Category: Primary 6

This was our last week of swimming lessons.  We have all really enjoyed our experience and so many of us have improved our swimming techniques even in this short block!  Today in the pool instead of focusing on swimming techniques we looked at learning some team games.  Water polo was a huge success and Mr McCurdy was so impressed with how quickly we were able to learn the rules and apply our swimming technique to produce a very free flowing game, both Jack and Billie were superb at scoring from a distance!  Some of us also practised our diving techniques, Kornelia and Rachel showed real improvement using the kneeling dive to begin with.  Mark and Aaron were able to progress to the plunge dive with super success!  Well done everyone, swimming is a skill for life and a life saving skill which is very important as we always want to improve our own personal safety.

Our success in the pool to learn new games has been mirrored in PE where we have been learning new games (many are variations of dodgeball) every week with a view to adapting the rules to suit our class and environment needs.  This week King Ball is the game we learned.  We quickly have realised that height matters!  So the game of P7 versus P6 was slightly unfair as some of our P7 children are particularly tall, however being tall is not the only skill required you have to be able to defend and catch the ball successfully, something that Danielle has shown a real skill for this week.  Tristan also showcased good strategic thinking in his defending skills and proved to be a real asset to his team as a result.

In class this week our Maths focus has been learning about how to find the volume of a solid shape as well as learning about litres and millilitres when measuring the volume of a liquid.  To find the volume of a solid shape we started the week by using practical unit cubes to build shapes, this helped us to develop our understanding of a cubic measurement.  From here we worked with pictures of 3D shapes made from unit cubes and counted these cubes (even the ones we could not directly see in the picture).  We progressed to looking at regular cuboid shapes and only counting how many were on the top layer and then multiplying it by the number of layers to find the number of cubic units.  Finally some of us were able to progress to being given the height, depth and width of the regular cuboid shape and using the formula volume = l x b x h.  Using this formula required us to use our Number Talk strategies especially when numbers began to get quite big.  We also used a measuring jug and a variety of containers to develop our general understanding of how much is a litre.  We were encouraged to estimate what the volume would be before measuring, after the first measurement our estimates became more accurate as we were able to compare the size and shape of the container with the one before and use this understanding to hone our estimates…good critical thinking skills.

In Literacy we have been listening to our class talks about WWII.  It has been said that Mrs Currie is like Simon Cowell when delivering her feedback…hopefully my clothes and fashion sense are a little better than his!  It has been great to see the work and effort that some children have put into producing their presentations it hopefully will inspire us all to further develop these skills.

A great week.  Well done all!