This week, we’ve had another busy week on ‘Planet 7’.
We’ve finished all our assessments in Literacy and Numeracy. Mr Hunter says he is beginning to see into our brains and how they work! We now know which areas of the curriculum our strengths lie and which areas we need to develop. No mention of fractions and decimals please!
We’ve also been focusing upon Growth Mindsets. Mindsets are beliefs – beliefs about yourself and your most basic qualities. Think about your intelligence, your talents, and your personality. Are these qualities simply fixed traits, carved in stone, and that’s that? Or are they things you can cultivate and develop throughout your life?
In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, such as their intelligence or talent, are fixed. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent rather than trying to develop it further. They also believe that talent alone creates success – without effort, practise or failure.
However, in a growth mindset, people believe that their basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. Brains and talent are just the starting point! This view (or mindset) creates an environment for learning and an understanding of resilience – all that is essential for great accomplishment. People with a Growth Mindset realise that no one has ever accomplished great things – not even Mozart, Darwin or Einstein – without years of practice, learning (and re-learning) and the odd failure here and there!
In Literacy, we’ve been learning how to structure a story in preparation for writing our own novel. We’re going to be investigating setting, characterisation and plot. Each week, we’ll focus upon a specific area in depth before bringing it all together and writing a mini-novel of our choice – with our own characters and plot line.
This week we’ve began to look at what a ‘setting’ is. We’ve looked at lots of different pictures of settings and the language used. We found out that an effective setting contains lots of descriptive language (adjectives) and it was surprising to find that in some of the best examples of writing, the authors used the five senses as a way of setting an effective scene.
Taking what we had found, as well as our class discussion, we completed ‘sense maps’ saying what we could see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Then we developed this further, by story boarding our scene. Story boarding is when you plan using pictures as well as language. For setting the scene, this is very important as it helps us to visualise what is happening in our setting from many different angles. Next week, we’re going to take it to the next stage and write our opening chapter.
On Thursday, we also went to Craigshill Sports Centre and took part in the cluster’s annual sports festival. We were put into two teams and had to go around lots of different activities. Some were fun activities and others were timed and scored. There were javelin throwing, relay racing, long jumping stations and many more. We had a great time and to finish off we had an inter-school relay competition. It was great fun, but we were extremely tired after 2 hours of hard physical work!
Oh, and before we forget, we presented at Community Time with Sophie and Teresa talking about Safety and we had our Drugs Awareness Programme with Michelle where we identified the dangers associated with smoking.
Who says life in Primary 7 is boring…………………….?
