Joy Duncan has worked with all our classes this term and what a treat it was today to hear and watch all the different drumming, singing and dancing from all over Africa.
Every class performed something quite different and the audience loved it. It was clear by looking at all the children, that they really enjoyed their learning too.
Thanks Joy, looking forward to the next drumming lessons already 🥁
Today we had the first of our STEM sessions. Emma is going into schools in Shetland to promote an interest in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
We could pair up or work on our own and we had an iPad and a lego vehicle and we had to programme it to do several things. It had to move in an orbit ( just like a satellite), use a sonic sensor, react to an object (space debris) and capture and move space debris.
P6/7 we’re really quick at learning to do this and we had a lot of fun programming the vehicles 🚗. We are looking forward to Emma coming back in the summer term. Let’s hope this inspires a few of the P6/7s to think about working in some of the STEM subjects in future. 🚀 💻 👩🔬
Primary 7 has a fantastic John Muir day. The weather was perfect for March, flat calm and dry, so Pete decided to take us to Bressay.
We walked from the Noss car park down to the shore, where we had watched an otter feeding in the seaweed on fish.
We walked south, past the broch and had fun, climbing, jumping and exploring the coastline.
https://issuu.com/johnmuirtrust/docs/jma_newsletter-spring2017_issuu
Really excited to see last year’s Primary 7 class are on the front of the John Muir Spring newsletter. Just in time to get us excited about our trip on Monday!
We have now started our 3rd big investigation. This time we are looking at how the change in the clocks this coming weekend will affect us. We have been recording how much sleep we have every night in a sleep diary, and how alert we are in the morning ( using the Karolinska scale).
We are doing reaction experiments on a morning and afternoon before and after the clocks change to see whether our reaction rate changes.
Our results will uploaded onto the BBC Terrific Scientific website and they will be analysed by Oxford University. It will be interesting to see the results of the whole investigation.
We carried out lots of practical science activities with Mr Rose today. We made timers work by using lemon power – the acid in individual lemons gave up to almost 1 volt. We powered LEDs and clocks and it was really interesting to make up different circuits. Some of us joined up lemons 🍋 to make the circuits more powerful.
We have been building up to SMUHA for a couple of weeks, with lots of time spent on maakin, preparing props, making up sketches and practising songs.
Friday was a perfect day and the Norse gods made sure we had perfect weather for the procession. Our guiser jarl Truncherface AKA Calum Mackay, and his fantastic Trowie squad led the procession well and all the other bairns sang and roared impressively! John and the galley boys had made another excellent galley and the burning was great to watch.
Back in the hall after break, we were treated to some very funny acts and finally the squad came in to sing their songs.
In the afternoon we were treated to some drumming with Joy and Emily playing her fiddle. The jarl squad looked fantastic when they arrived and it was great to go into the playground to see their galley.
It was a really super day in school and we hope that you had fun in the evening.
On Monday we had fun looking at ‘electric eels’ and finding out about electric charges.
The Primary 6/7s were enjoying the new carpet that we came back to, after the long weekend. The girls wanted to do our lessons on the floor😄
Primary 6 have had a super morning visiting Quendale Farm. We spent an hour in the lambing shed, learning about the Suffolk ewes and their lambs. There were also five calves in a pen too.
We learnt about the whole lambing year. We can recognise a ewe that is about to lamb and we had a go using the simulator to help a birth a lamb.
A big thank you 😊 to Hillary and her staff for a really interesting trip.
