To celebrate St Patrick our patron saint and as part of our Lá Glas celebrations, we performed 'Shamrock Beat' together with P6CM. Our goal was to try to get the whole school to dance with us and thankfully our camera lady captured us succeeding in doing so. The hall was bouncing as every class in the school joined us in dancing our hearts out. Well done Primary 6!
We were very excited to get our hands on the brand new Sphero Robots today.
The Sphero programmable robots helped us to learn fundamental STEM concepts through play-based learning and group challenges. We had great fun familiarising ourselves with the Sphero app as we developed our spatial awareness and teamwork skills, while linking in with our Numeracy topic Time, to see who could record the fastest times moving the Sphero's around the obstacle courses.
Today we had our final session of our 6 week Paws B programme. Paws B aims to give students Mindfulness as a life-skill and use it to help them: feel happier, calmer and more fulfilled. get on better with others. help them concentrate. help cope with stress and anxiety.
We had a lovely time welcoming Ellie into our class each week and we look forward to implementing all of the useful strategies she taught us.
Our current class novel is Kensuke's Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo. In the story Michael's family have decided to leave their home, town, normal lives and everything they know to go on a once in a lifetime trip sailing around the world. This sparked an exciting cause for discussion as we weighed up the pros and cons of such a huge decision. We shared very carefully considered responses and worked together to produce a balanced argument, providing reasons for and against dropping everything and sailing around the world. Some children felt very strongly about their points of view and this inspired us to host a great class debate.
Following on from this, we revisited our debate to reflect on how our thoughts on certain topics can change over time. Unfortunately for Michael's parents, things didn't exactly work out as planned therefore we explored their new thoughts through a hot-seating style interview.
Today we celebrated the feast day of St Brigid.
We learned about the life and work of St Brigid before taking a step back in time to discover how St Brigid's crosses are woven with reeds.
We carefully followed a step-by-step tutorial and were able to make beautiful crosses to take home and bless our homes.
We have been learning that buildings in earthquake zones have to be 'earthquake-proof' in an attempt to withstand the impact of natural disasters and to reduce the devastating destruction that is caused to infrastructure, for example, skyscrapers in Japan.
This challenge required us to work in groups to design and build solutions to structural problems using a combination of science, technology, engineering and maths skills. This was a fair test and each group was given 40 cocktail sticks and 20 marshmallows and the aim was to build the tallest structure that could withstand shaking and remain intact for the longest period of time. I think it is fair to say that we have some of the finest engineers, designers and architects of the future in our class.
It was a normal day in school when suddenly... AN EARTHQUAKE RUMBLED THROUGH EDWARD STREET! The children worked together to produce news broadcasts for the television to report the devastating effects of the earthquake.
We are loving our topic 'Natural Disasters' in P6SS, particularly all the practical elements of our learning.
We have been learning about areas in the world where earthquakes happen, and how civilians manage their unpredictable lives by preparing an 'emergency kit' to have on standby should disaster strike!
The boys and girls raided their cupboards at home to gather all the essential items they would need to build an 'earthquake emergency kit' and then they presented their work to their classmates.
To promote positive behaviour we work towards earning Dojo Points in our class. Each term we set ourselves a target of how many points we think we can achieve by working together as a class, and we choose a reward that we want to work towards getting.
Our Christmas Challenge was to raise enough points to earn a pyjama day, during which we could watch a film and enjoy hot chocolate / tea, biscuits and goodies.
Needless to say the children surpassed all expectations and smashed their target and enjoyed a very well-earned reward.
Key Stage 2 classes engaged in a very tough Battle of the Bands competition, during which each class worked frantically on TT Rockstars to see who could showcase their times tables knowledge best and answer the most times tables questions accurately.
It was an intense competition and more than 250,000 times tables questions were answers during the tournament. Although holding 1st position for much of the competition, we concluded in 3rd place, following very closely behind P6CM and P7AV.
Credit to our class who worked tirelessly to the end, determined to do P6SS proud.
P6SS visited The Fold Nursing Home today to share Christmas cheer with the residents.
The children sang a range of Christmas carols and then Niall told jokes, Caragh played the piano and performed a jig, Chloe did some dancing and Amy played her violin. How lucky and proud is Miss Sweeney to have such a talented bunch of children.
It was a truly heartwarming morning shared with members of our community and the children made wonderful memories to treasure for a lifetime.
Thank you to our wonderful dinner ladies who prepared a beautiful Christmas dinner for us today.
"It's hard to beat the turkey and ham dinner!"