Highlights – Banton Biggies

Last week’s Biggies Highlights

Well last week went a bit too quickly for me to post this.

Famous Buildings

We have started another Makerspace project. The class are going to make models of famous buildings. After some research, organising groups and working out sizes and designs we started on Tuesday.

The first stage mostly involved cutting big sheets of cardboard to the correct size.

Montage of 4 photos of children cutting large pieces of cardboard.

Junior Leaders

On Wednesday afternoon Julie from Active Schools NL came in to train the Biggies to be Junior Leaders. This is training to help the children organise and lead games for the younger pupils. They need to think about safety and fun.

We were delighted to get a great report form Julie, the class are well on their way to be Junior Leaders and give the wee ones some fun.

Mair Scunners

A few years ago the biggies invented some Scottish horror characters, or scunners. We had another go this year, drawing the characters and giving them a backstory in Scots. Have a read:

Scots Afternoon

As well as working on Scots during language last week we had a ‘Scots celebration & fun’ afternoon on Friday, this included, pinning the tail on the haggis, irn brew floats, throwing the wellie and 2 amazing pipers. Hopefully we wil post more on this later.

Montage of 2 pupils playing the bagpipes

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:

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.

The Biggies are Back in Class

We have got to the end of our first week. The children are settling well and we are starting to think about our routines.

We have started reading Mr Johnston’s favourite book, Love That Dog. That means we read a lot of poems too. The first one we studied was The Red Wheelbarrow. The class all wrote poems based on this poem. They are great.

We a have also been working on a new class logo to represent out class, more of that later. And starting work on our Rights Respecting School class charter.

Today we had a visit from Steven from Future X, to show us what Future X entails and how to get involved. We had a great time:

The p7s have also been helping out with their buddies in p1, to make play dough and to get used to going for lunch.

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:

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.

Highlights of a short week in the Biggies

The biggies has a sporty week:

On Monday we practised our junior leaders routines. We will lead activities with p1-3 very soon.

On Wednesday we had a visit from Active Schools Julie and a Rugby Scotland Coach. We had a great time play some rugby based activities.

We also did some group work on Climate Change:

We finished the week by meeting up with the Primary 1-3 and sharing the Autumn zines we made last week.

Highlights of the week 23 Apr 2021

We have had a really busy week the first week back. The class are really working hard in their maths and literacy.

The Robots project is going well.

We had a walk down to Dow’s wood on Wednesday and Among other thing there were some amazing drawing done in a very short time:

Aaron combined his language & ice skills in the outdoors:

The Primary Sevens had 2 challenges from Kilsyth Academy, we decided it would be a good idea for the sixes to join in. The first challenge involved designing a boat:

The second was to design a setting for Tunnock’s teacakes:

The biggies have great imagination & design skills. The creature image is Alice’s she turned her Teacake upside down to make a campfire!

Back to School Highlights

I was really glad to see all the children back in class this week. We have taken a fairly gentle start to getting back into routine. Everyone settled down really well and are working and playing enthusiastically. Quite a few children seem to have grown an inch or two over lockdown.

On Tuesday we started a new project on Robotics, the Primary 7s are working on the First Lego League challenge and have spent a bit of time starting their first tasks and getting their heads round all the boxes and elements of the challenge. The Team will have to use teamwork, innovate and investigate values while building lego, programming robots and solving problems.

Meanwhile the primary sixes are working on programming micro:bit move robots. I was really please by how well they remembered and used their micro:bit skills and worked independently. I am looking forward to seeing them learn more coding and apply that to some maths and problem solving.

On Wednesday we went for a walk to Dow’s wood. We were looking for signs of spring, there are not too many about yet. Some trees, hawthorn are starting to put out leaves and we found some hazel catkins. It was a beautiful, clear day. After some adventures in the mud the class had a game of hide and seek. Back in school we have been recording our afternoons in individual ways, showing lots of creativity.

There have been plenty of other things going on this week, some good writing, accurate maths and brilliant fielding. I am looking forward to next week.

Playground Maths — Formal methods and some fractions in the playground.

Banton Biggie Highlights Week Ending 18 Dec 2020

We are having a nice end of term.

We had out Christmas party this week, slightly quieter than usual, as we had to stick to our bubbles. The Biggies managed to enjoy themselves. My favourite part is watching some of the pupils being wrapped up.