The Oldest Class in Banton Primary
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
The latest episode has been published on the Podcast blog:
I am really please by the way the pupils worked on this episode. They took responsibility for writing, recording, editing and publishing the episode.
Everyone in the class had their say, they worked independently and cooperatively to record and encourage each other.
During COP 26 the Biggies were invited to contribute to digital book, passed from school to school for COP26. The children had to explain where they though and were doing about climate change and who inspired them. That had to do this in digital formats, audio and video. As I expected the Biggies did a great job, using their creativity and digital skills. Everyone can view the ‘book’ online now.
It has been selected by the Book Creator team to add to their ‘Social Studies’ library. It’s sitting on the bookshelf alongside other examples & sample of various history, geography and other social science books made by students around the world.
The Biggies joined in the @digilearnscot and @CodeClubScot COP 26  Code Along Project. We joined in a Teams call with Schools from across Scotland to create a game in Scratch. This week we added some finishing touches to the games and published them. You can play them by clicking the thumbnails below.
Yesterday the Biggies joined in with 3000 other children learning Scratch from an expert. This was part of @digiLearnScot and @CodeClubScot’s #COP26 ‘Code-Along’ you can click on the thumbnails to see the results.
The topic was around the importance of polinators like butterflies and beets.
This was a great refresh of our Scratch skills, covering random and forever loops.
You can see some of the children’ animations in action by clicking the thumbnails.
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 took an idea from Darrell Wakelam to make some Day of the Dead skulls from paper plates.
We then took it a bit further taking photos of ourselves in front of the green screen. In Keynote we added backgrounds, our pictures and photos of our masks.
We used instant alpha to remove backgrounds to create interesting pictures.
A bit of fun but learning about layers and opacity. We also got the images from unsplash so they are copyright free. We also read about the the Day of the dead festival.
We told Darrell we had used his idea and this is what he said:
Brilliant John! Love the photo idea too, I bet the kids had a real laugh putting those together. 🤩
— Darrell Wakelam (@DarrellWakelam) October 31, 2021
We have been learning a bit about Climate Change in the lead up to COP 26.
The Biggies were invited to take part in a digital book that is being passed to schools and others to add their thought on climate change. It is  digital book and we will share the finished product.  Our pages seen me to go down well.
Today it was @johnjohnston & @Banton_Pr, brilliant videos & reporting! Tomorrow is Day 10 & we're passing the baton to @MountFloridaPri for them to add their climate pledge for #OurDearGreenPlace & #COP26. @NicolaSturgeon & @BorisJohnson you’ll get your copy soon @BookCreatorApp pic.twitter.com/I2lOOznMa7
— Digital Learning for ALL (@DL_for_All) October 21, 2021
We will share some of the work we made over the next week. Â The featured image above came from the ideas of some of the children much better than their teachers. Here is how the Biggies introduced themselves:
And here are some posters they made about how we can help do our bit about climate change in school or at home. We included them in a couple of videos we added to the digital book. Click to see bigger versions:
The class worked with a great deal of indpendence to put together all the media for the digital book. Their skills
A short week in the biggies, but we managed to have a bit of maths fun with an outdoor tables challenge and some tarsia puzzles. We also worked on collaborative problem solving with diagrams.
If you would like to try some simple multiplication and division tarsia, you could try these ones, print them out and mix them up:
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.
