Good morning all! We hope you have managed to get outside and enjoy this amazing week of snow we’ve had, in between all those snowy showers!
Next week we have a busy week planned for you! We hope that Gregory and his team from The Children’s Parliament will be in school on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning. On Tuesday, we will also have a visiting artist in class who will do creative work with you so we would ask that you all bring in an apron or old shirt to protect your clothes.
On Thursday we will be swimming again and we’ll have another session of Boccia to look forward to on Friday!
It’s going to be a busy one! Hope to see you all soon! 👋
We recently completed our latest Mission from the Children’s Parliament. It was based around Safety and Security. We revised what ‘data’ is, the different ‘types’ of data there can be and how it is used in AI systems.
We then thought about our rights and how this relates to safety and security with AI. We talked about online gaming and the importance of keeping data safe to protect their right to play and privacy. We discussed sharing locations online and talked about safety in relation to this too.
Our next task was to try to guess the identity of a mystery YouTube channel user based on their recommendation homepage. They had to consider what this person may like, where they might live, how old they are etc… For this activity, we needed to think like AI and to have respectful and fair ideas about this person. We are hoping to hear more about the mystery user when our Investigators have their online call next week!
Our final task was a craft based one. We each got a wooden house to decorate. The outside needed to reflect information they’d be happy to share with the world! Within the inside of the house, they were to write, draw or symbolise pieces of information that should only be shared with family and friends.
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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.
We were delighted to receive our MCP lanyards!
Getting To Know You Paper bag introductions!
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!
This week our new Investigators have been announced. They have been given their welcome packs and will be preparing to meet the children they will be working alongside on their first online call shortly. We wish them luck in this exciting opportunity.
Our new Investigators!
We’ve started our class novel, “The Explorer,” which ties in with our Rainforest and Biodiversity topic.
We have learned about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and have used some of the most relevant Articles to help us form our Responsible Behaviours Agreement for our class. We plan to create a rainforest theme which we’ll share with you in time!
Any pupil wishing to represent their class in the Pupil Council had the opportunity to think about what would make them a suitable member and we’ll take a vote on this next week.
For writing this week, poems created in Week 1 were rewritten for display in class and there was a big effort with handwriting. Well done!
Maths this week was based around problem solving activities with pupils choosing from a wide range of tasks that involved them using strategies such as trial and error, act it out and look for a pattern. Lots of paired and cooperative group work was also needed to succeed!
This week saw our final online call with the Children’s Parliament, Alan Turing Institute and our fellow pupils at Oakwood, Doune and St Mary’s. It was a very positive call where achievements were recognised and celebrated. The Investigators had to think about what they had got better at by being an Investigator, what surprised them about their time as an Investigator and what they were most proud of. They then had to be creative, showing their thoughts in drawing form. (See Self Portraits below)
Sharing our ideas and thoughts during the meeting this week.
The Investigators for 22/23 are now in discussions as to how they can support the new Investigators for the next school year. We are currently thinking about who this could be and how we can involve past, present and incoming pupils in our AI work in the future. There are some exciting plans afoot so please look out for more details in August!
If you have not had a chance already to view the final report for the year, please see below.
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Mrs Henderson and I would like to thank you all for the amazing support you showed us at our class Assembly today! It was so lovely to have our families in again to share, and celebrate, our learning. We are so proud of the Draatsi class for their hard work and continued enthusiasm throughout the year, on what has been an exciting opportunity. We hope that this came across in their presentations today. Please look out for the Children’s Parliament video that will be shared with you shortly. As well as footage from the AI Summit, there will be clips and interviews that our pupils took part in when our class was taken over by Gregory and his team.
If you have any feedback following today’s Assembly, we’d love it if you could leave us a comment.
Sorry for only a few photos. I was too taken up with enjoying the moment! P4/5/6 … you have done yourselves very proud!
What a really special day we’ve had! An excellent procession and galley burning this morning and a noisy Jarl Squad visit in the afternoon. It’s just a shame that the later celebrations have had to be postponed. Here are some photos from today … including Mascot Max! He’ll be returning to the Children’s Parliament with some amazing stories to tell!
Max with our galleyLining up to welcome our Jarl Squad.A* for costume effort!Max’s first torch procession!Watching the galley burn.
Max’s first SMUHA!It was great to see this P4 Viking and his Dad!A shield design from 2020! (2 votes, average: 1.00 out of 1) Loading...
The two snow closure days have stopped us doing some of our planned activities for our Viking themed SMUHA week. However, we managed to prepare torches and helmets on Monday and got our photo taken with our school galley today, before we burn it tomorrow. 🤞
There was a production line going for torch making!The Draatsis with the galley that’s been waiting to be burned since 2020!And a silly one!
Just in time for SMUHA, the Children’s Parliament mascot, Max, arrived in the post! We have to show him around our school and community so it’s perfect timing to bring him along tomorrow!
Our Investigators with Max in the snow!Alec made him his own helmet for tomorrow!
In the afternoon, we made Viking heads using clay. The class practised on Monday using plasticine and explored how to add to the base to make it look 3D and used the different clay tools to add texture and detail. This really helped them create Vikings with lots of character!
It’s been a very busy week in the Draatsi class! We’ve even managed a photo and interview with the local media so keep your eyes peeled in the Shetland Times for news of our AI work with the Children’s Parliament!
Here are some of the activities we’ve been involved in…
Language
We have moved on to Target 2 in our Writing Challenge. With Mrs Henderson the pupils started a longer story which they will build on over the coming weeks. They need to try to include carefully punctuated sentences with interesting openers. Today saw us looking in more detail at openers that begin with -ing words. The pupils were given a sentence ending for them to decide on suitable beginnings. We also looked again at using speech marks. There’s so much to remember!
Maths
Various Maths topics have been worked on this week. These include addition and subtraction methods, multiplication, fractions and work on area. They have been working hard and developing the skill of explaining their answers in words.
HealthandWell–being
Class PE is always really popular so we took advantage of the fine weather on Thursday to go outside and play some of our class favourites! We love Capture The Flag and Rock, Paper, Scissors!
Last week, we watched the Oscar nominated animation, ‘The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse.’ This week we created our own charcoal drawings in the style of Charlie Mackesy and wrote quotes that mean something to us. Some examples are below…
Work by Scott, Jasmin, Rory, Scarlett and Alec.
Wednesday saw our class taken over by the Children’s Parliament. We were joined by Gregory and Sophia who have visited before but were also joined by Cathy who is the founder of the Children’s Parliament in Scotland and Rona who is Head of Projects. They were so impressed by the knowledge of the pupils and how they can articulate themselves. 😌
They helped us with our next Mission. Each group was given a case study which used a different aspect of AI. The children had to read these through and decide on how the AI was being used in a positive or negative way.
This group’s case study was about the use of online video games. They found more cons than pros in their story.
The next task was to illustrate how these pros and cons could be shown using plasticine! This was a hard task but we were all amazed at the imagination each group showed. Each plasticine model had a detailed story behind it.
This group’s story was about how AI can be used when diagnosing illnesses and injury.Models were created to show how people left out of facial recognition would feel.We had to explain what our models showed.
The culmination of the day was creating a news report with each person taking on a different role…Presenters, Interviewers and Editors. The pupils had to write a report about their case study and ask questions about the type of AI used in their story. Joining us live, online, was Mhairi from The Alan Turing Institute. She was able to answer all our questions while the editors quickly noted down her responses. The children ALL rose spectacularly to the challenge and were not put off by the bright lights or Gregory’s dictaphone!
Our presenters were not fazed by the bright lights!A career in the making…Interviewers patiently waiting for their cue…Delighted to be asking The Alan Turing Institute the cutting edge questions!Presenters Fruit Cake, Sponge Cake and Chocolate Cake!
It was a fantastic day of learning and team work. Thursday saw each pupil being interviewed by Gregory to tell him what they understand of AI and how they are finding being involved in this two year project.
We are very proud of each and every Draatsi!
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