This afternoon we joined the University of Edinburgh online to participate in the Internet project involving the sensors. We had a chance to read lots of data and then to investigate 4 different readings and where they might have come from! Lots of great discussion, thinking skills, creativity and collaboration. This was exciting and we are looking forward to the secret sensor challenge next!
The investigation analysis
Reading data
Secret Sensor Challenge
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:
This week we were practising for our Burns supper through animation. It was very easy to animate our characters and record audio using Adobe Express on our GLOW account. We found our Scot’s poem from the library online and then recorded our poem. We had fun selecting our character, background and video size. The first poem we recorded was ‘To a Mouse’ and the results were amazing!
After our outdoor learning session yesterday, we used our ideas to inspire our writing in IDL. We started with a basic poem starter, to help us write our own version using rhyming pattern.
We have been exploring the poetry of Robert Burns over the last two weeks. After many discussions and learning our favourite poems we went outdoors today to observe the nature in our playground and take some time out to reflect, on how Burns drew inspiration from nature. We will then use our own observations to create our own poems and focus on simplicity, structure and descriptive language.
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:
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.
Despite the snowy weather, we’ve had a wonderful first week back in Primary 1-3. The class has been hard at work on a book study which has combined reading, creativity and hands-on learning. Our book study is focused on the book, ‘The Ugly Five’ by Julia Donaldson which explores five animals in the African savannah who are often called “ugly” by others.
After reading the book and making predictions on Wednesday, we explored the animals in the book in more detail and created fun character descriptions. We began by looking at real-life images of each animal using iPads, then we looked through the story to create our own descriptions which can be seen below. This activity helped us better understand the story and sparked our imaginations.
Our curiosity about the animals in the story and their environment led us to design and build our own habitats. Using a variety of materials such as LEGO and building blocks, we created models of environments such as a rainforest, a polar habitat, a garden and a city. We learned about the varying needs of animals and plants within different habitats, which then led to a discussion about the unique needs of the animals and how their habitats help them survive.
On Friday, we continued to explore coding through Micro:bits during Creativity Hour and had an exciting time putting our skills to use! We learned how to programme the Micro:bits to function as dice – by shaking the device, a random number would appear on the screen! Once we completed this, we used our Micro:bit to create our own games.
Some of us incorporated the Micro:bit dice into board games we had in the class such as Connect 4. In this game, the children would shake the device to generate a number, which determined the number of tokens they could use to play for that round. Others, made up fun challenges where the dice decided different movements. It was a great way to combine problem-solving and teamwork while learning more about technology and coding.
