We visited the Edinburgh International Book Festival this week and loved:
Chris Higgins & Emily MacKenzie: Here Comes Trouble – Finding out what makes an interesting story and what being a good friend means as we met the creators of Trouble Next Door and Trouble at School. The children loved the live illustration, guessing the creatures as they were pen and inked…
William Sutcliffe: Roll up! Roll up! – We enjoyed the “thrills, spills and all the fun of the big top as we met William and found out where he gets the ideas for all of the wacky characters in Circus of Thieves.”
John Dougherty & Tom Morgan-Jones: Dinosaurs and Dinner Ladies – Outstanding session with John performing his poetry (slightly painfully for the teachers in the audience), and Tom with his amazing ink drawings!

Gill Arbuthnott & Doug MacDonald: Who is Dracula? – Our P7s relished getting hands on learning about the science behind infection spreading, getting gory with vampirism and blood serums!

Following this visit P1-4 were inspired to write our own illustrated poetry:

We also followed this through in Forest School this week with the children designing their own stop-motion animated films and (in most cases) some rhyming stories to go along with them. This is our first efforts learning the skills and techniques prior to our submission in the Heartland Film Society Young Indies Film Competition. Quite impressive for a first go!

We have been celebrating the Year of the Rooster in our Chinese classes over the last few weeks, focusing particularly on our writing skills – looking at the development of Chinese characters and how radicals are put together to make characters, then characters put together to make words. We practiced in sand and then made posters using the animal character and the written Chinese numbers for the year of our birth. We also made Red Envelopes (hong b’oww), tying it in with our own versions of Rabbie Burn’s “My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose”.

Practicing writing our animal characters in sand, then shaking them to disapear!

Our oral focus has been on talking about different food types and how to say I like (war shee-hwuan) and I want (war y’oww). To hit it home we learnt how to make noodles, first kneading the dough, then rolling and using the noodle maker to make strings of noodles. We put them in our home-made ember bowls and used our whittled chopsticks to eat them!

We also learnt the story of how the Rooster lost its horns and how the dragon managed to persuade the Jade Emperor to let it join the New Year Race. Here’s a brief clip from the story:

Our aim at Forest School this week was to experience what it was like to be living in more primitive times, as we begin our topic on Medieval Life. Although the ember bowls have a more primitive history, we talked through what it would be like to be living more hand to mouth and how many more people during medieval times would have been farmers or certainly spent time working off the land.

We had to saw our own fairly flat ‘wood cookies’ and then use carefully blown embers to burn out a hollow in the wood. The children learnt patience in their sawing and blowing and had to take care and risk assess when using the embers. A few children experimented in making small hand-drilled holes in the wood and this helped considerably in getting started (though discussion over whether it was ‘fair’ also ensued).

Forest School became Snow School last week! We were designing in the snow and doing both science and mathematics challenges: fractions of natural or snow-made materials, 5 snowball doubling, using a pivot/fulcrum to fire a snowball, building snow creatures with French features and seeing how far we could move snow without pushing or pulling.

A: “I loved learning about forces because I learned how to move a snow ball without touching it.”

C: “I liked launching the snowballs in snow school – using a fulcrum to send it about 2 metres or more.”

E: “I loved making a snow penguin. It looked exactly like a penguin. I loved measuring how deep the snow was.”

C: “I liked the snow animals because it was hard to find stuff for the face.”

A: “During snow school we even measured out objects, telling them as fractions of a metre stick.”

Literacy in P3/4/5 this week has seen us talking and writing about our holidays, setting resolutions and doing some persuasive arguments. In French we looked at Facial Descriptions and in Chinese the New Year Animals.
M: “We were doing persuasive writing and we were doing Chinese art – amazing.”
E: “I love handwriting because I am good at it.”
C: “I enjoyed learning about the  Chinese New Year Animals.”
C: “I liked making the Chinese New Year pictures. They inspired me to remember the story.”
J: “I learnt to do a French game…the monster game where someone says numbers, colours and face parts in French and you draw them.”
E: “I enjoyed Chinese this week because we talked about Chinese New Year.”
S: “I liked my persuasive writing because I learnt how to persuade people through facts, quotes and reasons.”

In maths we were learning about multiplication, division and fractions.
A: “It was very fun doing fractions because I learned many different shapes like tenths, halves and quarters.”
M: “In maths we were learning about fractions. In science we learnt about forces and ship making.”

In Science we are looking at forces and how they affect objects by either changing their shape or making them move/stop moving, change direction, or fall to the ground. We made pirate ships that will be used to investigate different forces.

E: “I loved making the pirate ship because it improved my team work.”
C: “I liked learning about forces – like pushes and pulls.”
C: “I liked the pirate ship making because it was very, very difficult.”