St Bartholomew's Class Blog

Last week in Primary 5/6, we had some very special visitors from Miss Duffy’s class in Primary 1.

We went to the art auction together and had a wander round. Everything was very impressive and the children thought that the paintings were ‘very beautiful and colourful’. Some of us bought paintings, others reserved them until Monday when we were able to pay for them. We had a lovely time.
When we had finished, we returned to Primary 5/6’s classroom and the fantastic Primary 1s helped us to make some stain glass windows. We got a little sticky, but it was worth it because we created some excellent stain glass windows.

After that, we worked together to write some super stories. The Primary 1 pupils did a wonderful job helping the older boys and girls to remember to put capital letters and full stops in each sentence, while Primary 5/6 supported the younger pupils with spelling. Our stories were out of this world and some of us even got to share them with Miss Brennan and the rest of the class.

Since then Primary 5/6 have been very busy with digital learning. We’ve been learning about computer programs and learned that coding is giving a computer a set of step by step instructions to tell the computer what to do. Coding can be tricky, because the instructions have to be very specific and clear. If you make even one wrong command, the program could stop working! So we took the opportunity to practise our coding and problem solving skills in teams of three using an app called ‘lightbot’. It was a lot of fun and we deepened our knowledge of coding in the process. Miss Brennan was very impressed by our hard work and by how good we got!

On Tuesday this week some of our pupils joined a new Digital Learning club. We discussed and made notes of the areas that we want to learn more about and set up accounts on Scratch which will help us to develop our skills and understanding of coding and programming using the scratch language. We are very excited to do a little more on it next week!

Finally, we have been learning about the stations of the cross in R.E during Lent, and as part of our Pope Francis Faith Award journey, we are going to help out during the Holy Week morning services by sharing and presenting our learning. We’ve been busy bees preparing for it and are looking forward to this exciting and important opportunity.

We have been working hard in our computer room to learn how to word process. Here you can see what skills we have been developing…

We know how to make a capital letter, how to do a full stop, how to change the font, colour and size of our writing. Aren’t we clever!

Also, as part of our IDL topic on materials, we know that everything is made of atoms. We explored the art technique of pointillism and created these crosses for our Way of the Cross wall during lent. Each cross is made of tiny dots, reminding us that everything is made of atoms.

We’re busy bees in Primary 5/6 and we have lots of exciting things to share.

We’ve started some new novel studies this week and we can’t wait to share our thoughts with you. The Superstars are reading ‘Horrid Henry’, they are desperate to know what mischief he’ll get up to next and are really pleased because they love to watch ‘Horrid Henry’ on the television.

Our Clever clogs have started reading ‘The Butterfly Lion’ by Michael Morpurgo and have been making fantastic predictions about what they think will happen in the story.

Finally the Whizz kids are reading a brand new book, ‘Tom Gates is Absolutely Fantastic (at some things)’ and they are loving it more with every page they read.

We’re very happy with our new books and wanted to share them with you!

This week we’ve also been looking at astronauts as part of our space topic. Working in pairs, we used our iPads to research some questions we had about how astronauts live in space, we found some really interesting facts about showering, eating, sleeping and even going to the bathroom in space!

We wrote a short monologue from the point of view of an astronaut after their first day in space and some of use managed to record these as a video blog. We tried some astronaut ice cream, most of us thought it was very tasty! Andrew said that it was great because it tasted just like warm ice cream but Carlos wasn’t sure about the texture.