Tag Archives: Curricular areas

Our hopes and dreams for the future.

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We have recently completed our Health and Well-being topic where we focussed on  “Hopes and Dreams”. The pupils have been discussing their personal hopes for the future (displayed on the clouds) and investigating their dream job and the steps needed to achieve this (their steps are on the leaves).

It has been really interesting to hear the variation of careers that the class would wish to pursue in the future. I’m certain a lot of them have found some information regarding expected salaries and the qualifications needed to achieve this enlightening too – the importance of some key subjects in school for most careers was a shock to many.

I hope that many of them manage to achieve their hopes and dreams in the future.

Engineers in the making

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This term we have been exploring forces. Using this knowledge and understanding we spent the morning designing and constructing our own bottle rockets.

The pupils were working in pairs to design a rocket that they thought would be aerodynamic and light, but withstand enough pressure to create optimum thrust (and distance) for launch day.

We are looking forward to finishing the project at the beginning of the next term and seeing who’s rocket performed the best on launch day!

Broo Archaeology Trip

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This afternoon Primary 5/6 and some of Primary 6/7 went to visit the dig at Broo. Gerry Bigalow, the project coordinator met us and gave us a really interesting talk all about the house site. Every year they find something different and reveal more of the house. This year they have uncovered a huge fireplace and a window that hasn’t been looked through for 300 years!

After the talk and walk around the site we split into two groups and had a chance to do some real hands on archaeology. We used the large hanging sieve to look through buckets of the sandy earth from the site and it was exciting to see how many things we found. There were lots of bones and some burnt peat.

The second activity was to use the trowels to scrape back the soil and look for artefacts. This time there were again quite a few bones and the remains of a very old bottle.

We were lucky with the weather and really enjoyed the walk there and back too. Primary 5/6 gave the afternoon 10/10!

Thanks to Faith and Robert’s mums for coming with us too.

Terrific Scientific

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Today we completed all the last measurements of our project. We looked at all the data and tried to see if there were any patterns. Everyone found that the onions had grown most on day 8. We looked at the temperatures on that day and before and it had been warmest then. We drew graphs using Excel to compare the temperature and the rate of growth. We were surprised at how much the spring onions had grown.

Scatness Visit

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This morning P5/6 went back in time 2000 years to the Iron Age. Chris Dyer from the Amenity Trust showed us round Scatness. We started in the visitor centre, where he talked to us about Shetland’s history. We completed a jigsaw puzzle, which had a timeline from the Stoneage to present day.

He also explained to us how housing has changed through the ages. Chris had lit a peat fire in the middle of the reconstructed wheelhouse and we all enjoyed going into it and hearing more about life in the Iron Age. After that we went for a look at other houses on the site and saw the broch.

We finished off by playing a really good Viking game called Kubb.

A big thank you to all our adult helpers too!

Beyond the Panda

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This afternoon Primary 5 and Primary 6 went up to Sandwick Junior High School to take part in the Beyond the Panda outreach programme which supports the work of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland. The workshops were presented by Sandie Robb, the Senior Education Officer.

There were six different workstations which the children worked their way round. Activities were varied and covered many aspects of a panda’s life -from birth and how they develop, to the food they eat and what Panda poo looks like! There were jigsaws  to complete which illustrated a panda’s habitat and where they live in China. Another activity involved  a lotto game featuring China’s wildlife. At another workstation they were given two skulls and they had to try to identify which was a panda skull and which was a black bear skull by looking for clues.

Yet again it has been an interesting and informative session which everyone enjoyed.

A special thanks must go to our parent helpers and Emily and Eve who joined us from the secondary department.