Last night (17th June) it was the Summer Concert. We were down at the hall most of the day practising yesterday. At break time, the fire alarm went off and we all went out to the car park. We stood outside for a while then Mrs Spofforth came and said there was no fire but the fire alarm wouldn’t stop going off till they got someone to fix it so the whole school all went down to the hall. We practiced our songs then P1 and P2/3 went back up to school. P4-7 set out chairs in the hall then we practised some more. In the afternoon we did a whole school practise. At 6.45 everyone came back to school. At 7.00 the concert started. P1 went first. They sang three songs: My Teacher, The Plumber Song and Frere Jacques. Then all the piano/flute/recorder players went. Lucy was playing the flute and Ryan was playing the piano. After them, P2/3 went. They sang a French song and another song I can’t remember the name of. After that, me and Ashleigh played our fiddles. We played the Foula Reel. Evan also played Edelweiss on his fiddle. After the fiddles, P4/5 sang. We sung Old Dan Tucker. After us, some more people played the fiddle. Then P6/7 did their instrumental and Kaitlin and Kara sung Wagon Wheel. At the end, we watched a video about the P7 trip to Aberdeen. The concert went really well!
Move up morning
On Wednesday the 8th we had a move up morning.
Move up morning is when we move up to the class that we will be in after the summer and meat our new teacher and class.
Some classes got to play games and others got to write a story or make a fact file.
Our future teacher is called Miss Sonders. (The spelling might be wrong)
It was very fun.
Ashleigh and Lucy xx
Mixed Stage Learning
On Wednesday we did Mixed Stage Learning. That is when the whole school gets put into groups and we do different activities in each classroom. In my group there was about 3 P1s 1 P2 2 P3s 1 P4 4 P5s 1 P6 and 2 P7s. After break my group went down to the P1 classroom. Since it is the Olympics this year all the activities we do are going to be to do with the Olympics. First we watched a video on the whiteboard. It was a video of a carnival in Rio, where the olympics are being held this year. The people in the carnival had lots of fancy costumes and masks. After we’d watched the video we started making masks. The shape of the mask was already cut out on card so we started decorating them. We put feathers, sequins and glitter on them. Then we stuck them onto lolly sticks. After we’d finished that then we got to try doing samba dancing. It was very easy and fun! After lunch my group went to the P2/3 classroom. We were making posters about Brazil and Britain. We were split up into even smaller groups then we started researching. We got 20 minutes to research then 20 minutes to make the poster. It was really fun and I enjoyed it. We are doing mixed stage learning again next week.
Coastguard visit
Today the coastguards came to visit us. There were two men that came, they were called Willie and Ian. We were split into two groups, one group stayed in the class with Ian to begin with whilst the other group went outside with Willie then after about 15 minutes we swapped. It was good fun outside, we got to pretend to be coastguards and save people. 3 people went out to pretend to be swimmers whilst one person was the coastguard going to save them. We had to put this life jacket on them, a helmet and attach a rope to them. Another person got to use the megaphone and shout to the people swimming to let them know they were going to be rescued. Once the ‘coastguard’ was safe to go he ran out to rescue the swimmers, once he gathered them all together as a group we pulled them back using the rope. We did this a few times so that everyone got a shot at doing something! It was great fun! Then we got to have a look around the coastguard pick-up. We sat inside and had a good look around, they had a lot of kit in the back. Willie asked us to stand at the front of the pick-up so we could see the flashing lights when he turned them on. He warned us that we might want to cover our ears as he then put the siren on…it was loud!! The group inside listened to Ian as he spoke about the coastguards. He was really funny. He told us a few stories about when it is appropriate to phone the coastguards. He also spoke about bombs! He showed us a few photos of ones that had washed up on beaches and told us stories about them and the dangers and that if we are ever unsure about anything on the beach then we should phone the coastguards! At the end Ian let us try on the coast guard hats, he had one for boys and one for girls. Nearly everyone tried them on, Willie even put the ladies hat on Miss Nicholson’s head! 🙂
Dogs Against Drugs
Today Michael Coutts came into school to talk to us about dogs against drugs.
There are 2 dog handlers in Shetland and they have 3 drugs dogs between them.
Did you know that dogs have 30x better smell than humans? Elephants have even better smell but they are more difficult to get in the police van. :’) Bees also have better smell.
The dogs and their handlers have to go south every year for assessments.
We got keyrings that had the website on it. Here is a link to the Dogs against drugs website if you want to have a look at the dogs in Shetland, although Thor isn’t on this one : http://www.dogsagainstdrugs.co.uk/the-dogs
Thor is their newest dog, he’s still training. We got to meet him, he was lovely. He got really excited when he saw Magnus kicking the ball around at break time. He just wanted to play too! 🙂
The life of Scottish Olympian Eric Liddell
Today we had a man called Graeme Patterson come into talk to us about the life of Scottish Olympian Eric Liddell, the primary 6/7s came in too. Graeme was really funny!
Here is some of the things we learned about Eric (what we can remember anyway)
Eric’s parents were missionaries so he and his brother grew up in a Christian household. They actually lived in China when they were really young but moved back to Scotland when the boys had to go to school. Eric was really good at sports and his brother was really good at school. After a while their dad went back to China whilst the rest of the family stayed home. When the boys were old enough the mum went to China too so the boys went to boarding school.
It was the time of World War 1 when Eric’s brother was aged to leave school, his mother was frightened that he would have to go to war. She prayed for him and when he was playing football someone tackled him and broke his leg so he couldn’t go to war as he was in hospital.
Eric was training to be a teacher and his brother trained to be a doctor.
Eric started running in the 100 metre sprint (it was called the 110 yard back then) people started to recognise him as he was really fast. He also played rugby for Scotland but he wasn’t that fussed about that, he was quite happy with his studies, the bible and running. Long story short he went to run the 100 metre sprint at the Olympic Games in Paris in 1924. (This was the first Olympic Games held after the war and the committee banned Germany from the games as they blamed them for starting the war in the first place and killing lots of innocent people)
At the games – they came with a list of the days of the races but the final of the 100 metre sprint was on a Sunday so Eric refused to run as that was his day to God. Race day came and he did not run instead they found him in Church on the Sunday reading the bible to others. He said he would run the 200m and 400m instead – he had not been training for this but he still managed to get to the finals in both. He won a bronze medal for the 200m. On the day of the 400m final he was handed a note that said ‘Those who honour me I will honour. Samuel 2:30) so he put this in his shorts and ran the race…which he won! Some thought it was a one man race when they were watching it.
After winning 3 medals – 1 bronze, 1 gold and 1 for taking part he decided to finish his studies, became a teacher and got married to a woman called Florence.
They decided to leave everything and go to China to tell people about god. They had 2 children with one on the way in 1942 – this was when Japan was invading china. So Eric sent his wife and children to Canada (this is where his wife came from) and Eric stayed in China alone. He kept working but 2 months later the Japanese invaded his village and he was taken prisoner and thrown into a work camp as he didn’t come from China. He wanted to help others in the camp so he set up a school for the children in the camp. Sadly he contracted a disease and died the age of 43 (21 February 1945)
There is a statue of Eric Liddell in St Andrews – its what he looked like when he crossed the finish line.
When Graeme spoke of how Eric was a Christian and how he read the bible to people. Graeme showed us the bible that he thought was the best…he flicked through and said some people think that its boring, there was nothing in it. Then he said some people think its just black and white and flicked through the book again…this time there were pictures in it!! THEN he said he thought that wasn’t true and that it was full of colour…as he flicked through the book we could see the pictures were full of colour!!!!! everyone was amazed!
He also pulled off our shoes to show an example of what Eric shoes would have been like – not like the fancy trainers Levi had on but more basic ones like the ones Lucy had on. He smelled the shoes and pulled funny faces which made us all laugh!
We loved having Graeme in and would fully recommend anyone and everyone to get him to visit their school! He really was good!
Olympic Rings
We got to make Olympic Rings out of paper plates because our topic is the Olympics. First we had to poke a pencil through a paper plate then cut a circle in the plate. We each had to do five. Then we painted them. It was fun.
Evan on the moon
Me, Evan and Keisha made an animation about Evan going to the moon and me and Keisha were on the radio. When Evan puts the Tingwall primary school flag on the moon an alien takes him back to Earth.
2 planets animation
Me, David and Brandon made this animation called Two Planets. We used an app called ZU3D to make the animation. It was quite a lot of work because first we had to make the storyboard and script. Then we had to make the backgrounds and characters and props. Once we had done all that we got to start filming. It took ages to film because we had to take a photo, move the characters a tiny bit and take another photo. We had to take about 200 frames. It was a lot of work but I really enjoyed doing it.
Stupid spacemen animation
We had to use our topic (space) to create an animation which I did whith Anya and Ashleigh.
Before we could make our animation we had to do a lot of work first. We looked at animations and what went into making them. Then we got into groups and thought of an idea of what we could do for our animation. We were asked to make a short animation about space and told there had to be at least 3 facts in it. We had to think about the plot, setting, characters, props and the script before making anything. Once we had all of that we got to start making the background, characters and props which was fun. Miss Nicholson showed us the app ZU3D on the Ipad, this is how we filmed our animation. It took a lot of frames to make our animation as we had to make sure there were enough images for our speech. We were the first group to finish our animation.
