It was EU code week and we took part in an app design afternoon online with lots of other classes. It was a great creative challenge and we enjoyed sharing our ideas with each other.

Here are some our app design ideas.

• Saving endangered animals
• learning how to do different sports
• learning to read
• help with reading, writing and drawing
• donating items to those who need them
• learning how to horse ride

We are creating an Autumn display so we went on a leaf identification walk. We used a chart to spot which trees the leaves were from.

Here are our long a sound spelling words.

In numeracy we are using number bonds to practise mental strategies for subtraction. We are also learning the language of subtraction such as

• minus
• less than
• difference between
• find the difference
• reduce
• how many more
• take away

In maths we are learning about different types of angles, such as right, acute and obtuse.

Our writing this block is recount writing, a personal account of an event or experience, with a personal comment. We were very observant in spotting that it includes past tense verbs.

We drew and painted pumpkins, mixing a variety of shades of orange.

PE is gymnastics and we are very excited about using the gym apparatus!

Welcome back, Primary 2!

We had a very busy start this week.

Before the October holidays we had a vote about our new class novel and most of us agreed that it would be lovely to find out what happens to Tomas and Flicker next. So, we decided to read,”The boy who dreamed of dragons” by Andy Shepherd. Some of us felt that we already knew the characters and we would be familiar with them.

We spotted straight away that Flicker the dragon looks more grown up when we discussed the front cover. We knew that Tomas could not fly on Flicker’s back at the end of the first novel.

In Rhyme and Analogy we explored words that rhyme with the families – sad, hit, leg & sun. Can you find other words that rhyme with these words?

We used our linking cubes to make stories of 15. Then we wrote our sums in numbers on our whiteboards. Using the cubes really helped us to see how we reached our answers.

Our highlight this week was learning about Coding. We had such fun using the little picture cards and getting our friends to move around the classroom. We even had to pretend we were sleeping for one of the commands! Then we created our own codes for a partner to follow. We had to have a clear start and a clear finish so we started with a green flag and finished with a red flag.

We are looking forward to turning these into programs for the Beebots. We enjoyed Coding so much that we will research other activities that we might like to explore. Coding really challenged our thinking this week but, we felt so proud of ourselves when we had created our own programs.

We also started to look at RECOUNT in our Writing. This is quite different to the descriptive writing we did in Block 1 but, we are looking forward to learning how to write a recount and then write our own.

In groups we also thought about what we already know about night and day as this is our new Science topic. At first we thought we only knew a few things but, when we started recording it on our sheet we were amazed that we had written and drawn so much.

We are looking forward to finding out more about night and day.

It’s been a short but busy week!

We had our Live Coding lesson on Tuesday and have been continuing working on our App designs each afternoon.  We now know how to link icons to different slides in Keynote to make our Prototype ‘work’ like a real App. We’ve used some other coding apps too and Mrs Little had a very exciting evening chatting about Coding with Tim Cook from Apple!

We have also been working on some illustrations for a special project – more information on this soon.

1. What have you been most proud of this week?
2. What has made learning difficult for you this week?
3. What are you looking forward to next week?

We have had a busy but enjoyable 1st week back. We are looking forward to exploring our rainforest topic in more detail over the next few weeks. What are you looking forward to this block?

Mrs Brown and Mrs Smith

This week in P7 we have learned a lot even though we were off on Monday. We have done a lot of maths, from our times tables needing to be lightning fast and learning all our angles with a protractor. One of the coolest things we did was draw jungle animals mouths measured by a protractor.

In writing and literacy we have learnt all about information reports and similes which can be fun to use out of context. We have also looked at ideas for Dalguise funds.

Plus we had a bonus lesson on Tuesday! we had a live lesson for Code Week. We made a plan for a potential app using keynote and there is a competition to choose the best app idea. The winning child’s school will win an Inspire Sphero robot.

Lastly we began to look at our topic which is…Tropical Rain Forests! We look forward to learning more throughout the term.

(By Lochain McNae)

We were out in the playground yesterday trying to identify the different types of trees we have around the school. We discovered we have quite a few different types of trees including oak, maple, sycamore, rowan and holly. We enjoyed looking at the different shapes of the leaves and found lots of lovely colours too.

Try using the leaf identifier to see what trees are near your house/ in the local park/ on your favourite walk.

We had a great time designing our own apps on Tuesday as part of code week. We had to brainstorm, plan and create a prototype which we are going to share with the rest of the class. We came up with loads of brilliant ideas and some of us would really like to be app designers when we are older.

What an afternoon! Kingsland were delighted to host Paul and Andrew from Inspire Learning for a Live Lesson on Coding to begin our learning for  Europe Code Week.  All of the P4-7 classes joined live from their classrooms along with at least 60 other classes from Primary Schools across the Borders!

The theme for the day was designing an App that could be used by many people with Inclusivity as a key focus. After Paul talked us through the initial part of the task, P7A and Mrs Little were delighted to share some of their ideas LIVE on with all the other pupils and schools.  A HUGE well done to all the pupils who spoke and shared their work.We gave a big shout out to all the other classes at Kingsland who we know were also producing some great ideas and were rewarded with a huge cheer!

Then it was time to get down to the task properly.  We learned how real App designers Prototype their ideas before they get to the coding stage. We did this using Keynote on our iPads and are looking forward to learning how to add hyperlinks in our next lesson. There is a competition across the Borders for the best Prototype Design which excited a lot of pupils!

We were all super excited to meet our new stick insect family. We set up their starter enclosure and made sure they had food before we settled them in.

We then had the tricky job of naming our new ‘stickies’.

We have named them; Stickabelle, Lorax Jr, Ivy, Trixie and Twix.

Let us know what you think of our new arrivals…

How many can you find in the photo below? They are very good at camouflage!