It’s been a week full of active learning and creativity this week!

In Art with Ms Burr, the children have been painting butterflies from the rainforest.  They have been thinking about the colours they see in nature and recreating this in their work.  They have been working with concentration and care.  We have also created beautiful Christmas card designs which you’ll be able to see when you visit for your parent appointment shortly!

In Topic work this week, Mrs Henderson found an active way to help illustrate how food webs work.

We had another visit from Gregory and Frances from the Children’s Parliament who came to meet our new P4/5 pupils who have joined our class and introduce them to the work they do and to begin talking about AI.  There were, as always, some great ‘Getting To Know You’ games and we spoke some more about the UNCRC.

Group work is at the centre of all that we do in the Children’s Parliament.  In groups, we had to choose an animal and think of statements about it that would allow the rest of the class to guess our creature.  We had to agree on the animal and statements before ordering these from most difficult to easiest.

In groups, we drew around a life-size body and wrote inside it about the kind of person we’d like to be and our hopes and dreams and how we’d get there in the future.  Again, team work, discussion, listening and sharing was needed to make this task a success.

Then we started to think more about AI and where it can be found in daily life.  We also recapped on how data is collected for AI and introduced our new pupils to the ‘Cleaning Up The Ocean’ online game.

On Thursday, Gregory returned to help us think more about fairness in AI.  He gave us a challenge!  A school has over 300 pupils and for the upcoming day trip to the Golf Course, there can only be 100 children chosen!  Who gets to go?  We were introduced to coding using ‘Python’ which uses simple words and numbers to instantly sort and analyse data.

The challenge was to build an algorithm that decides who gets to go on the trip by using a points system.  Points had to be allocated under certain headings – pupils who are always late, those with best behaviour, age of pupil, those performing best in a test etc.  When the numbers were input, the computer made the decision for each pupil as to how many points they were rewarded.

After a list of names was produced and we found out who the 100 tickets would go to, we then heard about some of the personal stories behind the pupils.  This made us realise that selecting pupils in this way was unfair and sometimes, you need to know more information.  Our investigators will pass on our thoughts at their next online meeting.

Thursday afternoon saw us drumming with Joy again and I was so impressed with how quickly the class have built up some complicated rhythms and combining these together.  I love watching the concentration on the faces as the pupils follow Joy’s lead!

Friday saw us learning about the Spanish Armada and the wreck of the El Gran Grifon which sank off Fair Isle in 1588.  This gave us some background knowledge before listening to music from this period of time from the Chroma Music Group.

The afternoon saw Nora and her violin and Rory with his accordion, creating music with others pupils while we learned a dance in the hall.  It was a war dance between the Spaniards and Elizabethans.  It was a very different and enjoyable Friday afternoon!

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