Author: Miss Boden

This week, Baird and Burns clans were visited by Matt from Veolia, who are a water, energy and waste recycling company. Matt explained to the children how waste from our homes is taken to their sites, like the one in Almondell. They then use a range of processes to clean the water enough so that it can be recycled into rivers. Matt had also brought along samples of the water from the local site to show just how clean the water becomes before it is returned to the river.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The clans also took part in their own recycling activity. In table groups, the children were shown how to make an origami hat. They were then able to make these hats into paper aeroplanes and then finally a bag. This showed the children that things can be recycled multiple times and still have their uses. The children absolutely loved the visit and learned lots of new facts.

Baird Clan have begun to get in the Halloween spirit this week by creating our own spooky characters! We started with a game of “table wars”, with each table giving examples of Halloween related vocabulary until only one table was left. We then created riddles in pairs or independently as a way of focusing on describing objects without using their names. Finally, we created our own monster characters and used adjectives, similes and metaphors to describe our creations. Next week, we will use our monsters as the basis of our own spooky stories.

 

 

This week in our numeracy lessons, we have been focussing on making estimates. We have used our knowledge of rounding to help us to estimate the answers for different addition, subtraction and multiplication problems.

 

We also took on the challenge of esti-mysteries and used our maths knowledge and problem solving to answer the problems. We enjoyed these so much that we decided to create our own esti-mysteries. We used clues that tested our knowledge of number patterns, place value and fractions to create our problems. We are so excited to try out our esti-mysteries next week!

 

Over the last two weeks, Baird Clan have been using the book “Our Clan is a Family” as a context for our learning. We have discussed how the idea of our Clan being a family relates to our school value of belonging, and how we can demonstrate this around the school. While making our clan charter, we spoke about one of Miss Boden’s favourite sayings, “we are just like popcorn, our learning all pops at different times”. We used this quote as the basis for our clan charter.

 

We have also looked at the importance of resilience and working as a team. We started with a small team game where each team had to balance a hula-hoop on their fingers and get it to touch the floor. We soon realised without good communication this was extremely tricky! As a clan, we looked at some successful teams from this year’s Olympics, and discussed what made them a good team. We were surprised to see that many of the skills were ones we used in our own Clan team.