links of them all yet.

Banton Mill

Last Friday we went a trip to Banton Mill. The was organised by Mr Carter, Mr Morecroft & Mr Barrie. Mr Barrie is the owner of the mill which is now the headquarters of Calders and the home of around 30 businesses. Mr Carter & Mr Morecroft are local history experts.

We learnt about how the mill operated, the water wheel and how it connected to the machinery. We also found out a lot about mill workers and the way the building had changed.

We had a tour underneath the mill to se where the water wheel used to turn, and the remains of the old spinning rooms.

Back in school we investigated how water wheels turn and made model pulley systems from lego.

Lego Pulleys

We also used the trip and work in the class to practise our note taking, the children produced some great mind-maps, here are a couple:

Montage of mind maps produced by pupils about Banton Mill and its workings
Montage of mind maps produced by pupils about Banton Mill and its workings
Banton Mill

HALLOWEEN MAGIC

We had our Halloween party on Friday last week. We took photos of all the Biggies against a green screen.

Greenscreen images

Today we took the photos and used the remove.bg site to take away the green background to make transparent versions. We then found suitable background and created these images in Keynote. This allowed us to think about and practise using images in a way that respects copyright while having fun and learning a bit about graphics.

Click on the images to see full size.

Autumn Haiku

After reading Write Out: Gathering Sensory Details for Haiku on Kevin’s blog I though we could join in. We are a little late for Write Out which inspired this, on holiday last week.

We watched the video embedded on Kevin’s blog and looked at his classes examples. Then we went out into the playground. A cold breeze and some drizzle did stop the Biggies gathering words. Back inside we polished these a little.

Hand written Haiku The Crispy Leaves The Birds are chirping loudly I'm cold everywhere
nights getting darker A full moon calls for werewolves marks hallween's start
The summer has slowly fading The Autumn has quickly come in The dark is waiting
The cold organge leaves birds chirping in the cold rain Marks winter's start
The Autumn is here Brown orange the colour of the leaves As they fall down
The Breeze is blowing Some of the leaves are rustling The birds are chirping
Trees are still, red, brown orange, the sand is smooth and the sound of woodpeckers chirping
Fingers are colder The soft rain feels electric grey forms in the sky
The cold air is coming the leaves fall into the wind The birds start to rest
Birds calling While yellow to red leaves appear Autumn is here
Occasionally I see a robin with starlings flying with the breeze
Leaves falling off the trees cold air blowing through the breeze Autumn is here
Ourtside in autumn Orange leaves, summer is gone with the hot sun

September Poems

We have been reading a book called Love that Dog In the book Jack tell of his literacy lessons with Miss Stretchberry. Miss Stretchberry read the class poems and Jack tries to write some. At the start he does not like it.  The Book also tells the story of Jack’s dog.

We have learnt about several different types of poem and tried to write our own.

The First type of poem we learnt about was imagist poems. Imagist poems try to make an image with words. We learnt about Lunes. Lunes have very few words, 11 in total, three in the first line, five in the second and three in the third. We wrote kennings, these are like riddles. We tried our hand at sound poems and shape poems.

We also read the Poem The Table by the Turkish poet Edip Cansever and wrote our own version.

Pupils’ Views

I’ve taken some quotes from the classes e-Portfolios where they reflected on the writing.

I liked writing my poems because you can write random words and the don’t have to make sense and you can write some and they can be as long and as short as you want .

When I was writing this poem I was thinking about a ewe lamb sale that I went to about a week ago. I thought I could think about what I brought back with me from the sale and I thought that could write a table poem about and what we got back from it

I enjoyed writing poems because it let me experience and explore different ways of writing and I enjoys how many things there are in this universe to write about but still it’s so hard to pick just one for a poem, I enjoyed how punctuation doesn’t alway need to be in a poem, how poems don’t need to make sense and how poems can be enjoyed by anyone anywhere at anytime!

I was thinking to make a dog poem and the kind of I’m going to was a Kenning I enjoyed making the poem because you learn something all the time.

I liked writing the something poem because it’s a concrete poem, it was really fun to write with all the different ways you can say the word, normal, with a capital letter, backwards, full stops in between, commas, all capitals with just one word. I also enjoyed some lunes that I was writing because it doesn’t take long.

I enjoyed writing poems because you get freedom to write with rhythm and beat and writing stories you can’t do that and poems don’t need to make sense.

I enjoyed writing poems because they don’t need to make sense and you can play about with the words that you are writing. It’s also fun because there are so many different ways to write poetry and you can learn new ways.

I like writing poetry because of the freedom. It doesn’t have to mean anything it could just be The Apple all over again. I like the amount of stuff that you can do it doesn’t has to be a number of words before the next line.

I liked the onomatopoeia in my poem.

I enjoyed writing poems because you could do anything you’d want with it and do things that isn’t real you also do a lot of punctuation and you get your brain moving then if you really like it you could show your teacher and they will like it to. It is really fun to write poems and my class is lucky we get a teacher that likes poems so we do things about poems almost everyday. That is why I enjoy poems.

Biggies Highlights W/E September 8th

Another fast week. Highlights for us included the progress we had made in the designs for or elastic band vehicles. A few can be seen on the featured image of this post. Hopefully we can get them all finished and run some distance trials soon.

Poetry

The class have really got into writing poetry and I think we will present some to the parents at next weeks coffee morning. We will put them on the blog too.

micro:bits

Working with the micro:bits on creating virtual pets, some of the more experienced pupils really made great efforts. The idea was to build a simple tamagochi type toy. We had instructions for stroking them to happiness and shaking them to an unhappy state. Some pupils started work on give them health, feeding them and even making them sick if they eat too much. This was all independent work. I was delighted to see the use of variables and loops recalled from last session.

Screenshot of micro:bit code for virtual pet.

Highlights Weekending 1 September

Time flies! We have had quite a busy week.

We got started with our micro:bits, homework and more.

We finally finished our class logos:

And the judges came to a decision of which one we will use to represent our class this session:

The new class logo. The world with crossed paint brush & pencils behind. The world is wearing a Banton tie. To big Letters Bs one each side of the tie.

All the logos are displayed on one of our rotating blog headers.

We have also had a couple of sessions in the Makerspace. The class are modifying their basic Elastic Cars to their own design, this work includes a lot of problem solving and re-design, good fun too.

Today we had a ‘meet the teacher’ classroom visit for our parents. The children showed their parents different activities that we do in class and some of their recent work. The pupils were great ambassadors and I am sure the parents enjoyed their visit.

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