Author: Miss McNee

P6/5 collaborated in small groups to problem solve and find as many different ways as they could to spell the word ‘kayak’ without using the same letters twice within the squares. The tricky part was they were not allowed to write up their own ideas to ensure everyone got a chance to collaborate. This lesson helped us to develop our communication and critical thinking skills. We had a look at other groups work to see how others tackled the problem and to identify different ways in which we could have showed our thinking. Lastly, we had a class discussion of what good communication and bad communication looked like during this task and how we could improve this next time.

P6/5 were joined by scientists for an afternoon of experimenting and extracting DNA. The scientists from the university of Edinburgh set us a challenge to choose a fruit that we think would have a large amount of DNA, after researching and critically thinking about it we chose lemons. We had a discussion about DNA and chromosomes. We then had to match the fake chromosomes up in pairs. We had to use our collaboration skills to successfully follow the instructions in order to collect DNA samples in our groups. The scientists are taking our extractions back to their lab to calculate how much DNA each group managed to collect, we can’t wait to find out who the winning group is! #P6/5