Welcome to our first blog in Primary 6.
We are delighted to share our leadership roles with you.
Leadership roles
Pupil Council – Kieran and Alaina
JRSO – Mason and Isla
Reading Champions – Chester, Olivia and Enja
Assembly Tech – Ollie and Ava
This year we have been given the very important job of becoming peer mediators. Our role is to support younger children to solve minor disagreements in the playground.
Literacy
For reading we have been studying Charlotte’s Web. It’s about a spider and a girl named Fern. There’s also a pig called Wilbur. The basic plot revolves around their friendship and how they are going to save Wilbur’s life (as he is a pig on a farm).
Alaina “I liked it because it contains lots of animals”.
Mason “I liked it because there was a pig in it and I wanted him to survive”
Chester “I liked Charlotte because she tells stories”
In writing we have been creating diary entries, persuasive writing and recount. We have linked this to our Titanic topic – we made posters which encouraged people to come and sail on the Titanic.
We have also been making Halloween poems especially for the P2s. Here’s a good example from Alaina and Mason :
Numeracy
In numeracy we’ve been covering fractions. In P6 this gets a bit trickier because we have to learn about mixed fractions, improper fractions, ordering fractions and decimal fractions. We’ve been using an app called PolyPad to help us with this. We can create our own fractions to help us see the fractions visually.
We’ve also started doing decimals and percentages which links to fractions (in fact they are all the same thing just shown in different ways).
For time, we’ve been comparing digital and analogue time – this can be tricky but we’re powering through it.
Learning Across the Curriculum
Our first topic of the year is the Titanic. We have been learning about who was on the ship (like Edward Jay Smith who was the captain).
We made a big display of the ship and it’s 16 water compartments.
We also learned why it sank: The captain kept the speed up because they wanted to beat the record time for a ship to cross the Atlantic. They had 9 iceberg warnings but they were ignored.
1517 people died. There were many reasons for this – one of them was they didn’t put in enough life boats because they thought it would spoil the look of the ship. They also launched a lot of the lifeboats when they were half full because they put women and children first.
Calum “Officer Murdoch saved the Titanic from a head-on collision with an iceberg but then it hit another one.”
Kieran “I found learning about the Titanic really interesting”.
Alaina “The ship Carpathia came but it came too late”.
Olivia “If only 4 of the watertight compartments had survived then the ship would not have sunk.
As you can see we’ve learned a lot already. We’d love you to come along to our Titanic-based assembly on the 14th of November! Here’s a couple of teasers about what’s in it:
There will be drama with the different classes of passenger!
You might want to check your seats for a mystery envelope at the end!
There will be some iconic characters to see!
Black Box Theatre Group
Isla – we’ve been doing dancing and singing with the group who have come in to help us with the Christmas Show – the song we are doing is…… no….. that is secret for now…..
STEM
We have been learning about Space. We learned about the different names for the moon which was so interesting. We created a slide show about different planets. We thought this was a fun way to learn together. We’ve enjoyed using Scratch and CODE.org to learn how to code. We have been learning to follow instructions carefully to make our programs work.
We were really lucky to have a STEM workshop all about dairy farming. We learned about how technology is used on the farm and how it makes the farm more efficient. We created our own AgriTech inventions for the farm and we are waiting patiently to find out who the winner is from all of the schools who have entered this competition.
Outdoor Learning
We are planning to work towards our Wild Places Guardian Level for the John Muir Award this year. The key areas are Discover, Explore, Conserve and Share. We started off with a playground litter pick and were surprised by how much litter we found. We took this back to this to the ECO committee so that they could remind everyone in our school to keep our playground clean and tidy.
Bagpipes Taster
Mrs Kelly organised for Chris to come into school and give us a bagpipe taster session. We really enjoyed learning about the bagpipes. Chris played the bagpipes for us and they were really loud. We got to practising chanting and we all had so much fun.
Football
We are loving our after school football club with Mrs Hare. We do some drills and play games against each other. So far we have attended one tournament. We worked well as a team and supported each other brilliantly. We love being part of the tournaments and hope to be part of more this year.
Goodbye Mrs Barnes and Mrs Gardiner
We are sad that Mrs Barnes and Mrs Gardiner have retired but we are glad that we were able to send them off with one of our fantastic Neilsland shows. We would like to thank them for all the love and support that they have given us throughout the years and for walking with us every step of the way.
We hope they have a very happy retirement doing all all of their favourite things with their favourite people. We will miss them both very much.
