Category: Primary 7

We were all book worms this week.  Check out some of our amazing costumes.

On Thursday we celebrated World Book Day with a few challenges.  Firstly we used our Maths skills we have been learning in Information Handling.  We worked in pairs and had two extracts from well known books, our job was to count how many words were in a sentence for the extract and then draw a comparative bar graph to show our findings.  This was a great way of applying our recently learnt skills and deepening our learning and understanding of how graphs can be used to find out information.  We also completed a Literacy challenge…to write a ten words story!  Sounds easy but it required a lot of thinking of how to convey the main message of a story in ten words.  Some of us even managed to get a couple of adjectives into our stories.  Keep your eye on the blog next week as we are going to post some examples of the Literacy work that we have been focusing on so far this term, there are some amazing examples.

We have also continued our learning about WWII and using this to help us develop our learning skills across the curriculum.  For our writing we used the context of creating a memoir from an evacuee child’s view point on the day they had to leave home (some of us flipped the activity and wrote from the parents perspective!).  To achieve this we used a success criteria which focused on using descriptive vocabulary as well as emotive language to describe this event.  We also applied our learning from our VCOP starter activities to ensure we used good tools for writing to showcase our work.  Again some examples will be posted in the course of the week.

In PE, Russian Longball has proven to be a great success, we have adapted the rules to the game to suit our needs and gym hall environment and it is great fun!  Mrs Currie even got into the game by being the bowler and took a few head hits from a stray ball or two (I would hope they were accidental!)

Another fantastic week!

Have a lovely weekend.

 

It is September 1940 and WWII has been going on for a year now, some people have been calling it the phony war as no one here in Britain have felt the full impact of the war…yet.  Please click below to hear an air raid siren…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schoolradio/subjects/history/ww2clips/sounds/air_raid_siren

TAKE COVER!  In our classroom you see the German bombers overhead and our classroom door is now an entrance to an Anderson Shelter!

Our Literacy work this week has been based around our WWII theme this week,

Reading – we read a memoir from a lady called Eileen Frost who had been a child during WWII and she described her memories of building an Anderson shelter and life in London during the war.

Writing – We watched a short clip of a man called Joseph Robertson who had been a soldier during the war, he also was describing one particular memory of when he was in a battle.  The children then discussed and shared emotive language and ideas about this and wrote a memoir from Joseph’s point of view.  These were well written and used some amazing emotive language.  They are now part of our WWII display in class.  We also used fact sheets about Anderson Shelters to help us re-create an instruction guide on how to build an Anderson Shelter,  we used the Scottish Criterion checklist to help us use good writer’s craft throughout our piece.

Listening and Talking – We are now listening to a text called “Catching Falling Starts” by Karen McCombie.

Mrs Currie is reading this aloud to us.  It is about a girl called Glory and her little brother called Rich, they are children who were living in London during the outbreak of WWII.  At first their parents did not send them away to the countryside as they wanted to stay together as a family, but after a narrow escape from a Blitz attack (only their Anderson shelter saved them) they are now being evacuated.

This leads us onto our topic focus for next week – Evacuees.  The children will continue to develop their use of emotive writing skills as they put themselves into the shoes of a child being evacuated and write about their journey as they leave home.

In Maths we have started our work on using and interpreting data.  Our focus for this week was to find out how much we already know about this topic in Maths and we started analysing bar graphs.  Everyone was given the opportunity to use data that we gathered in class about our Favourite Flavour of Crisps, using a tally mark chart, and created our own bar graphs.  To help us out we used the following website to show us how to create a bar graph,

http://www.amblesideprimary.com/ambleweb/mentalmaths/grapher.html

Try using this to help you create more graphs at home.  Send a reply back if you manage this.  Next week we will begin to use some data and graphs from WWII to interpret and analyse to find out more statistics linked to this topic.

Have a great weekend.

Mrs Currie

P7 this week had a trip to St Margaret’s High School as part of their transition programme.  It was a great success.  The children followed a timetable which involved a Social Studies lesson, Science lesson and PE lesson.  Everyone seemed to really enjoy the experience and they were a credit to the school in their manners and behaviour.

In class we have began our new topic of World War 2.  We have looked at the leaders of the countries involved and the causes for the outbreak of the war.  The children have all completed a registration card and understand why it was so important to have identification during the War time period.  Next week we are going to be learning about the Blitz and evacuations.

For our Maths work we have been continuing our work on angles.  P6 went on an angle hunt around the classroom and took photographs of different types of angles.  These will be put in our class talking book.  Next week we are moving onto looking at data handling which we will link to different aspects of WWII.

In class we have been discussing The First Ministers Reading Challenge.  This is an opportunity for the children to record the books they are reading for pleasure.  Everyone was issued with a passport for this challenge last term during Monday Circle time.  Children are welcome to bring their passport into class and they will be given an opportunity to share their reading with a friend.

On Thursday we were all treated to an amazing assembly by Fr Kenneth about his recent trip to Jerusalem.  His photographs that he shared were excellent and his stories of his trip were very interesting.  This fitted in well with our Catholic Education Week Theme of our Faith Community.  In class we discussed how a church is not the building but the people who gather together.  We found a lovely picture to show this and we have put this into our journal.

Have a lovely weekend.

Mrs Currie