This week as part of our Outdoor learning, we had fun decorating our journey sticks. We used a variety of collections from outdoors, arts and crafts and memorabilia from home. We worked together to share ideas and collaborate before getting creative! The next step is to share our journey sticks with the class reflecting on achievements, memories, challenges and growth experiences they have had this academic year.
On Wednesday, P1-3 explored the importance of using our voice to stand up for fairness. Building on our Health and Wellbeing topic of relationships, we discussed how we should treat others – with kindness, respect and inclusion. We read the book All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold to help us understand the importance of celebrating diversity and equality. We had a thoughtful discussion about what fairness means and how we can speak up when we see someone being treated unfairly.
We created posters for a competition on the theme, ‘The Power of Our Voice’. We used our collaboration and communication skills to work together in small groups to create the poster and share our ideas.
Here is what we have created so far:
Today we were lucky enough to host Craig Andrew Mooney, the author behind ‘The Rebel of Time’. It was a great experience to ask Craig our questions and hear a little extract of the book from the person behind the words.
Craig shared with us his inspiration behind the main characters and shared a fascinating insight in to the writing process. Everyone was captivated and participated in hands on writing exercise guided by Craig. Pupils had the chance to experiment with writing and illustrating in pairs, exploring their own creative ideas.
This is a great way to kick off our literacy book study and plant the seed of aspiring authorship in our pupils.
This week, Primary 1-3 looked closer at the language in The Ugly Five by Julia Donaldson, with Primary 1-2 focusing on how authors use rhyme to create fun and engaging stories. The lesson began with an opportunity for the children to share their prior knowledge through discussion about what they already knew about rhyming words. Together, we revisited the story, carefully analysing the text to identify rhyming pairs; some rhyming words that we found were “spotty” and “grotty”, “see” and “tree”, and “pink” and “stink”. They worked collaboratively by sharing ideas and supporting each other to uncover the rhymes within the text.
During this time, Primary 3 focused on developing a new skill: using an online thesaurus to find synonyms. The children enjoyed this task, as it allowed them to discover new words they hadn’t encountered before. Using an extract from the book, they selected specific words and found 2-3 synonyms for each one. This activity helped them build their vocabulary and improve their research skills, as they practiced navigating a digital resource.
Here is some examples of what they found:
