Author: Mrs Stewart

An Explanation

We have been looking at the Explanation Genre. This genre explains how or why something happens. We decided to link our Literacy to our current IDL context of Natural Disasters.

We also used our ICT skills by researching a Natural Disaster of our choice. We created notes in our first draft. We then looked at the features and layout of an Explanation and used this and the genre targets to improve our final draft, ensuring it included all the elements of the genre such as

Title

Identifying Statement

Explanation Sequence

Summary Statement

Well done Jaysiel,you shared with us your haul of medals! Astro Gymnastics for both participation and 1st place in your competition. You also shared your Edinburgh Marathon Festival medal for completing 1.5 K,very impressive. We enjoyed hearing about your achievements!

A brilliant night with some amazing costumes! Thanks P6 and all the volunteers who gave up their Wednesday night,we all had great fun.

Wow,how amazing is this! Emmy and Victoria have made up a game inspired by our class novel Light on Dumyat by Rennie McOwan. The name of their clan is a mix of their two surnames and the game involves all the skills you would need for an adventure in the Scottish hills,just like Gavin,Clare,Michael and Mot! I was so impressed with the game and the bow and arrows you constructed were great! Fantastic to see you having such enthusiasm for the story……we will have to wait and see if our predictions of how it may end are right!

Maths Week P6

Miss Niven joined us for Maths Week and demonstrated how P6 could combine our maths skills with expressive arts, as they learnt about the role of stage management in theatre. The children learnt about stage directions, technical stage drawings, and setting a stage, and how these elements all use maths. They first measured out the space, applying their measuring and estimation skills, and then coordination skills were used for setting the stage. This was followed by scene changes, which encouraged an understanding of how time and coordinates are used in managing a stage production.

We were also lucky enough to have 2 visitors come into our classroom to explain how they use maths every day in their careers. Mrs Pennykid told us how Maths is so important not only in the running of the KNEC Community Listening project but also when she worked as a nurse, discussing what skills she needed to use on a daily basis. Mrs Nallathambi used jars and beads in a very ingenious way to demonstrate how pensions work and what strategies she employs on a daily basis. Following on from this the class researched a range of careers and were amazed just how many relied on maths in the world of work.

Linking curricular areas, we looked at which artists used maths in their work. From our research we found artists like Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Georges Seurat to mention a few all used maths of some description in their art. We saw examples of pointillism, geometric shapes, tessellation and symmetry. We chose a particular artist and either recreated a famous piece or created our own in the style of the artist.

 

Reading with P2 gives the children the opportunity to practise, the important values of respect, care, valuing difference, responsibility, friendship and including others. Through reading and caring for smaller children older children learn the skills associated with empathy and compassion through activities in the classroom. It allows them to embed a culture of reading for enjoyment across the whole school whilst also being able to identify the needs of a different audience to their peers.

Thanks to Conor from Morrison Construction who came in and spent the morning with us building a huge Tetrahedron! Team work was certainly the order of the day and it was great to see the class collaborating and problem solving to get the job done! The quality of the communication and decision making as a team certainly helped towards our end goal. Well done P6.

 

 

Thanks so much to East Calder Bowling Club for hosting the Community Hub this morning. We had a great time honing our bowling skills. We are so grateful you gave your time to share your skills with us. We definitely have some budding bowlers who are keen to start bowling as a hobby. The refreshments were very well received and what can we say about your amazing donation to our P7 Leavers’ Fund of £180.00. Hopefully we can continue to nurture this worthwhile link with the community.

As part of our Social Studies context P6 have been investigating the features of an election and the work of our representatives at both a local and national level. They are developing their understanding of how a democracy works and are discussing what the rights and responsibilities of citizens in Scotland are. To assist us with our learning we have been fortunate enough to have visits from both the UK and Scottish Parliament this week. We had our own manifestos, elections and even a monarch! Of course we had a speaker and Presiding Officer too so everyone came to order!