Professor Yellowees was born in London but has lived for many years in Edinburgh and graduated from Edinburgh University. She has dedicated much of her career to researching and investigating renewable energy and solar cells. In 2012 she became the first female president for the Royal Society of Chemistry (until 2014). She promotes equality for all in the field of Science and has been involved in shaping the Scottish curriculum.
She is a great role model for all in the field of STEM.
If asked, how many influential scientists from the past and present can you name? How would you do? How many that you could name are female?
Throughout this session these regular blog posts will help us learn a little more about the well known and not so well known women who have been pioneering in the field of STEM.
Marie Curie is probably one of the more well known female scientists, here are some facts about her.
Occupation: Scientist
Born: November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, Poland
Died: July 4, 1934 in Passy, Haute-Savoie, France
Best known for: Her work in radioactivity
Nobel Prizes : In 1903, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marie and Pierre Curie as well as Henri Becquerel for their work in radiation. Marie became the first woman to be awarded the prize. In 1911 Marie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the two elements, polonium and radium. She was the first person to be awarded two Nobel Prizes. Marie became very famous. Scientists came from around the world to study radioactivity with Marie. Soon doctors found that radiology could help with curing cancer.
Death : Marie died on July 4, 1934. She died from overexposure to radiation, both from her experiments and from her work with X-ray machines. Today there are lots of safety measures to keep scientists from getting overexposed to the rays.
If you know of a female scientist that we could highlight in these posts write a reply here and we will include your suggestions in future posts.
Stay, play and learn was a fabulous way to the end the term! Hopefully everyone managed to sample some of our activities in class.
This term in numeracy and maths we have been learning how important it is to stretch our brains and have a positive attitude towards numeracy. If we don’t get something correct first time, this is not a failure but an opportunity to grow our brains and stretch our learning. We start each maths lesson with a positive message, today we showcased one of the songs we have been learning, have a watch and I guarantee you will be singing it all evening.
In our number talks we have been learning to discuss the strategies of finding out how many there are and then sharing how we could see it and work it out. Over the course of the term we have used concrete material such as the cubes and counting beads to start a number talk, and then we moved onto using our interactive whiteboard with the Rekenrek (this was on show today at Stay, Play and Learn).
In our numeracy work we have been looking at numbers to 100, counting to 100 in 1s and 10s. We have been partitioning numbers to allow us to understand the place value of tens and units (sometimes called ones). The children have all built double digit numbers using sticks of ten cubes and single cubes for units, they have then progressed onto being able to draw a simple picture of this, try it out at home by drawing a double digit number like this (Blue = 23 Pink = 15)
We have also began work on finding the number (one/two) before and after up to 100 and next term we will progress onto using the less than and greater than symbols to compare the value of numbers.
In addition and subtraction we are using number stories (calculations) up to 20. Again we have been using a combination of counting beads, number lines, cubes and our fingers to help us. Some of us can now see a number line in our heads and work out answers this way. Using the game Hit The Button and Sumdog are good ways of engaging with addition and subtraction calculations.
In our literacy work we have been using good questioning to engage with the texts we are reading. Everyone has now got a bookmark with some questions on it to lead discussions at home to help deepen our comprehension of what we are reading. If anyone has lost their book mark, please dojo to request a new one. And in class we are using the Blooms Button questions to guide our discussions. These questions ask us to use creative thinking, apply our knowledge, remember and understand and also evaluate and analyse what we are reading.
In our talking and listening, we have been using a no hands up rule in class to allow everyone an equal chance of sharing ideas; we use lolly sticks with our names on it to see who will answer/contribute. We understand the value of listening to others as we can learn from each other and we have been given a lot of opportunities for think/pair/share with a partner.
We are continuing to use our vowel house to deepen our understanding of phonics and spelling. Each vowel sound forms part of the story and we are learning that there is more than one way to make a vowel sound for example oi and oy (sometimes there are rules that can help us know which one to use). We are also learning key words in class, a lot of these words don’t follow our spelling rules and so we call then our photograph words (sight words). Here are some of the ways we have been learning how to remember the spellings; THE = Tired Hungry Elephants, SAID = Sally Anne Is Dancing, WAS = Worms And Snakes. You can even make up your own!
In our writing we have been trying to extend our writing by using the conjunctions and/because. We have also learned some ordering opening words for our sentences to help the reader know when or what order things happened in. Some examples are One day, Later, Next, First, After…
Our main focus for our topic work has been Hot and Cold Climates and Scotland. We have now learned where Scotland is on a world map and now know that the capital city of Scotland is Edinburgh. Next term we will be focusing our interdisciplinary learning on science and enterprise, very exciting things to come.
It has been a really busy term, enjoy the holiday.
This week was Inspirational Maths week. One of the inspirational lessons we completed was “Piano Fingers”. For this we numbered our fingers and then had to use the correct finger to press the numbered piano keys. This inspired us to think about how we use our fingers to help us count. When we count with our fingers we do not always just count in ones. Sometimes we make each finger worth ten and count up to 100. We use little tunes to help us do this, ask us to show you.
Here is a picture of us all trying to find different ways to make five with our fingers, the challenge was to try not have the same combination of fingers as the person next to us!
In our writing we have been focusing on using connective (joining words) in our sentences. The two connectives we have discussed are “and” and “because”. We learned a little story to help us learn how to spell “because”,
b-illy
e-ats
c-arrots
a-nd
u-sually
s-ome
e-ggs
This week we also had our special feast day Mass to celebrate St. Ninian. We learned the story of St Ninian and how he grew up and travelled from Scotland to Rome to become a Bishop. We even had an extra long playtime as a treat! Luckily it was dry!
For handwriting we have focused on learning how letters can join using lead in lines and flicks. We have practised l, i, t, c, o and a. From these letters we now know how to join our writing for the word “cat” and “cot”. As a challenge, what other small words can you make using these letters and try to join them up when you write them. Good luck!
This week in P2 we had our first set of Lead Learners.
Well done both Kerr and Sophie, they definitely lead by example by working hard and displaying super manners and attitude in class.
To follow on from our book study (which focused on the South Pole) we have decided to follow up with the theme of Hot and Cold Climates. While we were discussing this new topic we had a lot of amazing ideas to learn about,
Ephriam – “Deserts”
Lucy – “Egypt people”
In numeracy we have been looking at numbers before, after and between within 100. We have used our class technology to help us with this
We also have been finding out more about partitioning of numbers and using concrete material to show this,
We also had an interesting homework task which asked us to sort emojis and then challenge ourselves to find things in the house to sort. A lot of us used class dojo to send Mrs Currie our photographs, she was super impressed with our hard work and amazing ideas for sorting into different categories using set criteria. Kayla even brought in a sorting box to class and some of us helped her sort her items out.
Next week will be very exciting as it is Inspirational Maths Week! So look out for more amazing Maths news next week!
Another amazing week for P2. We are well and truly getting back into the swing of school and have achieved a lot this week.
At the beginning of a day we work from our Smart Start boxes, which are filled lots of interesting activities linked to our learning, for example Snakes And Ladders; linked with our numbers to 100, word searches; linked with our topic about penguins, handwriting; handwriting sheets practising the letters we have covered and much more. We can choose which ever activity we would like to use which helps develop our personalisation and choice in our learning.
We also continued to learn about penguins this week and we used a variety of different types of sources to learn information such as power points and videos. Here is the link to the video we used to get some of our information.
Using this information we then created fact files.
In numeracy we continued to count up to 100 and look at how numbers are made. We learned the big word “partitioning” which means splitting a number up into it’s different place values. Ask us about the magic trick that helped us partition the numbers.
We also all started taking home our reading books this week and everyone was so enthusiastic about their new books. Mrs Currie was very impressed.
We have been using the books Lost And Found and Up And Down by Oliver Jeffers as our stimulus for learning. With these stories we have discussed friendships as well as learning about penguins. As a result our classroom is filled with penguins.
In Up And Down we stopped the story at the point that the penguin rushed off to find a way to learn to fly and we had some amazing ideas,
For our numeracy work we had juggling penguins which helped us with our number bonds to 10.
We also looked at numbers to 100, have a go at this game to help you with ordering numbers up to 100.
Our technical issue from last week has been resolved!
Here are the photographs from our class trip to the WW2 Linburn war museum.
We learned so much as well as consolidating our learning from this topic. The alphabet quiz was great…although Mrs Currie had to be disqualified for cheating (I started writing answers in before he had said go…too eager and competitive!). Freya and Sophia were the overall winners, well done girls! We were able to handle real equipment as well as have a go a feeling how heavy and hard it was to use some of the weaponry from that time! Can you name the three people in the gas masks?
In school this week we had a visit from the Rights Respecting School Assessors. Tristan and Aurora represented our class at the meeting and they did a great job. Well done to the whole school for their efforts and we just cross our fingers that we are officially awarded the level 2 in August.
In maths and numeracy we have been revising and consolidating our knowledge of the topics we have covered. It has been amazing to see how much we have learned and this gave some of us the valuable opportunity to get additional teaching and practise in areas that we are not fully confident in. This will continue for the next two weeks.
In RE we have been learning about The Holy Trinty. As an additional activity, think of three ways to describe the roles you have in life, Mrs Currie is …a sister, a mother and a teacher. You can post your three descriptions here for an extra dojo!
We have had a fabulous week, it has been so active and energetic! You can see from these photos we had a wide range of activities, these show bootcamp and cricket.
In between our active lessons we did some learning about food hygiene and how microbes can cause food poisoning, we discussed how extreme heat (cooking food) and extreme cold (freezing food) can stop these from multiplying.
We then used our food technology trolley and created some delicious cheesy mash. This involved us learning how to use the bridge grip to cut the potatoes safely. We all really enjoyed the experience and the taste!
We also learned how Edward Jenner created a vaccine for smallpox by using the cowpox virus…all very interesting if not a little yucky.
Our Star Dinner lesson was great. We all invited a wide range of interesting people, Mrs Currie wanted to invited J K Rowling, Jessica invited the youtuber Roman Atwood, Kornelia invited the singer Ariana Grande, Tristan invited footballer Cristiano Ronald and Freya even wanted to invite her cat! What a super discussion we had about this!
Well done everyone for yet another fantastic health week at St Ninian’s.
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