Tag Archives: Curricular areas

Next Week in P4/5

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!  👋

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Welcome To Term 2!

It was lovely to see everyone back for the start of Term 2 and to hear about holiday adventures both near and far!

This week some of the learning that P4/5 have been involved in has included creating an atmospheric, moonlit sky for a spooky Halloween painting, creating a plan for a story about ‘staying out’ on Halloween night and starting our opening paragraph and in Maths, working with change.

It was very amusing to see some of these activities being carried out in Halloween costumes for our dress-up day!

We’ve also had a change of seating arrangements in the class so we’ve got new friends to work alongside.

Concentrating while mixing and blending colours.
Painting is always a favourite activity in P4/5!
A quiet class, happy at their work!

Opening sentences for Ollie’s ‘Staying Out’ story…

On Halloween Bobby and Miller go camping in the street.  They set down the tent on the grass next to a path.  The grass was wet, soft and damp but they paused.  They heard a noise, a loud noise.  It came closer and closer AND closer.

Opening sentences for Alex’s ‘Staying Out’ story…

It was Halloween and Jeremy and Bob went camping in the forest.  It was a misty and cold night and it was hard to see.  All they had was a small tent, a torch, beans, firewood and matches.  They were sitting next to the fire when suddenly it went out.

Monopoly Maths in fancy dress!
Super group work playing by the rules, working out change and double checking using calculators.
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A very busy week!

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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Week 2

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!

Measurement in action

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Part of our learning in Maths this term is focusing on Measurement.  It’s a great topic to incorporate in every day tasks, outside of Maths time too.

During our RME work, we used our skills to measure Ayanda’s turban material that he wore at a recent wedding.  We were shocked   to find out that it measured around 4m 80cm!

The Daily Mile has also created an opportunity  to think about distances in metres, kilometres and miles.  We are counting up laps and adding these measurements together to get a class distance.  To date we have walked, jogged and sprinted our way to 31, 4730m or 314.7 km or 196.7 miles.

This week, we measured out a rectangular shape that measured 50m in perimeter.  We timed how long it took us to walk that distance twice and will use this information to help us work out how long it would take us to walk 1km.

Preparing for SMUHA! 🤞

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!

All engrossed and busy! 😌
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Da Week Dat’s Awa!

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.

Health and Wellbeing

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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