The Tallest Class in Banton Primary
We have had a busy week this week. Highlights for me included our work on Earthquakes. The children did some research to find out the basic facts and yesterday made some model seismographs to explore how these instruments works.
We used our research skills to find how about earthquakes.
Mr Wevling started a new science topic, looking at the different states of matter.
The Children rose to the NLC Learning Hub Christmas Engineering Challenge.
We posted an in progress report Christmas Engineering Challenge Part 1 last week.
We lost some time on Friday as no children were in school due to snow.
This week we finished off and have started to make movies of our reindeer. All of the groups managed all of the chilli challenges! Watch the movies to see how. (A couple more currently in production)
The NLC Learning Hub has issued a Christmas Engineering Challenge:
The biggies started work this morning. We are making Reindeer from Cardboard and hope to include movement, electrics & coding. It might take a while…
Most of the groups got a lot of their model finished this morning. We used our teamwork, creativity & problem solving skills. On group got on to the moving part:
By lunchtime we had made a lot of progress:
More to do…
For this term the Biggies have been working on a Lego Explore topic. It took us right up to the last week!
Today the children finished some ‘poster boards’ explain what they have learned.
We have been lucky enough to borrow some lego kits from NLC Stem. and started to get to grips with the Spike Robot yesterday. As well as the obvious coding and creativity skills this allows the Biggies to practise their excellent team work.
Yesterday we had some challenges in the playground, make a sleigh, some decorations and a fairy grove.
Today some of the class worked in Minecraft on some the same tasks and a giant Santa:
Some of the Children worked more on their CodeClub Jazzy Jumpers:
And
After creating and exploring the science behind our balloon cars yesterday we used them for maths today.
We practised measuring distance in metres & centimetres and time in seconds. Then we calculated the speed of our cars by dividing the distance traveled by the time taken.
thanks to The Royal Institution for the idea Balloon car racers
We had great fun finishing of our scribble bots and making some “art”. We found that chunks of glue stick worked better than rubbers to keep the wobble going.
Is it Art? you be the judge:
We also used videos, pictures, drawing to write reports and instruction about Scribble Bots on our e-portfolios.
The Medals for the Team arrived today. Unfortunately we have one member off, but the others put together a short video to show some of the things they have learnt.
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.
Their team is called the Cog Cats.
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:
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!
