Strathblane Primary School

This   morning we did the lunches and then we did maths. For maths we did times tables,

add, take away and division.  This was to practice for our level A and Level B tests.

After that we did magic cloack books we had to finish our writing and colouring.  They are going to be displayed in the library next week if they are good enough.

I  LOVE   SCHOOL  BUT   MOST   of  all  I  love  My  FRIENDS.  WE ARE  IN  THE  NEWS

paper ! p3  ROCKS!. I think p3 rocks!. I am sad that it is almost the end of p3. Our project is the magic cloak. Our  next project is our village!. our old project was the teddy bear picnic.

By Abi, Laura, Nicole and Eilidh J.

Hello world,

Our world is great! We have been really busy with the P4s writing our latest books! It is called The Magic Cloak.  They will hopefully be on display somewhere near you very soon! Our class is writing the story but P4 have to write a play.  We hope it is going to be very successful (Eilidh M.).  Yesterday we learned how to use dialogue and speech marks properly when we are writing.  We learned 4 rules.  They are 1) use two pieces of punctuation with a set of speech marks 2) use a capital letter at the start of the speech 3) when a new person is speaking, take a new line for each new speaker and indent it 4) use speech marks at the start and end of each bit of speaking.

In maths we have been doing division.  You need to know your times tables. If you don’t then your division is no good yet.  You can’t be successful yet! But try try try again! Today we were doing it against the timer on the whiteboard.  We had a candle that burned out and then we had an egg timer.  It was fun but challenging.  Last week we also did some work on symmetry! If a shape is symmetrical it means both halves are exactly the same.

Last Friday we had two visitors.  We had Elise who was from America.  She was stuck in Scotland because of the volcanoes.  We were very happy to show her what school was like in Scotland.  She should have stayed here instead of going to London.  We played year 3000 and Istanbul and Chiwawa and Star Trekkin. 

Our other visitor was Jo.  She came to tell us about how to make quilts.  It was really good fun.  I thought she was really co0l. (James)  We are going to be able to make our quilts.  She even made us cakes.  She made really really good animation and quilts.  The cakes were fantastic.  We hope she brings cakes next time too!

On Thursday we had visitors who were telling us about Autism.  We had Wallis the bear who had autism.  We learned that people with Autism sometimes act differently than us.  They sometimes get addicted to an activity like jigsaws.  They do stuff over and over again.  If you said I am over the moon they might actually think you were over the moon because they take things literally. (Eilidh)  Their hearing might be really sensitive. (Jamie)  If you are really loud it might hurt their ears so they have to cover them. (Kyle)  If loads of things are going on at the same time it can be confusing and distracting. (Connie)

Feel free to ask us any questions and please keep commenting so that we know who is reading our blog! Please write your name.

From P3

Hello all,

First of all I would like to wish you a very happy Easter. I hope that you all have a lovely holiday.

I have included the article that Sarah has written for the Swiss Newspaper and it will be published after Easter. Thanks to Sarah for writing the article and to Mr Schwahn for translating it into English for us!

Don’t eat too much chocolate…I should listen to my own advice, as I already had too much!

Love Miss Allen

Circus, circus!

Primary 3 of Strathblane Primary School in Scotland
have been working on their big Circus project I had a lot of fun watching this project evolve and could compare cultural differences between Scotland and Switzerland.

The Circus Project

Once per year all primary school children in the picturesque village of Strathblane in Scotland work on one big project, and all 7 classes have different topics. This year’s topic for Primary 3 is “Circus“. Surprisingly, most pupils actually seem to have never heard about a circus before. For me this is hard to believe, as the circus has been such a very popular theme in my childhood.

During the project period, all pupils have their regular lessons such as English and Maths in the morning. After lunch break the class is breaking up into smaller groups to work on different aspects of their topic.

One of the first projects was to transform the classroom into a circus arena. For that purpose the children painted many large sheets of paper in various colours to cover the walls and hung a parachute on the ceiling to create a big top. Thereafter they created various acrobats and spectators.

Such a huge project stimulates the class to work in teams, to research specific information in the internet, and to develop creative skills. It also furthers their personal development and provides fun while learning.

A class’ look behind the scenes

The class has a public blog about the project. Parents and other interested people can visit and follow the development of the project. Here is a glimpse of what the children think about their project:

“One of the biggest challenges was to build a seal. We needed to use a big inflatable banana, old newspapers, mesh wire and black bin bags. For the pedestal we used a huge drum which we wrapped in paper”. Lachlan says: “The making of the seal was fun and made me confident at the same time, especially the paper-wrapping of the big drum. This project required a lot of team work”.

“Planning our presentation about the circus was really hard. I am very proud of what we did as a class in such a short time. On the day of the presentation, I went home feeling very happy and proud!“, Nicole.

Rowan and James loved to fix the parachute to the ceiling and to decorate the classroom. It is very colourful and it was really fun to see how the whole class worked together to hang the parachute. Cosima who comes from Germany and now lives in Scotland loved drawing and painting the clowns.

All children agree that the circus topic was a very good and fun project. It provided many different aspects to work on and to learn interesting details. The pupils especially liked that there are so many animals in a circus and that the circus children are seriously working with the adults from a young age. They found it very difficult to imagine training animals for the arena or to practise tight-rope walking. They all agreed that working in a circus would be fun.

Sarah Erni: I have been living in Scotland since February 2007. My landlady is class teacher for P3 at Strathblane Primary School.

I have been invited to the class several times to assist with bigger projects.

It is very interesting to get to know a different schooling system. The children here learn and work with computers from P1 (they start school at age 5 years) and use the internet to obtain information from P2 or P3. The whole teaching concept is very different to our Swiss one. Working on projects does promote the children not just in their general knowledge but also in developing their personality and other values such as teamwork, developing an own opinion, making compromises, planning of work and use of modern technology.

I really enjoyed working with them and the children were very interested in my Swiss provenience. It is great to see what P3 (most of them being 7 or 8 years old) learned in such a short time and what they were able to produce with their own hands.

Personally, I was always fascinated by the circus and am still fond of this topic. I can hardly believe that some Scottish children have no knowledge about circus at all and have never seen a performance.

For more information about the circus project of Primary 3 visit the blog at http://strathblane.edublogs.org

Hello everyone,
Thank you for coming to the amazing magical Circus.  I hope you liked all our circus stuff.  Thank you to the people who wrote a comment aswell. 

Today we read a book and had tours of all the other classes.  Today is really exciting because it is our famous party.  Everyone is wearing their normal clothes apart from the people that forgot.  If anyone comes in our classroom they have to burst in and say you are famous!

From P3

We have some really exciting news but it is top secret.  Maybe we can tell you a little bit of it.  HA HA! We are going to be in the newspaper! You can read about us if you speak German! We are not going to be in a Scottish newspaper.  We are going to be in a Swiss newspaper! Everyone is going to go COME ON P3…but in German! If you look on the comments from Wednesday 24th Feb. you can see why we will be in the newspaper.  Our friend Sarah is making it so that we can be famous.  Everyone will be very proud of us.

Hello everyone,
Sorry that we haven’t written on the blog for a little while. The past week as been a bit crazy since we are getting Miss Allen’s dream of a new whiteboard. We have been pretending that we are travelling Circus people and have worked in the Computer room, the gym hall, the Gp room, the P6 classroom, the P4 classroom and even the P7 classroom.  Sometimes we worked in the P3 classroom but not much.  They made a mess of EVERYTHING! Poor Harry the seal had a bad week but he is looking ok now. Here is what we all had to say about the week. Some people didn’t write anything because they were doing their Maths Tests.

From P3

Dear All,

Our classroom has changed a lot.  We have a new board in our classroom.  Miss Allen is very proud of it.  Harry the seal has had a hard time because of the builders.

From Nuala and Rowan

Yesterday we went to music with Mr McKinnon.  We did a warm up with him.  We did a little song and it was called Vista.  Then we all did writing tests.  Then it was play time.  It was very cold.

James and Kyle

Yesterday morning we went to muscis.  We learned singing hand actions. After that we went back up to the classroom and we did our spelling.  Then it was playtime.  After play time we had to do the writing tests.  Then we painted the windows and made clowns and then it was home time.

On Monday when we came in the van had ripped in half.  Then we had to move classroom because the builders were building our board.  Then we went to art and we had small clowns that we made in to big clowns.

This morning we went to the computer room.  We went down the stairs and went on Woodlands Maths on the time games.  Then we went to the P7 classroom and did maths.  Then we went outside for the fire alarm.  Then we did drama and then it was break. Then we did maths and then it was lunch and we had a break.  Then we did gym and then we got our interactive white board.

Dear World,

Harry the seal has had a bad time listening to the builders.  When the builders were working we had to stay downstairs.  We stayed downstairs for two whole days.  OUr seal is made out of a blowed up banana, bin bags and with a ball on his head.  The big board was up on the wall on Wednesday.  The board can go up and down.  It’s like the one in the computer room.

Lachlan, Archie and Fraser

You will be surprised if you see P3 because it looks so different. Miss Allen’s dream came true and she got the best toy ever. It is a special board like the computer room. We have one in the computer room but ours is better because it moves up and down.  Miss Allen was putting it up and down and we kept cheering. We had a count down to turn it on but nothing happened because there was no computer. We will get the computer tomorrow. I wish we had the computer today. Miss Allen wishes we had the computer today. Miss Allen was proud of the whiteboard. We called it Slidey because it slides up and down. Everyone was very happy. Miss Allen was very happy. The primary 5s even came to see it. They all cheered too and had a count down too. Miss Allen showed the P2s when they came up and they liked it too. We got to paint our windows. It was good fun but the sun was bright in my eyes. It is better than the paper one that falls down. We gave up. Well we have a new whiteboard.

Once we came back from lunch we started by clearing all the tables out the way and then Miss Carter asked us questions about what we have learned in the Circus and what had changed since she was last here.  Then she told us the jobs and she split us into five groups.  Our challenge was to make a seal in 1 and a half hours.  One group had to make fish and a ball for the seal.  One group had to cover a giant inflatable banana in plastic bags and one group had to make a tail fin and one group had to make the front fins.  The last group had to make a stand for the seal to sit on.  When it was nearly done we had an assessment and a staff meeting.  Then we got back to work and stuck the flippers on to the seal.

All the teams worked together really well that’s how we got the work done so quickly.  We are very proud of our work, thankfully.  Here are some pictures of us building the seal (Click on an image to view a larger version, sorry for the sideways pic…it wont rotate!!).

By Kyle, Jamie and James

We did other stuff today but we will only tell you about the important stuff because the other stuff is a secret. First thing we did was get into our reading groups.   We had 10 minutes to highlight the important things and read information.  One group had the trapeze, the other had lion taming, the next one had juggling and the other one tightroping.  Once we had read it we had to talk about the main points of the information to the groups.  It was a wee bit hard to remember the stuff.  I had change it because I kept forgetting.  We had to write the main points on post it notes.  They were all bright colours.  Then we had to put our post it notes together with other people’s that meant the same thing. Then we got our babies (glue for those of you not in P3) and stuck the post it notes on to a poster.  We then took the 5 most important points and wrote them on our poster.  We had little bullet points that we wrote them on and made a sentence out of them.

Then we had 30 minutes to practise how we would show the school our information. We had to make it interesting.  The red group told us about tightroping in a song.  The purple group told us about the trapeze in a play.  The orange group told us about juggling in a play and the yellow group told us about lion taming in a speech.  Miss Allen will try to let you hear what we said so you can learn about it too. 

We were wondering if any of our parents can juggle or know about the circus. Can any of you go on stilts? (my dad can Kathryn and James) My gran is great at juggling (Fraser).

Yesterday there was a famous tightroper and dancer that came into our classroom to help with our challenge.  If you didn’t know what our challenge was it was that we had to make a trapeze person and a tightrope person.  The visitors when they came in, everybody crowded them.  The tightroper had to be 30cm or less and the trapeze person had to be bigger than 1 meter. 

We had £12 but actually Miss Allen gave us more.  Before we could build anything we had to fill in a sheet and then we would get a building warrent from Miss Allen.  Then we would commence the building.  We had to buy materials to make it.  Most of them cost £1 but some of them cost £2 and £4 and some actually cost £6.  Cellotape was the most useful and newspaper, it was actually quite helpful.  The large paper was good making the person. 

Our team worked really well.  We had to make a deal with Miss Allen that we would tidy up a little bit and finish off the next day.  We had to promise that we would do our morning work (reading and maths) in the afternoon so we could finish our challenge in the morning.  We put a letter outside our door for the cleaners to not come in because of the big mess we had made and it would be a disaster if they sucked up our work with the hoover. We do not like disasters at all. 

The next day, we were going to go to the hall but then everybody came in to do the house assembly.  We had a staff meeting later. Everyone talked about their ideas at the staff meeting.

It was a really good day. In fact fantastic! Fandabbydosey!