After learning about Robert Burns this week and choosing our favourite poem to recite, we created pastel drawings from the images we could see in our head. We used the ‘Picture it’ strategy to help understand our poems and engage more with the Scot’s dialect. The finished pictures were all fantastic images which illuminate Burn’s poetry in our class and help with comprehension. Afterwards we chose our favourite Scottish word to look up and add to our display.
Today we went outside to try a few Mindfulness activities. Mindfulness is a critical self-regulation strategy for people of all ages. It can help us feel calm, focused, and in control. We worked together to communicate our feelings and collaborate with each other. We also had a successful singing workshop this morning in from Voice Rocks!
Voice Rocks
Today the P5-P7 class took part in a singing workshop with Jill, called ‘Voice Rocks’ The children got the chance to develop their skills and techniques relevant to singing and performing.
We want to say a huge thank you to everyone who was able to attend our Christmas Fayre last Friday. It was a fabulous morning celebrating all things Christmas and the children had a ball.
Today in maths we were learning to divide decimal numbers as well as counting on and back. In doing this task we had the opportunity to practice these calculations with a partner or in a trio outside, on the tables, on white paper, white boards and sit in any area of the class we wished. We are all very busy and this helped with our written textbook task later on.
To finish off our work on DNA, we had to present our final poster to Edinburgh University. Well done to Ethan and Joe who presented this clearly and confidently. A big congratulations to Harrison, who won our DNA competition by collecting the most DNA and can be seen below, receiving his prize. This was a fantastic partnership to be involved in and has given our learners lots of new knowledge and scientific skills.
Yesterday in P5-P7, we were bringing some Christmas cheer to the classroom through creating our own Christmas stars. We first of all collected the sticks outside and then Regina taught us how to manipulate the sticks to create a star shape and tie them together. Then we had the fun of adding on a few glistening decorations! We had so much fun and we can’t wait to show our grown ups.
Today at the Scottish You Film Foundation workshops at West Lothian College, P5-7 enjoyed three workshops. In the first workshop we learned basic animation, pixel animation and freeze framing. In the second workshop we learned about characters and storytelling. In the third workshop we learned about silent film. It was a lot of fun.
Over the past 4 weeks we have been learning more about Clarifying which involves the children identifying problem areas and then using repair strategies such as reading on (to give more information), re-reading more slowly, looking at pictures, consulting a dictionary, using prior knowledge, reflecting on the text read so far or rephrasing a sentence or section of text. Today we decided to use this strategy to learn more about St Andrew’s Day before our assembly. We had the chance to write postcards to our friends describing the best parts about St Andrew’s Day and some of us started to create our own VLOG using clarifying and other reciprocal reading strategies to research content online and explain ideas to make it very clear.
The world of work is a fun way to help children learn about themselves, their skills and the jobs they could do in the future. We talk about career options in P5-P7 every day during our lessons and last Friday we were very lucky to have a special visit from John Blacklock to talk about his Engineering job with Amentum and how it takes him all over the world.
