Children in Need 2013

Lots of us dressed up to raise money for
Children in Need on Friday 15th November.

 

This is not the cheeriest photo (we should have taken more!) but we did have a good time helping the school to raise over £600 for the charity.

 

One member of our class went the extra mile by organising her own competition, asking people to pay to guess how many sweets were in the jar.  What a great idea!

 

 

 

You can see more of the ways your money will be used to help children throughout the UK, including here in Orkney:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01ln7q6

Brave, bears, maps and movies.

This week we found out where Scotland is on a world map, on a map of Europe and in the UK. Within Scotland we identified where the big cities are and what the different parts of Scotland are called. We had to listen carefully for information in these tasks as well as carefully observing maps and finding information on websites.

 

Luckily for us we can watch the film 'Brave' as part of our topic. We had a good discussion about how the animation was made - first the script, then the actors read the script with lots of expression and the animators fit the drawings to the recorded voices.

But how accurate is the film? What is made up? How did the film makers use  myth, legend and folktale and how did they mix it with the real landscape and history of Scotland? We looked at a video by Ray Mears to find out about the Caledonian Pine Forest and the animals that live there.

 

Then we had a debate about whether animals that used to live wild in Scotland like wolves, beavers and bears should be re-introduced. We all had to listen carefully and respond to the opinions of the other team.

 

We are also finding out about apps for the ipad.

We hope that we will be making our own animations this year with an ipad app!

If you have found any useful problem solving or puzzle apps please let us know by commenting below this post.

What did you do at school today? or, Prickly Problems and Preparing Performances

This term we are thinking hard about problem solving.This was our first problem today.

Can you spot the best strategies?

This week the strategies which we used were making a model or drawing a picture, making an organised list or table and looking for a pattern.

 

We decided it was too expensive to go to Arizona, find a cactus and wait for 4 years to see what happened, so we drew pictures or used LEGO to make a model.

model cacti - year 1,2,3 and 4

If you try this problem, you'll need to READ and THINK carefully.

The cactus doesn't grow 2 pads every year - it grows 2 pads on each of last year's pads...

When you figure out the pattern you can calculate and predict for many years ahead.

 

 

Rehearsals for the Christmas performance are well underway.

Monday afternoons this term are for practising in the hall.

We P5s are singing at the front of the stage while the P6s and P7s perform and sing on stage.

We have to be patient but ready for the cues to sing!

We hope everyone at home is looking forward to it!

Windpower!

We have been finding out about renewable energy and investigating windpower. Some of the off shore wind farms ( called 'arrays') are enormous! The London Array will be the biggest in the world.

We watched an amazing video which shows the huge size of the turbines and how the foundations are put in to the sea with a big hammer. We found out about the jobs the  remotely operated vehicles or ROVs do under the sea and how they are needed to lay the cables safely under the seabed.

There must be lots of different jobs that underwater ROVs could do so we designed our own and build lego models to share our ideas. Here are a few of our designs which we made into lego models.

 

We chose a windy day to investigate the wind and the Beaufort Scale , and once we got them in the right place the anenometer and the model turbine were flying round! The anenometer measured F7 in the playground! This must have been a gust, but as you see in the chart below the photo it was definitely a steady F6.

No shortage of wind in our playground!

 

Wind speed  - we were measuring from 2pm to 3pm.

Power Station VIsit

We have visited the power station to see how power used to be generated for the whole of Orkney with diesel engines. The station is only used for back up in case of emergency nowadays. 30 people used to work there but now only 3 people look after the power station. We found out about how much power the engines can generate and how much power is sent to us through the submarine cable and eventually to our homes, and what is done with the extra energy generated by wind turbines. If you would like to find out more please read our comments below as we add them. Everyone will be sharing what they have learned.