Category Archives: Topic

Literacy and English, Space, Topic, Visitors

Mr Rose and space

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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.

Literacy and English, Shetland, Topic, Visitors

Granny Brae

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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:

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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

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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

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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

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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!!

Shetland, Topic

Shetland Museum

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After Kirsty told us about James Robertson and we looked around the exhibition we got to try drawing a self portrait like James Robertson’s one.

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He had a globe painted with him to show he was educated and we think it also shows that he mapped around the world.

 

We had to think about what we would want the world to know about us. A lot of the boys drew something to do with football or computer games. There were also sports like, hockey and swimming, musical instruments and things we enjoy doing now or would like to do when we are older. We worked really hard on our portraits and coloured them in, some of us did not get them finished before we had our break so Miss Nicholson let us finish them once we had our snack. After our break we got to have a look around the museum which was great as our topic is Shetland. We had to complete a scavenger hunt. We split into 3 groups and worked together to find everything as well as having a look at everything in the museum.

We had great fun!

Responsible Citizens, Shetland, Topic

Trip to the museum to learn about James Robertson

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Today we went to the Shetland museum to look at the exhibition on James Robertson. He is the Shetlander who put Jamaica on the map. He was the youngest boy of 10 children. He lived in a croft house in Gossabrough, Yell. His family weren’t rich but they weren’t poor. He was very clever. He made several maps of Jamaica and they are really good for the time they were made considering he doesn’t have the technology we have now. After he made the map of Jamaica he went to London and got a painting made of himself as well as buying lots of nice things since he was rich. He wasn’t nice to his nieces and nephews. It took him 12 years to make the map of Aberdeenshire.  He went on trial because the people who asked for the map of Aberdeenshire told him his map was wrong but he had worked on it for 12 years so it would have been right at the time he started. He only had 3 years to make it so they thought they shouldn’t have to pay him, he thought he should be paid for all his work. So they took it to court. He died before his trial so we don’t know who would have won. He died aged 74.

Art, Expressive Arts, Group work, Personalisation and Choice, Shetland, Topic

Our topic

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Our topic this term is Shetland. Yesterday in Topic Miss Nicholson gave us each a map of shetland and we had to write down where all the places were. We found a lot of places. We went over this as a class to see if we were right. We were learning about Fair Isle knitting/patterns and Miss Nicholson took in lots of Fair Isle jumpers which we got to try on. (they were a bit big though) We also got to see a jumper board which is what people dry Fair Isle  jumpers on to keep their shape. After that we got to design our own jumpers and we got to listen to Shetland music whilst we did this.

Confident Individuals, Group work, Myths and Legends, Personalisation and Choice, Presentations, Topic

Myths Around the World

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Primary 4/5 have been very busy this past few weeks researching myths and legends around the world. Once they gathered all of their research they created a presentation. They had the choice of how they wished to present their information – most groups chose Power Point, although there were a few groups that chose to have a poster alongside their Power Point. We looked at presentation skills before they presented their work to the rest of the class. There were lots of questions asked after each presentation which sparked great discussion within the class.  A lot of hard work was put into their presentation and it showed! Well done P4/5!