STEM – Page 4 – Banton Biggies

Highlights of the Week 14 May 2021

Another busy one! We have Miss Mowitt in class helping us a the moment, she has brought some fun ideas.

The Primary Lego group made some progress, we now have our competition playing field finished and set up. This week the group tested an example challenge:

The Primary sixes had a deal of fun making a robot avoid crashing:

Maths

Miss Mowitt, worked on some data handling and we had some good looking results.

R.E.

We have been learning about Ramadan and the class made some fanoos lanterns.

Poetry

The Highlight of the week should have been sports day on Wednesday, but it was too wet. We wrote some poems instead.

Two of my favourites were Ben’s:

Ocean

A universe that never ends
The water is strong
Like an army going to war
It over takes any obstacle

and Lara’s:

Birds

The bright sun beaming through in my window,
just like to look out to see the birds flying past my window,
bird after bird.

But everyone has some good ideas and words. Quite a few were a bit longer.

on Thursday the weather was much drier, and a lot colder, so we went out for

Sports Day

Although we missed the audience we had a great sports day. The children were brilliant at taking part, playing fairy and encouraging others. Lots of enthusiasm

There will be some more pictures of the sport’s day on the main Banton site soon.

Follow the line to Creativity

The Primary sixes have been working on programming their micro:bits to follow a line. We added a bit of creativity to the coding by designing tracks to give the bots some character: disco dances, dogs and more.

The class also were creative in their movie making:

Buzzy-bee Kristy & Alice

Disco Dancer Lara & Kaitlyn

Micro Dog Rhuraidh & Skye

We will add the rest of the videos when they are finished.

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.

Steady Hands

After working on some basic circuits we had a challenge today. To make a steady hands game.

The class worked really well on this, working in partners, using nearly all of the skill we could thing of. In particular, practical, communication, creativity and problem solving. We ended up with 100% success and 1 very proud teacher.

Dem Bones 🦴

Yesterday Afternoon, Mr & Mrs Carter Came in to show us some animal skeletons including a human named Sarah. The skeletons were found by Mr & Mrs Carter, These were badgers, foxes, a human and two roe Deer, one from Dow’s wood and one from Denny. The fox they found in their garden shot and they buried it to get rid of the flesh to leave it with just the bones.

When they came in we went into four groups and our group was Me, Hannah, Lara, Alana and Jessica. We started off with a roe deer from Denny, we had to get all the bones back together to make the animal again. We split into different sections to work on. I made the spine, Jessica was the dentist who made the teeth go back into the skull. Hannah & Alana was putting the rib back together, Finally Lara was putting the arms and legs together.

Secondly we got the badger next we had the same jobs, Jessica had a harder job putting the teeth in this time, all around it was a bit harder because it was smaller than the last one. Lastly we got the roe deer again but it was from Dow’s wood, once again same jobs but we didn’t have that much of a struggle this time cause we already done one similar to the first one.

Now we got the second part of the afternoon it was to just inspect the bones, we started of with the human. The hand was really flexible and weird, the foot was like the same it was really flexible and in the pelvis the was a hole where you could put the leg bone in.

After that we went to the next table and at that table we had a rabbit, a vole, and some beautiful sea shells, Alice was really concentrated on building a rat if you inspected it there was so many little pieces. After That we moved over to our last table and there was a Heron head, a Hedgehog head.

We really enjoyed Mr & Mrs Carter Coming in Yesterday and I hope you enjoyed this report.

K’nex Semi Final

We are very proud of two of the Biggies who reached the primary 6 semi final of the Glasgow Science Festival Creating Engineers Competition this year.

Testing strength

On Tuesday p4, 5, 6, 7 did a Science experiment to test the strength of paper.
To test the strength of the paper we sellotaped the paper to a table and then we cello taped a plastic cup to the other end of the paper. To test the strength of the paper we put sand in the paper cup and the paper would break and the cup would land in someone’s hand 🖐. If the sand was not enough weight to make the paper break then we put weights in the plastic cup. Once the cup fell we attached it to a weighed and took a note of the weight. The paper that could hold the most weight was the strongest. Most people fount the strongest paper was the art paper.

Playground trees

This morning we were finding out about the trees in our playground.

We measured the height of trees with our clinometers.
We measured the circumferences of the trees and used a webpage to estimate how old the trees were.
We took photos of the trees, their leaves, bark and fruit.

Skills: maths skills: measuring, calculation to find out the heights. Team work. Taking pictures. Web browsing.