Monthly Archives: January 2016

Literacy and English, Social Studies

Burns night

Leave a comment

Tonight people all over the world will be celebrating Burns night. We looked at why we celebrate Burns night and who Robert Burns was.

Burns Night is a celebration often held in Scotland around 25th January.  It celebrates the life and work of a famous writer named Robert Burns.

Robert Burns was a Scottish poet (25th January 1759 to 21st July 1796) His work is very well known and celebrated worldwide. He wrote his works in both the Scots language and Standard English. He also wrote folk songs which are still enjoyed by many people today, his most famous one is Auld Lang Syne.

On Burns Night, many people have a traditional dinner called Burns Supper. This usually includes eating haggis, which is a traditional Scottish food. It is often served with neeps and tatties. Poems written by Burns are often read aloud too.

Before people start eating their Burns Supper, the Selkirk Grace is often said:
Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
And sae let the Lord be thankit.

Robert Burns is still very famous today. He has been voted ‘The Greatest Scot’ by the Scottish Public in a survey held by national Scottish television channel, STV.

There is also a Robert Burns Museum which is in the place where Robert was born.

Literacy and English, Space, Topic, Visitors

Mr Rose and space

Leave a comment

Today Harry Rose came in for our second session on learning about space. Unfortunately the power went off during the presentation so Mr Rose had to talk without having the power point. He did very well to carry on speaking. We are looking forward to seeing the rest of the presentation next week.

Here are some more interesting facts for you:

There are 88 constellations. The most famous constellations are in the Northern Hemisphere. They are mainly named from Greek myths.

You could take a submarine right under the North Pole as it is just water underneath. Unlike the South pole which has land underneath. The highest mountain on earth is underneath Antarctica. We can’t remember what Mr Rose called this.

There is 50,000 tuns of ‘stuff’ that falls from space in 1 year! So earth is getting bigger every time.

Comets are made from stone and ice. The tail that you can see is the ice melting as it is getting closer to the sun. The tail always faces away from the sun as the solar wind blows it away from it.

Meteor showers (shooting stars) is earth going through the tail of a comet.

The closest star next to earth is 43 trillion kilometres away! It would take 4 1/3 years for a message to get there if it was travelling at the speed of light from earth. The speed of light is 300,000, 000 metres per second or 300, 000 kilometres per second. It would take us 7000 years for us to get from earth to the next star.

-My Achievements, Confident Individuals, Expressive Arts, From home, Literacy and English

Show and tell

3 Comments

Over the past few days the children have brought in a few of their achievements, items they treasure or models that they have made which we would like to share on our blog.

Literacy and English, Shetland, Topic, Visitors

Granny Brae

Leave a comment

Colvin’s granny (Jenny Murray) came in to talk to us and the primary 2/3s this morning about an axe head that Colvin found in Yell on the beach in Gutcher. This was used about 5000 years ago when the first Shetlanders were here. They used sheep guts to attach the stone to the wooden handle.The used ash and sand on a bit of leather to polish stones.

She talked about the houses that they had in the stone age. They were round, small and made of stones.

She allowed us to ask her questions at the end and tell her of our findings. It was really interesting and we enjoyed her visiting our class.

Here is a picture of Colvin and the axe head:

DSCN0805

These are a few photos that Miss Nicholson took. You can see what the axe would have looked like (a Whalsay man made a replica for the museum – with real sheep guts!) You can also see some of the other axe heads that have been found and used thousands of years ago. They were used for a number of different things: killing animals, chopping down trees (Yes Shetland used to have lots of trees and when they were building the Gas Plant they found roots of trees that would have been a forest!)

Space, Topic, Visitors

Mr Rose talks about space

Leave a comment

Today Mr Rose came in to talk to us about space.  It was very interesting! Here are a few facts we found out:

Barron worked out that 1000 seconds is 16 minutes and 40 seconds. (He worked this out in his head!)

There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy.

We learned a mnemonic to remember the different planets: My Very Elegant Mother Just Spewed Up Nine Pizzas. However this does not include the asteroid belt so he told us of the one he learnt when he was at school: Most Volcanos Erupt Marmalade And Jam Sandwiches Under Normal Pressure. But we like the first one best! 🙂

The sun is about 17-20 million degrees and its not on fire.

The Northern lights happen through the parts coming off the sun and hitting the earths atmosphere.

The planets travel around the sun at different speeds because the closer you are to the sun the less distance you have to travel and the gravitational pull speeds you up. So the closer you are the faster you go. Mr Rose had a powerpoint which showed the speed and direction of the planets orbiting the sun. It was cool to watch.

The half of Mercury that is towards the sun is hot (410 ̊C) and the other half is cold (-170̊C)

You couldn’t live in Venus because you would be suffocated because its mostly made of carbon dioxide, squashed because the weight of the air would crush you, baked because it is the hottest planet at 460̊C and you would dissolve because of another gas which is very powerful. And it stinks!!! Venus is covered in clouds which keep the heat in, this is why it is so hot. A day on Venus is longer than 1 year.

Mars is very cold.

We really enjoyed his visit and look forward to him coming back next week for another session!

Cooperative learning, Group work, Space, Topic

Cooperative learning with primary 6/7

1 Comment

Today we got together with primary 6/7 to do some cooperative learning. We are joining together to start work on our topic of space.

First of all we got into groups, to do this we had to look underneath the tables. Miss Nicholson and Miss Morrison had put pictures to do with space under our desks. There were 8 different pictures so we had to go sit with other people with the same picture as us. Then we were in groups of 4. Half of the groups went through to the primary 6/7 classroom to give us more space.

We each had a different coloured pen in our groups and we had 1 large bit of paper and we had to write down everything we knew about space on this paper. You could see who had wrote what with the colours. We had 12 minutes to do this, Miss Nicholson put a rocket timer on the board, it was fun to watch the rocket go off when the time was up. Then we had to join with another group and discuss our ‘graffiti’. We had a lot of the same things but found a few differences after comparing them.

Finally we paired up with someone from another group to think of questions that we would like to find out through our topic.

We are having Harry Rose come in on Friday to visit and talk about space. We are very excited about this!

Animation, Group work, Space, Technologies, Topic

Animation

Leave a comment

Today Miss Nicholson asked us what we knew about animation, we got to watch an animation on youtube and write down everything they had to think about when making this animation. We came up with lots of ideas. She then showed us a few animations that other children in a different school had made. They were really good. We made a list of things you would have to think about if making an animation then Miss Nicholson told us we are going to be making our own animations about space!

We are very excited about this!!

Uncategorized

First Week Back

Leave a comment

On the 8th of January it was the Scalloway Fire Festival.  The Jarl Squad came to visit us. The costumes were green. They looked very good. They sang  the Up Helly Aa song and some other songs and then we got to go around the hall and try on their helmets and hold their axes and shields. We really enjoyed their visit. On Monday after lunch we got to go down to the hall with P6/7 to do Zumba.  We learned two routines. We will be  doing Zumba every Monday for 3 weeks. This morning we went on the bus to the Scalloway Swimming pool for swimming lessons. We got changed and then we all sat on the side. Mr McNiven our PE teacher took a few of us in the pool at a time and then we had to do some front crawl and back stroke. After that we all got in the pool and we got numbers. First the number ones did either 6 widths or 4 widths. Then the number twos did the same. We did a bit more of that then we swam underwater and then we went for a shower. We will be going again next week.

P1000977 P1000989

Primary 4/5

Term 3

Leave a comment

We have had a busy first day back! Unfortunately we had to say goodbye to Teagan at the end of term 3 but we would like to welcome Morgan into primary 4/5! We will have to update our class photo now that we are all back.

We hope that 2016 is going to be a fun and exciting year for us in P4/5. This term we are going to be working collaboratively with Primary 6/7 with a joint topic on Space. We are very excited about this topic. We are also hoping to look into animation and make our own animations towards the end of term which we will try to upload onto here for you all to see!