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
