Author: Mrs Gordon

Lion King

Unfortunately (I’m sure the children disagree…) we had a very short week due to the snow…On Monday we had a successful rehearsal at Linlithgow Academy which at least gave the children a chance to get their positions on stage for most of the show. We had hoped to be back yesterday to do a full run through, but that was not meant to be…Hopefully we get back in on Monday. If the children can keep practicing using the links that Mr Logan posted on the blog, and that I sent on dojo, that would help greatly. They can also listen to the Lion King Junior soundtrack. Well done P7, you are doing an amazing job!

PE

In PE Mr Logan has been continuing with his better movers and thinkers football skills. The staff had a training session on this a few weeks ago, and this allows children to use ball skills whilst also having to multi-task and use their brain eg dribbling a football in different directions (4 forward, 4 side, 4 back) whilst throwing and catching a tennis ball with one hand. Not as easy as it sounds…

Numeracy

This week we started a new topic of Volume and Capacity. We revised the meanings of the 2 terms and then went on to estimate the capacity of various objects. We then started work on a carousel of 4 activities where we had to : estimate and measure the capacity of 5 different containers with water in them, estimate 100ml, 75ml and 25ml by pouring into a container and checking, convert from millilitres to litres and do some volume word problems.

Mrs Gordon

Numeracy

We continued our focus on Area and Perimeter by solving word problems relating to these measurements. The children picked whether they wanted to work on the “mild”, “spicy” or “hot” challenges and had to solve real life problems relating to wallpaper and carpet measurements. We also created a café where we had to solve fraction, decimal and percentage questions to know how many items were in each category of the menu eg. 1/20 of the menu is hot drinks.

Literacy

This week we were extending our knowledge of prefixes and suffixes. We had to create word maps using root words eg port and see how many words we could create from the root word. I think the record was 22! We also started using our new reading comprehension resource where the children select a card to work on based on their interests and level. The children really enjoyed this as they said they likes the choice, variety and the number of levels available to choose from. Once they select a card they answer questions on 3 sections: reading comprehension, all about words and grammar.

Drama

With our Lion King Show only just over a week away, Mrs Gordon arranged for Mr Mac, the drama teacher at Linlithgow Academy to run some workshops. Each class in P6 and 7 got the chance to have a 30 minute session with Mr Mac where he helped the children use characterisation to move and act like their animal from the Lion King.

French

This week we continued our learning about food linking it to our previous learning on likes and dislikes. We did a carousel of activities where we asked a partner if they liked certain foods, then we play connect 4 with food and a snap food game.

Mrs Gordon and P7a

Numeracy

This week we started our new topic of “Information and Data Handling”. We realised there were lots of links to real life, and reasons why we need to learn the skills to present and interpret data. In this first week we have been selected the best graph to display our data and drawing frequency tables and graphs.

Literacy

Hamburger paragraphs were a key feature this week, essentially allowing us to structure and create quality paragraphs. The initial or topic sentence introducing the concept is the “top bun”, the details are the “fillings and burger” and the conclusion or ending is the “bottom bun”. We all wrote “hamburger paragraphs” and peer assessed them.

After the fantastic Stem Engineer interviews last week, we revisited our notes and made a start on a report about engineering. There was lots of decision making required as we had to decide which were the key ideas, and how to present these using sub-headings in a report. Some of us realised we had not taken enough/detailed enough notes during the interviews, which made it difficult to plan a report. Luckily we all worked together to share our key information and make sure that everyone then had the key facts.

French and Spanish

J’aime et je n’aime pas…were the focus of French this week, where we learned how to say what we like and dislike. In Spanish we started to learn “los numeros de 0-50” by singing a catchy song. We noticed that there were similarities to English and French numbers.

IDL Social Studies – Creative Scots

This week we worked in our decades to finalise the planning and creation of our lessons for next week. Each group was given a decade from the 70’s until current day and have been tasked with becoming the teachers, and teaching their classmates and Mrs Gordon about Scottish music and musicians in that decade. This week involved lots of planning of lessons and creation of activities. We can’t wait to learn all about it next week…

Mrs Gordon and P7a

Happy New Year and welcome back from holidays ! It was lovely to get back to school and find out all about our holidays and resolutions.

Target Setting

In Literacy and Numeracy we reviewed our targets from last term, evaluating ourselves against them and then using this information to create new targets for this term. We also created reflection triangles where we were able to think about what we had learned last term, what we had improved at and what had challenged us. As a class we shared some of these targets and successes.

New Years Resolutions

Also along the same thread of review and new beginnings, in health and wellbeing we created our resolution and broke it down into little steps. We will monitor our progress of these resolutions/goals and once we achieve a mini step we will put it on the wall to chart our progress towards the final goal. The children could choose anything they wanted, and many chose health and fitness options which was very encouraging.

Numeracy

In Numeracy as we draw our work on fractions, decimals and percentages to a close, we focused on converting between the different measures. In our problem solving Mrs Gordon gave us a real-life budgeting project, where in teams of 3/4 we were given a scenario about a family of 4 planning a once in a lifetime trip to Sydney. We had to find out about flight costs, accommodation, car hire, passport costs etc This was part of our continued work on “skills for learning, life and work” and it allowed the children to use lots of different skills whilst completing a fun activity.

Literacy

In literacy we continue our focus on our class novel “Wonder” and began our guided reading groups again for this sessions. Our focus for writing this term will be note taking, questioning, summarising and report writing. Mrs Gordon gave us a quick talk about her career and we had to take notes, she spoke very quickly to test us! This was to prepare us for taking notes next week when we have our 2 engineers coming into to talk to us about their careers as part of our STEM project. We also worked on effective questioning and have created high level questions for our visitors.

IDL – Lion King

In IDL we started our “Lion King” focus with rehearsals for all cast members, song practice, acting/drama and costume design. First efforts on scenes 1-7 were fantastic, and we are all very excited about this project.

Mrs Gordon and P7a

Mrs Tulloch challenges the children each week with their learning in science and technologies. They are very fortunate to have her share a wealth of knowledge and lots of fun and practical activities.

This week the P7 children assisted Mrs Tulloch by demonstrating some fun experiments including making lava lamps. Here are a few photos of them at work.

Thank you Mrs Tulloch for everything you teach us, and for always helping us learn new and exciting things.

P7a and Mrs Gordon

The P7’s had a fantastic time creating, writing and illustrating mini books as Christmas presents for their P1 buddies. The P7’s surprised their buddies by delivering their presents after break and reading the stories to the P1’s. Here are a few photos.

Merry Christmas to all from P7, Mr Logan and Mrs Gordon

This week we finished our block on fractions within numeracy by doing an assessment. This will help identify an areas we still need to work on. We then started work with percentages. Mrs Gordon was delighted that a few children recognised that “percent” means per 100, and that cent in French is 100!

In literacy we wrote diary entries from the point of view of an animal, plant or person living in the Amazon Rainforest or Brazil. We had to really put ourselves into our characters shoes, and do some research as to their life style to ensure it was authentic.

In French we designed our own Christmas jumpers and then wrote a few sentences to describe them. We had some lovely designs and learnt some fabulous words like robin – rouge-gorge (red throat) again some links to the English language.

We also started Spanish by working out what we knew, counting to 20, greetings and asking and saying our name. We found some links with masculine/feminine endings that we understood due to our work on that in French lessons.

In IDL we are at the end of our focus on Brazil, and we were very lucky to have some parents and grandparents join us for the learning showcase on Wednesday. We did an apprentice style activity where each group had to choose their team leader and then complete a Scotland/Brazil comparison task. There were a few twists along the way, and each section  was timed to add an element of urgency. At the end each team presented a “persuasive presentation on either Brazil or Scotland” trying to convince the audience to visit. The children did a great job, and some of the visitors commented on how well they gave each other feedback! Our peer assessment is working !

We had our second session of skiing on Thursday at Hillend, where we had real snow, making it more authentic! Everyone really pushed themselves and did so well. After an exhausting few hours, it was time to get back for our Christmas lunch. Lunch for 62 was served in our classroom, it was a bit of a squeeze, but very tasty!

Mrs Gordon and P7a

What a fantastic end result for the P7 enterprise project this year. Between the 2 classes the children split into groups of 4 or 5 and have spent time during the last 3 weeks on the project. Each team had to design, plan, advertise, manufacture and sell a product(s) or service at the Christmas Fayre. The children worked hard on costings and budgeting, and had to estimate how many of each product they expected to sell.

The Fayre was a great success and overall we made £850.73 net profit (in P7 alone). On Monday each group will calculate their team’s net profit and reflect on what worked well, and what would be done differently next time.

Many thanks to everyone who supported us. Here are a few photos of the teams at the Fayre.

Another busy week of learning in P7a. In Numeracy we continued our work on fractions. This week we looked at conversions between mixed number and improper fractions and addition/subtraction of fractions. We were choosing our chilli challenge based on how we felt about the subject (mild, spicy or hot). We also used lots of fraction examples as number talks this week to help us better understand the concepts. The use of concrete materials such as blocks, magnetic cuisinaire rods and fraction pieces allowed us to explore fractions in more depth. The concrete material we loved the most was the mini roll… have a look at our mini roll fractions.

In literacy we continued the “Big Writing Animals in Danger” radio report writing. We had to focus on the structure of our report, and ensure it was persuasive yet factual. The children peer assessed each other’s work, giving feedback to allow them to improve the piece of writing. The next step will be to record and share the reports.

We are loving using yammer as a tool during our guided reading sessions. This is a great way to improve ICT skills whilst combining it with literacy. This was another opportunity for peer assessing when we gave each other written feedback in our reading groups about the homework questions.

In French we continued with “Moi-meme” and learnt how to describe hair colour, eye colour and height. Our focus in PE was passing skills in basketball. We were able to easily give constructive feedback to our peers when observing each other play.

On Tuesday we finished our Brazilian Landmark junk models and again peer assessed (this time by group) against the success criteria that we co-created. Have a look at our creations below, aren’t they fabulous?

After all this peer assessing we have become a lot more confident at giving constructive feedback that will allow us to improve our work and recognise what good looks like.

Have a great weekend, from Mrs Gordon and P7a.