‘You can’t blend in, when you were born to stand out.’ R.J Palacio

‘I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you are thinking, it’s  probably worse’. These words come from our class novel, Wonder by R.J Palacio. Before listening to the novel, we were grouped into three’s, Mrs Matos gave each group a tube of toothpaste, a toothpick each and a plate. You can imagine we were just as confused as you are. Mrs Matos asked us to empty out all the toothpaste into the plate, that was a lot of fun, still left confused the next instruction was to put ALL the toothpaste back into the tube…..with only the TOOTHPICK!! It was impossible. We learnt from this activity that the tube represents our mouths, and the toothpaste our words. We realised that any words that are spoken, especially unkind words we can not take back, just like the toothpaste couldn’t  go back into the tube. This activity was fun and messy but we learnt something special before embarking on our journey through the book called Wonder.

This year we want to focus on having a positive growth mindset towards Numeracy and Maths . A lot of us sometimes feel anxious or don’t enjoy Maths because we worried about getting the answer wrong. We watched an important video on why challenges are good for us and how, when we find things difficult, that by trying our brains are growing and by excepting the challenge and making mistakes that is how we learn. To help build our confidence and mental agility, we have Number talk discussions. Number Talks help us to solve problems mentally and then to share our strategies with the class, this has helped us to see that it’s  not how fast we get to the answer or even if we get the answer wrong, it is about sharing our strategies and finding our errors, and that is how we learn, because we all see numbers differently. Over the last week we have been learning to analyse and interpret graphs. We have looked at bar and line graphs, but just for that extra challenge we worked in pairs to analyse and interpret a graph we have never seen before…..A ‘cross graph. We took on the challenge, worked well with our partners and managed to identify all the information that we needed.  ‘Never give up, no matter how difficult it may seem.’

Being in Primary 6 comes with some responsibilities. We have taken on the roles of having P2 Buddies. We know that sometimes using the netbooks can be difficult, so we went along to Mrs Burton and her P2 class to help them research the closest sea side resort to Linlithgow using the netbooks. We needed to show our buddies how to switch the netbooks on, we explained how and why we were using google, and then helped them to type and search. We enjoyed spending some time with the P2’s and we hope to help throughout the year with various other activities.

As part of our weekly research this week, we worked with a partner to research  Treacher_Collins syndrome, as this is the condition that the main narrator in the book, Wonder, has. We had to find facts about the syndrome, this will help us connect better with the narrator and will help us to understand his condition better.

In 1+2 this week we made our own French vocabulary flash cards, which we will use throughout the year to help us remember the meanings of the words and to practice the correct pronunciation.

Another busy week has past, what will be in store…….I ‘WONDER’

P6A and Mrs Matos