Geometry P1

In primary 1 we have been learning about shapes - focusing mainly on triangles, squares, rectangle and circles.

Our maths lessons have been combined with art lessons and we are currently working on creating a Kandinsky inspired shape mobile, which we spotted on Pinterest.

As I only work with the class one day a week we will be doing one shape a week for 4 weeks and then combining the shapes into our mobiles. I think they will look fantastic in the classroom with the nice bright colours we are using.

The children have made a great start to their mobiles and tried really hard to keep their squares the right shape. We also got to use the brand new paints and brushes we received after moving into our new school!

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Nim's Island Paper Mache

Last term we completed our work on our paper mache islands.


The students had already created their topographic islands but still needed to mache and paint them.


We decided to use PVA glue mixed with water as the adhesive in the mache stage. I was initially apprehensive about how well it would work as I hadn't used this before and we had a rather watery mixture but once the glue had dried it gave a good result.


Some of the students struggled with the idea of only using small pieces of paper, and some didn't smooth their paper down quite enough so ended up with a rough texture for painting.


Then in the last week we painted our models. This was a great activity and the students were only provided with the primary colours and white. It took a bit of conversation for the students to understand why I had chosen those particular colours - not just because they would be good island colours.


The pupils really enjoyed getting to mix the colours and discover what they would make. They painted their islands and all looked fantastic once they had finished. We had a mixture of ideas in the islands but the whole point of this project was that they were to use their imagination so all ideas were accepted.


I would definitely do this activity again with another class, or with a different design.

Plant Science

Wow! Our plants have grown so much.

This week we had another look at our plants in their mazes. Most of the plants have now grown through the maze and out the top.
 
 



Hopefully this experiment will solidify the children's understanding that plants can move. I think it is important for students to have experiential activities to demonstrate concepts rather than me just telling them that plants can move and expecting them to believe it.

Unfortunately one of the plants was broken when we were looking at them. But this has given us an opportunity to see if they will continue to grow or not.

We continued our observation table and compared the lengths of when we measured last week with the lengths this week. Some groups of students were unable to measure their plants because the ruler wasn't long enough. They were able to problem solve to use two rulers to help them.

Art and Geometry

This term I have been working on creating medicine bottles for their novel study of George's Marvellous Medicine. We completed ours this week and they have been displayed in the school. I was particularly impressed with the student's creativity in this activity. They were given the brief of creating a medicine bottle
from a piece of A4 paper using pastels to colour in. They came up with the rest all by themselves.

This class has also been working with some classes on geometry and we are finishing off our unit on 3D shapes by making models out of 3D junk objects we have around our houses.

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Once the students have completed their models they will fill in a shape analysis page which I can use to assess the knowledge they have developed over the sessions of this topic.

Nim's Island

In P5 the students are doing a novel study around Nim's Island. As a result we are completing art projects with this theme too.

We started off recreating a piece of volcano art which I discovered on pinterest, but later that week I watched a TED Talk by Cindy Foley about creativity and thinking like an artist. I realised that the volcano art we were doing in class was teaching the students about artistic techniques but not encouraging or utilising the students creativity.



In light of watching this video I decided to come at the art lessons from a different approach and asked the students to think of ideas that they could do to create art around the Nim's Island theme.

The responses from the students surprised me and I enjoyed seeing the different ideas that the students had come up with.

After reading the results from the children there were a lot which talked about paper mache, making Nim's hut and creating life-size pictures of the characters.  So I decided to let the students do all of these activities.

I prepared the resources the students required and let them choose which activity they wanted to do. Now the students in my art class were coming up with the ideas for their art lesson and then choosing which activity they most prefer out of a selection. Until the school holidays we are working on our paper mache islands and our life-size Nim's. The students are being given freedom in their art to use their imagination and creativity - this is actually a requirement in their work, and are also having to problem solve how to use the materials to achieve the result they want.

Plant Science

Last week we checked in on the progress of our phototropism experiments. The students were very excited to see what had happened in their boxes during the week and were surprised by the range of results that we got.

The students used their new measuring skills to measure the growth of their bean plants which we recorded on a class table.




We closed up the boxes and will have a look again next week to see if any of the plants have made it through the maze.  We also learned that the plants that were dropped(!) before they made it into the mazes are still growing.

One group observed that the plants were quite pale looking but we're not sure why that has happened - pupils thought it could be because of the lack of sun, lack of water or due to the air. Our next experiment will hopefully help us to identify what has caused this to happen.

CPD Science

On the 14th of November I attended a science CPD session run by SSERC and attended by teachers within the Stirling and Clackmannanshire councils.

I selected the workshops titled Ice Ice Baby, which focused on the use of ice as a resource to teach science.

We participated in three difference activities in the session and started of by being given a present, which turned out to be an ice-block with a frozen lego figure inside. We were challenged to get the figure out as quickly as we could. This could be part of a lesson on states, thermodynamics or insulating materials.

Then we looked at ice gardens and how they could be used in class to introduce a range of topics such as density, seasons, etc.

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Our final activity was to make ice-cream using ice, salt and milkshake. This activity seemed to me to be the most engaging one for students, as they get to eat something at the end, but I wondered who would take on the responsibility of paying for the resources. Therefore it seemed like an experiment I would be unlikely to use in my classes.

I had a great afternoon at the session and found learning about SSERC and it's activities around the council and country to be very interesting. I would love to attend further workshops they run.

The CPD will impact my teaching practice by increasing the variety of scientific topics I look at with the classes I teach. My ability to implement science into my programme is dependent on the requirements of the school and each class so hopefully I will be given an opportunity to use my new learning in my teaching.