Category Archives: Technologies

P3/2 celebrate World Book Day

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P3/2 had a wonderful time celebrating World Book Day on Thursday. We created some fantastic potato characters…A huge well done to all those children who took part!

We also enjoyed creating book token designs and bookmarks and had the opportunity to do some paired reading with our friends.

Today, we performed a Scots story or personal account of our favourite book in assembly in front of the whole school! It was great fun having the opportunity to share our learning.

We have also been taking part in fairtrade fortnight and created some fairtrade artwork, using fairtrade colours and images. Today, our class brought in 10 fairtrade snacks for playtime! Well done!

 

Scottish Cooking and Baking in P4

In P4, we have been having great fun learning about, making and tasting Scottish foods. The first food we made together was a (child-friendly) cranachan – we used oats, yoghurt, raspberries and honey. We also baked shortbread for our Burns Party. Both were delicious! Well most of us thought so anyway! We are doing all of this through our food technology lessons with Mrs Logan. We are learning to prepare food and use equipment in a hygienic and safe way. We use our reading skills as we read the recipe and we use our maths skills as we measure the ingredients. We have to cooperate with our friends and work as a team. We can’t wait to find out what we are making next!

P6 have been GETTING CREATIVE and exploring Glow Mail…

BYOD... opening new doors of creativity at all turns for P6.
BYOD… opening new doors of creativity at all turns for P6.

 

On Friday P6 entered into the realms of sheer and absolute creativity, and, perhaps even without knowing…

In our ‘Digital Technologies Across the Curriculum’ (D-TAC? We’re trying to think of a name!) session we were looking at emailing. We all ‘assumed’ we knew how to do it. 85% of use already have personal email accounts. So we know how to email right? NOT QUITE YET…we discovered!

Key Skills we learnt about EMAIL IN GLOW:

1. Know your login/password (And if it is your device – click ‘save for future’, little box, saves time!).

2. Click on Microsoft Outlook 365 tab. Wow it looks different to my other email account!

3. Find out my own email address… ‘My Profile’

4. Add contacts through ‘People’ – this makes it easier to see my friends, add groups, email quickly.

5. Send an email to Mrs Gray. Wow we filled her inbox, didn’t we P6?

6. Found out what ‘CC’ stands for/means in emailing. Yeah, we had seen it before, did we know what it meant? Nope. It means ‘Carbon Copy’, like if you want other people to see what you’re emailing but it’s not exactly for them. Pretty good idea, right?

7. We all got excited about changing our profile picture, and then had to be even more creative. All our devices were very different. Everything appeared very different on all of our screens. Let’s start real exploration – we found out how to change/create lots of stuff through doing this!

FEEDBACK FROM MRS GRAY…

~ P6 trust yourselves and each other more, remember I am no expert either. Let’s ask each other, before we ask me, if we are unsure about something.

FEED-FORWARD FROM MRS GRAY…

~ What now? Shall we set up an email group? Shall we use email within a lesson/activity (peer assessment method?). You will have better ideas than me…

 

SO P6… let’s have some FEEDBACK/FEED-FORWARD IN THE COMMENTS…

P6 have been taking inspiration from the late, and great, Steve Jobs...
P6 have been taking inspiration from the late, and great, Steve Jobs…

Christmas fun with our buddies

Yesterday afternoon P7 really enjoyed spending time with their P1 buddies. We prepared two craft activities for our buddies to complete and we were very impressed with what a lovely job they made of them! It was great to spend time together and help our buddies get creative.

We also delivered ‘top secret’ diaries from an elf and spent time reading these together. We couldn’t believe how bust elves really are at this time of year!

P7 would also love to thank Primary 1 for a wonderful afternoon on Wednesday! We loved joining you for your topic afternoon and learned lots about Fairyland! You all did a great job making clocks, wands and building a carriage for Cinderella. Thank you for inviting us!

P6 Update

I loved Hopetoun House – Kayleigh.

I really, really, really enjoyed making the News Report at Sky – Alexander.

I thought Christmas Lunch was YUMMY! – Olivia.

I loved making the news report at Sky, particularly using the camera – Lochlan.

We’ve been getting on really well this week with our #RandomActsofKindness – have you seen us around? – Daisy.

At Hopetoun we got to make butter and buttermilk – in class we then tasted this on pancakes and crumpets! I’d give it 10/10! – Shefali.

 

Come to our class to see more….!

Primary 3 Katie Morag Showcase

Last week in primary 3a and 3b, we were very excited about having our family into school to share everything we have been learning in our Katie Morag topic.

Our special guests arrived at 9.15 in the morning and we welcomed them in the small hall and got started right away with sharing our work.

We performed the Canadian Barn Dance and Gay Gordons in the small hall, and then even asked an adult to dance with us!  We were very impressed with the effort and enthusiasm from our guests.

In our P3 classrooms, we performed our Katie Morag puppet shows.  We have been working very hard with Mrs Thomson to plan and script our puppet show and then made puppets and backdrops for our performance.  We also showed our guests our 3D model islands.  As Katie Morag lives on an island, we have been exploring island life and designed and made a model island of our own.  We had to explain how we did this to our guests.

We shared stories with our guests in the library.  Primary 3a have written a whole class Katie Morag story and read this to our guests and Primary 3b have been working on individual Katie Morag short stories and shared these with their guests.  We also took the time to relax with a Katie Morag book.

To finish off our busy morning, we went back to the small hall to sing some Scottish songs.  We sang “Ye cannae shove yer Granny aff a bus”, “The world must be comin’ tae an end” and “three craws”.  We have also been working on a traditional Gaelic song with Ms Macdonald and performed this too.

We had a wonderful time showcasing our learning to our invited guests and our teachers think we did a wonderful job of explaining everything we have been doing in our topic work.

 

 

Here are some of the comments that have been made by our special guests:

“I can’t seem to pick a favourite as everything was great!  A big thank you Ethan, P3’s and teachers – the effort and quality of work blew us away!!  Good job everybody!”

“I thoroughly enjoyed the event.  It was nice to see Hamza’s interest and involvement in every part of the event – especially dancing and singing.”

“I enjoyed everything.  It is lovely to get an insight into what your children do at school and how they interact on a daily basis.”

“It was fabulous to see all the hard work undertaken by the pupils – loved the opportunity to see Roan’s work after hearing all about it over the past few weeks.”

“Primary 3 Katie Morag showcase was amazing!  It was great for parents to gain a better understanding through participation.”

“Great interaction, allowing the child to showcase what they have learned.  Really enjoyed the morning – a very proud Dad.”

Pupils Promote New Play Park

Representing Williamston Primary School; Myles, Shirees, Lewis and Halle were out at the latest new park at Bankton Mains today for its official opening. This park was designed in consultation with the pupils here at Williamston Primary School. The park makes use of new ‘Smart Playground’ technology using QR codes to engage children and parents with educational content.

Why not visit the park and see it for yourself. Please tell us what you like about it.

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch

IMG_0404 IMG_0405In Primary 2 and Primary 2/1 we have enjoyed learning more about lighthouses this week.  We have thought a lot about the purpose and importance of a lighthouse as well as the structure and shape.  Using our creative skills we used clay to mould our own individual lighthouse referring to our own design.  We had great fun getting messy and creative and cannot wait to put the final touches to our lighthouse models!

We were also set a challenge of creating one of the key characters in the story.  The seagulls are funny and have a big role in the story.  We were provided with some materials and told to make a seagull using only what was on the table. Each seagull was to be unique and its wings had to be able to move.  We showed great determination and problem solving skills in this activity and of course the challenge was completed successfully!