John Muir Award

In term 3, we took part in lots of fun activities as part of our John Muir award.  In case you don’t know anything about John Muir, he was born in Scotland and moved to America when he was 11.  He spent his life exploring in the outdoors of America and he did a lot of work campaigning for areas to become National Parks.  The John Muir award allows us to discover and explore too.  We used our local area (the back bit) to do our activities every Wednesday afternoon and we kept a diary, recording what we did each day.  For example, for the first week (5.1.24) we were given the letters from A-Z on a sheet, and we had to go and find things starting with each letter of the alphabet around our local area.  Some examples of things we found were leaves, KitKat wrappers, plastic boxes, bits of metal and crisp packets. A lot of what we found was rubbish, so we then did a litter pick.  On 11.3.25 we made willow crafts.  We cut some willow branches with secateurs and then make them into a craft.  We made hearts, fish, and dream catchers.

Lacey.

Transition

Us P7s have been working with our youth worker, Hazel Kelly who comes in on Tuesdays.  To help us with the transition, we do tons of fun activities that will help us develop a better understanding of high school.  We split into three groups.  Group 1 goes at 11:30am until lunch time, group 2 goes at 1:20pm and comes back at 2:10pm, the final group goes at 2:10 until home time.  Every week we do something different whether that’s trust building exercises or just fun and interactive activities. One week we had to make a giraffe using newspaper to improve our teamwork skills!  Doing all this makes us feel a lot better about moving up to Calderside or the Grammar in August.

We have had some visits form the science ambassadors, head of S1 at Calderside and English teacher, Mrs Scott. Mrs Scott did some non-fiction work with us. The non-fiction work was to do with things we do without thinking and we found this very interesting and fun.  Mrs Calder (the Head teacher at Calderside) will be coming in May to meet P6 and P7.

Isabella

Literacy

We have recently finished a block of functional writing.  We learned about report writing and produced reports on different animals such as orangutangs and penguins.  We also learned how to write persuasively, for example: ‘For Mobile Phones in School’ and ‘Against School Uniform’.  We had to include features like a rhetorical question, capitalised word, and arguments with points to back up what we were saying.  Right now, we are making sure we know how to use speech marks correctly.  The rules of speech marks are:

-New line new reader

-Speech marks before and after the sentence that is being said

-Punctuation before you close your speech marks

-Capital letter after you open your first speech mark

 

We are about 70% through reading The Thief Lord and we’re REALLY enjoying it. Our favourite characters are Victor (Ben) and Bo (Elise). We are surprised because we thought Victor was evil but in fact, he’s been nice to the children.  The Thief Lord has helped us with skills like inference and identifying metaphorical language like similes etc. Some examples are:

– ‘as he was swallowed by the shadows’ (metaphor)

– ‘Mr Hartlieb was still as big as a wardrobe’ (simile)

– ‘We all glow in the dark like moon cheese’ (simile)

– ‘fuming with frustration’ (alliteration)

Ben and Elise

Numeracy

With Ms Clarke we have been collecting and displaying data. The first thing we did was to collect data within the class (for example, eye colours) then we took that data and turned it into a bar graph.  We are also learning about fractions, decimals, and percentages and how they are linked and how to convert between them.

Chad

Literacy

Last term we finished our novel, ‘War Horse’ which was brilliant!  We watched the film too and did a survey to see who preferred the film and who preferred the book. 76% of pupils in our class preferred the book War Horse to the film.

This term we are studying, ‘The Thief Lord’ by Cornelia Funke.  Here is a picture of the front cover and we would like to share the blurb with you too.

‘Two orphaned children are on the run, hiding among the crumbling canals and misty alleyways of the city. Befriended by a gang of street children and their mysterious leader, the Thief Lord, they shelter in an old, disused cinema. On their trail is a bungling detective, obsessed with disguises and the health of his pet tortoises. But a greater threat to the boys’ new-found freedom is something from a forgotten past – a beautiful magical treasure with the power to spin time itself …’

We have not met many characters yet, but we do know that the ‘bungling detective’ is called Victor Getz and he has lived in Venice for fifteen years and owns two tortoises called Lando and Paula.

In writing, our focus last term was imaginative.  We all did a piece of writing about a ring that could do whatever we wanted it to do.  Then we did a piece of narrative, spooky writing called ‘The Church’.  P7 also wrote Christmas poems for their buddies and we read them to them around the Christmas tree.  We also helped our wee buddies to make Christmas cards for their family!

This term, we have started learning about information report writing. There are four sections to a report. They are:

1. Title
2. General Statement
3. Description
4. Evaluation

We have done reports on Foxes and Lions so far.

Murron, Jake and Callum

 

Numeracy

In Numeracy lately we have been learning a lot about fractions, decimals and percentages (FDP). We have been learning how to calculate fractions of amounts for harder percentages and we have to use a calculator to figure out the answer.  There is a 2-step process to this:

Find 22% of 1650

step 1: find 1% (1650 divided by 100= 16.5)

step 2: times that answer by the percentage that we’re looking for (16.5 x 22)

then you should have your answer which is 363!

We have also learned the parts of a circle: the straight line that runs from one side of the circle to the other through the centre is called the ‘diameter’. The line that’s half of the diameter is called the ‘radius’ and the line that runs all around the outside of the circle is called a ‘circumference’. (With this we also learned a bit about ‘pi’, pi is the relationship of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.  The circumference of a circle is just over three times the length of its diameter. This is the case for every circle no matter how big or small it is!)

Abeera, Isabella

 

HWB

In December we learned a dance called The Neilsland Circle.  We taught this dance to P4, P4/5 and P5/6 and we all performed it at our Christmas party.  We are still doing Dance as our P.E. topic and have been creating our own dance moves to Disney songs.  Soon, we will move on to a Gymnastics topic.  Hazel Kelly from Universal Connections is coming in every week to help us P7s learn about going into high school and talk about anything that might be worrying us.

Kelsie Ann and Emma

House and Vice Captains

We have recently been involved in improving our house system.  We decided to change the names of the houses from colours to trees. Last term, we went into our playground and looked at all the beautiful and different trees we have. We paired up with our house/vice-captain and chose a tree that we love to be the name of our new house. We hope you love the new names as much as we do.

Silver Birch	Pine	Willow	Rowan

 

Macy, Scott, Lola, Connor, Isabella, Abeera, Chad and Chloe.

Literacy

Our class novel is War Horse by Michael Morpurgo, it is a fiction story, but it based on events on WW1. War Horse is about a horse (Joey), losing his mother and getting sold to a farmer. The army buys him and he becomes a war horse and does many different, difficult jobs. His best friends are Topthorn  and Albert. War Horse is AMAZING.

In writing, we have been learning about personal recount writing. Personal recount writing is about something that has happened to us in the past. Here’s some things you must do to create a good piece of personal recount writing: you have to write in chronological order, you have to write in the past tense and you have to include your thoughts and feelings about your experiences.  We did our first writing assessment of P6/7 which was about our years at Neilsland Primary.

In grammar, we have been learning about: adverbs, different kinds of nouns, alliteration, metaphors, similes and onomatopoeia. Alliteration is all about having the same sounds next to each other. We learned about alliteration by having a bit of paper and finding words that had the same sound and letter of our name.  Metaphors are two words comparing things without using ‘like’ or ‘as’. E.g the moon is cheese. Similes use the words ‘like’ or ‘as’ when comparing two things. E.g., the moon is like cheese. We are getting good at picking out language features like these in texts and we are learning how to use them in our writing this term.

Scott and Amber

Numeracy

Recently we have been learning about BIDMAS. These are the meanings of BIDMAS:

Brackets

Indices

Division

Multiplication

Addition

Subtraction.

BIDMAS helps us understand the order of operations, here is an example :

(8 +2 ) x 3 + 4

10 x 3 + 4

30 + 4

=34

 

BIDMAS is a very complicated thing to handle, but once you get to know it, it gets easy.

 

We have also been learning about multiplication sums. We know you might be thinking multiplication sums are too easy for P7 but the ones that we do are harder than normal ones. Here are two examples that we have done in our jotters and when you look at our jotters, you can see how we worked them out.

2536×7= 17,752

654×57=37,278

 

This solved and written by Chad & Kali.

World War 1.

We have been learning about WW1.  Today, we delivered an assembly of Remembrance to the whole school, in memory of the soldiers who fought and died in WW1 and all other conflicts.

Click here to view our Remembrance assembly!