Skills – Banton Biggies

Biodiversity Live Lesson

Last week we joined in this video conference. It was in 3 sections all based on wether.
First we heard from Jess Lilley, Edinburgh Zoo about life in the water. We saw the penguins at the zoo and found out about a fish none of us knew about, the flapper skate.

We then heard the story of the Mermaid of the Clyde, told by Allison Galbraith. The last workshop was by Joe Wilkin-Oxley from Keep Scotland Beautiful. He explainsd about water, how much we use and how to save it.

This was all very interesting. During the week most of the primary sevens were off to Kilsyth Academy, but the rest of the Biggies got busy writing stories about mythical water creatures and working on scale in maths using the Flapper Skate to practise scaling down & up.

The Bee Hotel Food Court

Today some of the class started working on our raised flower beds that will be planted with wildflowers for the occupants of our, yet to be built, bee hotel.

The Class did a great job with hardly any paint on clothes. They also wrote some notes for their e-portfolio, I’ve put some of these below.

This term we have been learning about bees so the Kilsyth rotary club reached out and they had a big chat with us about bees and gave us information about what bees like. Tthey wanted to make a bee hotel with us and we are also making some wild flower planters and the look amazing.
Josh

We are going to “bee” building a bee hotel, but it can also be for other bugs and flies an wasps.

We are getting help for the bee hotel from the Kilsyth Rotary Club. For this We need items with many holes in them like bricks, leaves, straw/grass, sticks, wood, slates, lots of wood, logs, moss and lots of other natural objects and un-natural objects to.
Hollie

The next time they came they talked to us about what flowers would be suitable to plant they said that our Bee hotel would be for other small creatures. Like moths and flys and unfortunately wasps. When they left they gave us something called collars. Not a dog collars they were big wooden planks the opened up into a square shape.
Ben

So today we got these six wood planks and they bend and turn into a squares, and we got six of them, we painted them with white primer paint. So our teacher told two students to get one plank outside, and he showed us how to paint it carefully.
Alfred

Once we’ve done that we will fill it with soil and wild flower seeds. Soon we will be making the bee hotel but we need to get sticks, stones,log extra. We will use that to make the hotel. People will be bringing stuff in for the hotel suck as bricks with holes, bamboo and other stuff. Once it’s done we will look at it and leave.
Hazel

The next step is for the collars to dry then put designs on them then let them dry and get varnished dried yet again and then be made into raised beds for wild flowers to a-tracked bees and not that welcome but wasps next we will build the actual hotel which may “bee” a challenge but we can manage it I’m sure because I’m “bee-ing” positive.
Hollie

We still need to get some things for the bee hotel like tomorrow we are going to go to the woods and collect some stuff for the bee hotel like sticks and other things. We haven’t started to build the bee hotel yet but the bee people will be coming back after the Easter holidays to build the bee hotel with us. Some people will be bringing some stuff in like bamboo and bricks with holes in it.
Rhuaridh

We have been sent out to our homes and soon other places to collect items and other materials that bees and insects can fit through, for example a brick (the brick would have to possess holes within itself to be accepted and put into use.)
Charlie

In the afternoon the class did a bit of design work and started transferring their designs to the pained collars.

The First Lego League

The Primary Sevens along with Caelan from p6 have been working really hard this term on the First Lego League Challenge :

FIRST LEGO League Challenge teams are introduced to a scientific and real-world challenge for teams to focus and research on. The robotics part of the competition involves designing and programming LEGO Mindstorms robots to complete tasks. The students work out a solution to a problem related to the theme (changes every year) and then meet for regional, national and international tournaments to compete, share their knowledge, compare ideas, and display their robots.

wikipedia

Their team is called the Cog Cats.

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The challenge has involved an incredible amount of hard work. Along with the robot challenges went an innovation project where the children had to design a solution to the problem of keeping people active.

The group were also judged on their core values of:

DISCOVERY – Team explored new skills and ideas.
INNOVATION – Team used creativity and persistence to solve problems
IMPACT – Team applied what they learned to improve their world.
INCLUSION – Team demonstrated respect and embraced their differences
TEAMWORK – Team clearly showed they had worked as a team throughout their journey.
FUN – Teams clearly had fun and celebrated what they have achieved

The group have worked on this all term working very independently and show an amazing amount of resilience. Both in the robot challenges and the innovation project the children have had to repeatedly iterate on their work, improving and testing each time.

They have exemplified the school values of Respect, Responsibility Resilience & Compassion

On Thursday 17th June we went along to the virtual South of Scotland heats. The group had to run their robot through the challenges, present on their innovation project and answer questions on their core values.

Although we did not win our heat, we were delighted to be the winners in the Core Values section. I think this victory show what we already know about this primary seven they are pretty decent kids!

Scribble Bots

The Biggies have been making Scribble bots.
They need to use the knowledge and circuit building skills they had learnt during our electricity lessons in term 1. Some Teamwork, practical skills and problem solving lead to success.

Clever Never Goes

All the children in the school have been learning about Clever never goes about the dangers of ‘going off’ with someone.

The Biggies made resources for the younger children in the school to help teach them. We made 3 videos and an animation and sent them to the younger classes. They gave us some great feedback.

watch the videos

Highlights 2 Oct 2020: Short but Creative

Shadows

Background

Close Up

We didn’t have a full week but the Biggies have had a creative one.
On Tuesday afternoon we went on a tiktok photowalk round the playground. We tried out some of the techniques we have been learning from Dave’s Tiktok Photowalks site.

Later in the week we have been working on material to help the younger children in the school understand “Clever Never Goes”, a way of staying safe. The class were brilliant at working together, showing leadership, cooperation, act, problem solving and creative skills. Most of the class worked in video but one group used scratch.

We hope to publish the video and animation next week.

As usual the dens in the playground continue to develop and change:

Cardboard Engineers part 3

Most of the Biggies have now finished their marvellous machines. They took the basic cams and added some artistic flair.

Some of the class needs to go to the Kilsyth Academy Maths competition this morning so they need a wee bit more time to finish (now added to the video).

We also took some short videos on the machines in action.

Cardboard Engineers part 2

We now have some moving machines, hopefully get them all running and make them beautiful this afternoon.

Cardboard Engineers part 1

The Biggies are spending the day tinkering and engineering. Already we have used our maths skills, measuring, dividing and knowing about the properties of shape; Our problem solving; practical skills and helping each other when two hands are not enough. Our next steps will involve more problem solving and practical skills to get our cams and cam folders sorted and finally we will use some creative thinking to finish our models off.

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…