Primary 7 – East Calder Primary School Blog

Robotarium Visit 🤖

All of our P7’s and P6’s were very fortunate to get to visit The Robotarium at Heriot Watt University over the last few weeks. Some of us got to meet Ameca – the worlds most advanced human shaped robot – and asked it some hard hitting questions like ‘how big is the universe?’, ‘will robots take over the world?’ and most importantly for some ‘what is your favourite football team?’

We saw some incredible robots in action, got an amazing tour of the working labs and spoke to some inspiring engineers.

We finished the day with some competitive robot games – who knew robots could play football?!

A brilliant day out for everyone, and hopefully a few new budding engineers among us!

Meteorites!

This week has been out of this world! Literally! We’ve been very fortunate to have some real meteorite samples loaned to us from the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. What an amazing opportunity to hold, feel and look at some incredible rocks that have been travelling through space for millions (and even billions) of years.

Everyone was so engaged and respectful when handling these very precious materials. Hopefully you have heard all about it at home.

Chess Club

Chess club have been learning about the rules of chess and how to correctly set up a chess board. We spent time learning about all of the pieces on the board before beginning to challenge each other in our chess league.

Science at ECPS

We have been very busy in our science lab since we returned to school! In our first week back we were growing rainbows, creating crystal geodes, planting rainforest and desert biodomes and beginning to set up a wormery (no worms have been added yet!)

We have also started our topics for the term:

P1 & P2/1 are learning all about electricity and how to keep safe:

We have been working on our classification skills this week and sorting items into electrical and non-electrical groups.

P2, P3 & P4 are investigating forces and magnets:

This week we have been investigating the affect weight has on the speed of a ball rolling down a ramp, and testing out balanced forces.

P5, P6 & P7 are exploring light:

We have been exploring how to use reflection to control light and have been using this knowledge to build our own mirror mazes.

East Calder Bowling Club -Community Hub visit

Wow! What can we say but a huge thank you to East Calder Bowling Club. Today we were fortunate enough to visit the bowling club where we taught the fine art of bowling….it is much trickier than it looks! We are so grateful to everyone involved who gave up their time and for the much needed refreshments on such a beautiful day. Considering some of the children had never bowled before there were some real pros in our midst. We would also like to say thank you to the Club for the incredibly generous donation to the P7 Hoody fund. This was much appreciated. The children thoroughly enjoyed this worthwhile experience.

Community Hub Visit

Today the Community Hub visited the KNEC Community Listening Project and Warm Hub in East Calder. The project aims to provide a space called a warm hub. Starting with 4 hours, 2 days a week (Monday and Thursday 11am-3pm) They open in the downstairs of East Calder Church Hall allowing people to come and sit in the warm. There will be a free bowl of soup, roll, warm drinks and biscuits available. There will also be free WI-FI which allows people to sit in and complete work if need be. This will also help people who would be isolated in their homes facing the potential of suffering loneliness.

We helped preparing lunch, getting plates ready and then, very carefully serving lunch. We also had a lesson about listening, as it is central to the ethos of the Warm Hub. Another group looked at the organisation of the Hub and how it accommodates everyone. It was great to be able to chat to so many of the visitors to the Hub. Later this week we will present the Hub with a cheque from our Dress Down Day fundraising. Thank you to everyone at the Hub for such a warm welcome.