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!
Congratulations P6 for a fantastic effort at the Cross Country event today in Polbeth. You all did yourselves proud with everyone completing the course. It was great to see you all cheering each other on. Great sportsmanship! Special mention to this superstar who managed to finish 3rd. Considering there were 5 other schools competing that was some achievement!
P6 were fortunate enough to visit The Oriam at Heriot-Watt University today. We met Hope!
Hope is a life-size inflatable whale. Hope measures 13m long and 8m wide, similar to a real-life humpback whale.
She also looks like a real-life humpback whale both outside and inside. We were fortunate enough to go inside Hope. This gave us the opportunity to learn about the internal anatomy of humpback whales, from breathing to feeding as well as the impact of plastic pollution. Our visit gave us the opportunity to think about sustainability and how important whales are to the health of our oceans. We had a whale of a time……
We would like to thank everyone who attended our Sharing the Learning session on Wednesday afternoon. We had seven stations in total,each highlighting an area of our learning this term.
Station 1 – ICT – Microbits – Exploring core programming language
Station 2 – Social Studies and ICT -Victorian Assessment using our Context Powerpoints
Station 3 – Science Creating a variety of circuits and describing the transfer of energy around the circuit
Station 4- Social Studies and Listening and Talking – West Lothian Museum Services-Sharing Victorian artefacts
Station 5- Social Studies Who am I ?- Using clues to identify famous Victorians
Station 6 HOT skills- Literacy – Creating Higher Order Thinking skills questions from a variety of texts
Station 7 A Learning Walk- Ethos – Sharing our class displays
It was great to see the class talking to a wider audience with such confidence.
Thanks P6
Sky Academy P6
P6 were fortunate enough to visit Sky Academy this week. Sky Academy Studios uses the power of TV and innovation to open young minds and develop young people’s Creativity, Collaboration and Communication. Our day out included
As you can see from the images below we have some budding Producers, Editors, Directors, Scriptwriters and there should be Oscar nominations for our Presenters, Experts and Eyewitnesses Well done to our fantastic Cameramen/women who filmed the whole experience.
Congratulations to these 3 superstars! We have achievements in Swimming,Football and Taekwondo. A fantastic effort. Well done we are really proud of your efforts.
We were fortunate enough to have a visit from West Lothian Museum services this week. Linking with our current Social Studies context we enjoyed an afternoon of Victorian artefacts! The class were allowed to handle a lot of the items and were amazed to see how things have progressed since Victorian times, even though we have the Victorians to thank for some of the amazing inventions that we use today. It was interesting to see that the Victorians used an abacus in Arithmetic similar to the concrete materials we use in Numeracy today.
This was a great springboard for our Victorian context as it led to discussions about Victorian inventions, housing and lifestyle to name but a few. We will be linking this learning to our current Literacy theme of creating a recount, the ability to retell and evaluate an experience. The Museum Service have kindly agreed to attend our Sharing the Learning in March so come along and see if you can identify the purpose of our Victorian artefacts, remember your child is now an expert!
Our Class novel is Hag Storm. It is written by Victoria Williamson. Hag Storm is based on the life of Robert Burns and one of his most famous poems, Tam O’Shanter. The class did really well to identify some of the similarities not only with the characters but also the way both writers built suspense through their vocabulary choices. Linking to some of the activities we enjoyed during Scots Week we identified Scots language within the novel and created a glossary.
We all had a go at learning a Scots language poem. Our favourite poems were both written by the same poet, Gregor Steele. The first one was called When Granda got the Internet and the second interestingly titled When Squirrels Tak Ower the Warld. Well done to everyone who gave them such a good go.
As we complete our Social Studies context on Natural Disasters this seemed a good opportunity to share some of our displays and the fantastic work we did across the curriculum linking to this particular topic. We linked our Literacy by creating a diary entry where we used the features of the genre. We worked on our up scaled vocabulary choices so the reader could really imagine being immersed in our chosen disaster! We also wrote explanations, describing how and why different disasters happen.
As you can see we also linked our learning to our ICT outcomes by creating a PowerPoint at the start of our context highlighting what we already knew about Natural Disasters and how we would like to take our learning forward, putting the class at the centre of their learning and demonstrating pupil agency, ownership of the context. Finally, we also looked at our outcomes for Art when completing pencil drawings of a particular disaster, paying particular attention to detail.
As well as linking different curriculum outcomes to our context we were also always mindful to remember our skillset, highlighting which ones linked most closely to a particular task.
