We’ve been rounding numbers to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000. We’re learning that you can use rounding in calculations to help estimate answers and we can explain why this is an important life skill. Even better, we’ve been playing lots of games to help us practise our new skills…

We’ve been learning about the Battle of Stirling Bridge this week and we turned into reporters once again to write newspaper articles about the battle. Some of us even managed to interview William Wallace directly after the battle. Now that’s impressive!

We’ve also been learning to distinguish between fact and opinion this week – a very important skill for historians such as us! It’s not always as easy as it seems, as we found out when we took part in a quiz…

Next up we’re going to learn all about bias in historical sources. Wallace the hero or Wallace the outlaw? Hmmm – we’ll tell you next week!

We took advantage of the lovely sunshine this morning to go outside in the snow. Our group challenge was to make a replica Stone of Destiny. Here are our excellent efforts…

Then we made characters from the Scottish Wars of Independence…

In the afternoon we started to create our own personal medieval wax stampers. These were used by nobles and kings in medieval times to seal letters and other important documents. In 1296, Edward I made many Scottish nobles attach their wax seals to an infamous document called the Ragman Roll, which made him overlord of Scotland. It’s one of the main reasons for the Scottish Wars of Independence…

We just need to bake our stamps in the oven then attach them to the handles and we’re ready to make our own wax seals.

Today we have been working hard in our Scottish Wars of Independence topic. We have been writing Newspaper Reports about the events that led to Edward I’s invasion of Scotland in 1296. We began by looking at the features of newspaper articles to help us structure our own reports…

After we wrote our own reports we edited and redrafted them…

Then we used tea-bags to tea stain them and make them look like authentic newspapers from 1296…

Finally, this afternoon, we carried out some research about medieval Scotland…

Before filming our well-planned and prepared ‘breaking news reports’ about the sudden death of Alexander the III.

What a busy day!

We have been exploring the events that led to the Scottish Wars of Independence and today, we answered some questions about the events that required us to think in lots of different ways.

We learned that these different ways of thinking are:

• Remembering
• Understanding
• Applying
• Analysing
• Evaluating
• Creating

In our groups we worked together to answer questions then we had to decide which of the above higher order thinking (HOT) skills we were using to come up with our answers:

There was lots of discussion going on and Mrs McLean was super impressed with our ability to identify the HOT skills being used.

We also evaluated the lesson at the end (using our HOT skills) and were able to justify our responses.

Kai said he really enjoyed the lesson because it was active and he liked the questions and the way they were set out.

Caius felt that there was too much moving around and said he preferred to stay at one desk during lessons.

Liam enjoyed learning about the different HOT skills.

Great work P6!

We have been working extremely hard since we started back on Monday and Mrs McLean is really pleased with all our hard work.

In maths, we’ve been learning how to multiply decimals and we can now multiply a variety of decimal numbers by 10, 100 and 1000.

We began our new novel studies on Monday and already, some of us have been working on our higher order thinking skills. For example, Team Vega have been analysing their books to find inferences while Team Sirius have been been analysing and evaluating different parts of their novels. Great work!

We have also started work on our new topic – The Scottish Wars of Independence. This was a fascinating and extremely important period in Scottish history. Today we placed the main events on  a timeline and discovered that the Wars of Independence took place in Medieval Scotland (many hundreds of years AFTER the Roman invasion – our last history topic!) from 1286 to 1328. Daniel worked out that the first Wars of Independence lasted for 42 years!

Phew! So we just managed to finish all of our books in time for this afternoon’s book launch and it was a great success!

Every P6 pupil stood up and presented their book blurb and a short extract of their work – very well done! Our P4/5 audience were super and had the chance to explore the books in more detail with the authors later on.

P4/5 gave us some great feedback and were very impressed by our character descriptions – especially our use of similes. We’ve worked so hard and we can’t wait for tomorrow’s ‘Movie-Duvet Day’ for a well-deserved break!

We have spent the month of December writing and editing our very own Christmas Books which we have dedicated to various people. Here are some dedications from our budding young authors:

‘This book is dedicated to my family because they love me. Thank you for always being there.’  (Holly, author of ‘The Yeti that almost ruined Christmas’)

‘This book is dedicated to my little brother Caiden because he has always loved Christmas.’ (Liam, author of ‘The Disaster Before Christmas’)

‘This book is dedicated to my sister Stella because she loves Christmas. Thank you for never growing up.’ (Rachael, author of ‘An Electric Christmas’)

‘This book is dedicated to my little cousin because she is always there for me. (Stephanie, author of ‘Where did Santa go?’)

Here’s a sneak preview of our books (and authors!):

It’s taken a lot of hard work and commitment to complete our books but we’re really looking forward to sharing them with P4/5 and Mr Young at our book launch event on Monday.

This is our first blog in a while and have we been busy!

Today was our Christmas Party which we shared with Primary 7. It was a huge success and we all had a really great time. Here are some pics…

We even managed to squeeze in some ceilidh dancing!

Thank you to all the very kind parents who sent in party food. The children were spoiled for choice!

It was great to see the boys and girls having lots of fun today but we’ve also been thinking of others this Advent. We know it’s an important time of preparation and we have been gathering food to donate to the Food Bank in Coatbridge for those who need some extra help this Christmas time. A huge thank you to the parents of the Primary 6 children who have very kindly donated items. They will be handed in to the Food Bank next Monday.

It’s been another busy week in Primary 6. In maths, we practised our new strategy for creating equivalent fractions by playing a game of ‘Musical Fractions.’ It was lots of fun…

We were also given another task from our mystery organisation MSB. They asked us to find out about the work that MSPs do so we used the iPads to carry out some research. We found out that our local MSP is called Elaine Smith. Some of us even remembered her from her visit to St. Bartholomew’s back in Primary 5! We decided to invite Elaine in to the school to talk to us about her job so we each drafted an email and now we just need to pick the best one to send on to her.

On Thursday afternoon, we took part in the school’s sponsored walk. It was a beautiful day and we all did really well, even though there were some sore feet afterwards…

Then, on Friday, we looked again at the Expressionist artist Edvard Munch and his most famous piece of artwork called The Scream. In groups, we discussed how he used line and perspective to create this painting. Mrs McLean was VERY impressed by what we had to say. After that we began to sketch our own Munch inspired pictures…

And finally, we worked on our floor sequences in P.E. Our challenge was to perform a sequence that included a balance, travel, jump and turn. We also had to include a forward roll…

Mrs McLean has seen big improvements in our sequences over the last few weeks. Well done Primary 6!

This week’s well-deserving Pupil of the Week was Rachael! Very well done Rachael!

We opened our latest letter from MSB today. How exciting!

They thanked us for all of our hard work so far. They also asked us to edit the questionnaire we chose as the class favourite to make it even better. This is the questionnaire we started with…

And here’s what we ended up with…

Two questionnaires! The class decided that the little ones in the school would need a much simpler questionnaire and that the one we had could be improved with some small changes. So Caius and Rachael went off to the ICT suite to make the changes and improvements. Well done everyone!

Now we just need to carry out our survey to find out what the children and adults of Townhead want to make it a better place to live.