WWII at Scotland Street School and The People's Palace!

Primary 7 had an excellent time last week exploring what life was like during The Second World War.  

We visited Scotland Street School in Glasgow where we got to dress up as kids from 1939 and take part in a morning's lesson at school with our very own strict school master Mr Valentine!  He was so different to the teachers we have in school today, he even brought out the dunce hat and the belt at one point! (Ahhh!)  

Model students?... pah!

At The People's Palace we got to take part in a rationing workshop where we found out what it was like for people trying to buy food fairly during the war.   

A week's ration

We also got to try out some of the war time artifacts; a baby's gas mask chamber, an ARP hat and some mend and make do clothing!  It was lots of fun! 

Baby's gas mask chamber

Lastly, we had a task to find out how many people could sleep comfortably in an Anderson Shelter over night.  Although we weren't in there long enough to actually sleep over night in it, we had great fun experimenting with how many of us could fit in! 

Our two groups came up with different suggestions:

1) 2 adults and 4 children

or...

2) 13 children!! (4 on each bench and 5 lying like squished sausages on the floor!)

Which would you think is the most comfortable now? ...hmmm!!

Clydebank Blitz

Overall it was an excellent day out and we learned a lot about what life would have been like for us if we had been around during those difficult war years.

Mrs R has posted the photo PDFs on Glow in the Primary 7 documents folder so log on and check them out!

Christmas Invasion!

Happy 1st of December everyone!

Our Christmas concert rehearsals are now well under way for our amazing show entitled Christmas Invasion... we won't tell you any more so as not to spoil the plot surprise, but it's not just an invasion of SNOW that has appeared in Bearsden this winter!!

Our dress rehearsal is this Friday and then our big performances are next week on Tuesday the 7th and Wednesday the 8th of December.  Contact the school office for tickets!

A Christmas Invasion over Bearsden...?!

The backdrop is now up and the classes are sounding fantastic on stage, well done to Mrs Park and all of the teachers and support staff for helping us out!!

Good luck to everyone taking part!

What A Great Week!

UPDATE!! This week in Primary 7 we have had a great time! We did lots of exciting work as part of our World War II topic and on Friday we had an active day to help raise money for our school playground. Have a read at our thoughts…

“This week in P7 Room 19 we did great things - especially on Friday! In the morning we all got to come to school dressed down, everyone had been asked to bring in their Wii games and first of all we played Super Mario Bros Wii and then after that we played Guitar hero until lunch. After lunch we went to gym and did a special obstacle course where there were two teams, the white team won.”

By Kera and Dharia

“It's been a great Friday this week. I loved playing on the Nintendo Wii and the Nintendo DS we should do it every week! (I still like doing our topic on World War 2 though.)”

By Euan

Guitar Hero CHAMPIONS!

“This (Friday) is the best day we have had at school.”

By Sarah and Katie

“I also really liked doing the Black Out freeze frames this week. I have had a good week!”

By Usaama

“At gym on Wednesday we had great fun playing bench ball.”

By Jamie

“Friday was a good day - we had a fun active day to raise money for the school playground. In class we were allowed on the Wii and to play on our DS then we had a fun batch of activities in the gym.”

By Paul and Tom

“This week we wrote a poem about Blitz Blasters which had to have onomatopoeias in them. We found out that to spell onomatopoeia easily it goes to the tune of Old Mcdonald Had A Farm! Friday was our active day and we had the BEST DAY EVER!!”

By Harleen and Olivia

“We made great Blitz artwork and wore fabulous outfits on Friday as part of our active day to raise money for the playground!”

By Cara and Heather

Our London Blitz artwork on our classroom window!

How To Survive The Blackout!

We can survive The Blackout!

Primary 7 Room 19 are now experts at surviving a World War II style blackout... from hanging curtains, avoiding 10 shilling fines and counting to 15, to painting white lines on lamp posts, clothing and even cows, their freeze frames tell it all!!

How to put up blackout curtains without getting arrested!

How to avoid attack from those pesky German bombers!

How to avoid walking into lamp posts and injuring pedestrians! 

How to count to 15, avoid the cows and use those headlamp covers!

Girls' Netball Festival

Well done to all of the Primary 7 girls who took part in the Active Schools Netball Festival at The Allander Leisure Centre on Wednesday after school.  We had enough girls for almost 3 teams and everyone had a great time... even Mrs Templeton and Mrs Russell were desperate to get involved to brush up on their skills for the pupil vs staff netball game in June!! We are looking forward to more netball tournaments being hosted by the local schools in the near future... stay tuned!

SLF Lego!

The BPS SLF Lego team have been getting very creative with our WeDo Lego kit over the last two weeks in school to prepare for the Scottish Learning Festival at the SECC on Wednesday 22nd September.

Advertising!
We will be appearing on the RM stand between 10am and 12.15pm at The Scottish Learning Festival and in order to advertise ourselves we had a little competition to design a flier which RM would have printed for us to hand out to passers by on Wednesday! We each created our own flier with a Lego theme and then we got together and discussed which one we thought would represent BPS the best. After much discussion we decided that Lewis' flier would be the winning entry and we have uploaded them all onto the SLF Lego Glow group with Lewis' flier being the one to be printed!

  

Construction!

We decided to create Lego models based around the theme of our World War II topic and last Thursday we completed our model Spitfire plane which connects via USB to the computer to both power the motorised propellor and enabled us to create sound bites which, after much discussion about timings, meant that our Spitfire sounds like it can drop bombs and fire guns!

After this we split our group into two; one group focused on creating extras using other Lego pieces to make a scene from the Clydebank Blitz, whilst the other group got busy on creating an instruction manual on how to build our Spitfire.

Our Clydebank Blitz scene is now complete - it has a large crane like the Titan Crane at Clydebank and it has a ship which we have tried to make look like an old replica sitting in the River Clyde.  We researched old ships and cranes online and that gave us some ideas for our construction.  We think that with the help of some green screen technology (as well as a green jumper sleeve and a green rubber glove!), our Spitfire should be able to fly over our river scene to Clydebank with its propellor spinning, firing guns and this time STOP the Luftwaffe from creating a path of destruction similar to that of 70 years ago!

Instruction Manual!
We completed our instruction manual on Friday there and it is fantastic! We deconstructed our Spitfire and using the same style as a real Lego instruction booklet, we drew each section of the plane, took photos of them and illustrated how it all fits together.  We then used Comic Life to create our own Lego instruction booklet using all of our drawings and photographs.  We have inserted captions as a guide and we are looking forward to seeing if our class mates can build our Spitfire from it too!!

If you would like to see our instruction booklet or try to make the Spitfire for yourself, click on the link below. (It is a large file so please be patient!)

Bearsden Lego Spitfire 

We can't wait for SLF Lego on Wednesday and we are really excited to find out what sorts of animation and green screen technology films we  will be creating too!


Inayah, Jamie, Paul, Lewis, Victoria, Abigail, Tom, Rennie and Mrs Russell!

Valentine's Disco

Primary 6s and 7s enjoyed a fantastic night at the Valentine's Disco last Thursday!  We had so much fun dancing together and we enjoyed the healthier tuck shop too.  The house captains did a tremendous job organising such a great night!!

Mrs Russell has now posted the photos from the night on Glow.  They are in the documents tab on the Primary 7 group page.... have a look, they're brilliant!

EDC Christmas Concert

On Monday the 7th of December, 7 of us from Primary 7 were chosen to represent the school at the East Dunbartonshire Christmas Concert held in the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow.

We went on the bus with Mrs Russell at around lunchtime and spent all afternoon rehearsing with all of the other children who were there representing all of the schools in East Dunbartonshire.  Even the East Dunbartonshire secondary school orchestra were there!! Our singing and stamina were really put to the test during the rehearsals but it was so worth it as by the end of the afternoon, the concert was sounding fabulous!

Once the rehearsing was over, we went to Pizza Hut with Mrs Russell and had a bit of a feast! It was really nice to be out having our dinner together!

After we had eaten, we went back to the Royal Concert Hall and got ready for the proper evening performance to begin.  Lots of our friends and family were there to watch us and Mrs Young came along to show her support too.

The evening was a real success and we are so proud that we got the opportunity to take part in such an amazing night!

(The photographs from the evening have been uploaded on a .pdf file to the P7 documents tab in the P7 Glow group.  Click on the link to download.)

Scotland Street School and The People's Palace

On the 2nd of December we went a class trip to Scotland Street School and The People's Palace.  We went to the World War 2 classroom in Scotland Street School first.  It was amaaaazing!!  We had to dress up like children during the war and line up in silence an arms length apart.  We had a really really strict teacher named Miss James - she had an old belt and she kept whacking it off the old desks right beside us!  We had to stand up when spoken to and reply with her name after everything we said.  We used a clock face to recite our tables and we had to use slate as well as pen and ink for our handwriting.  It was really difficult and the blotting paper didn't really help us.  Everyone who ended up with botches on their paper or ink on their hands would have gotten the belt during war times! The classroom had a funny smell - really musty.  After we finished our work, Miss James transformed into the school janitor and we had to do drill.  Life at school for a child during the second world war was sooooo different to what we are used to!!

Check out the rest of our photos of our day out - They are in the documents tab of the P7 group on Glow - it is a .pdf file, so just click it to download!

At the People's Palace, we got a tour of the museum and then took part in a workshop.  We really enjoyed seeing how many of us we could fit into the Anderson Shelter!! We got to learn about rationing too as they had a little World War 2 shop set up.  During our workshop we had to pick items out of boxes and use them in different ways.  Some of us got to dress up as land girls and to demonstrate 'make do and mend'.  Our photos of The People's Palace are also on Glow in the P7 documents tab.

What a great day out!

(Written by P7 Room 19 via email.)

Celebrity Skydivers!

Bearsden P7 teacher L. Russell and last year's P2 teacher C. Sheldon will be making a celebrity appearance in the Bearsden and Milngavie Herald's next issue, celebrating their fantastic skydives which they did in October to help raise a huge amount of money for Mphunzi School in Malawi.

Make sure you get yourselves a copy of the newspaper and show all your friends and family!!

Here are another couple of photos as a sneak preview...

READY...SET...JUMP...!!!

 

(We think this flying chipmunk impression is ace! hehe!!)

Mrs Russell's Skydive for Malawi!

On Saturday the 17th of October, at the end of 

our October holiday just there, our teacher 

Mrs Russell did a tandem free fall skydive 

to support our fund raising efforts for 

Mphunzi School in Malawi.
 
Through the events which we all took part in 

back in June this year, it was hoped that we 

could raise enough money to allow Mphunzi School 

to finish building their new classroom.

These events included our bad hair day, back to 

front day, soak the teacher and beat the goalie. 

Mrs Russell's P7 class last year also made DVDs 

of their Hollywood movies and sold them to 

parents.
 
As well as all of us taking part in these 

activities in school, Mrs Russell tried very 

hard to get as many people to sponsor her jump 

as possible, with people living as far away as 

Dubai being so kind as to donate money to this 

worthy cause.

Initially the skydive was to be held at the end 

of June and then it was postponed until August, 

however due to cloudy and windy weather it 

wasn't safe to jump and it was postponed again 

to October. 

On Saturday Mrs Russell woke up and saw that 

the sky was a beautiful shade of blue and there 

wasn't a cloud in sight.... It would finally go 

ahead!!

Mrs Russell went to Glenrothes to the airfield 

and her and Miss Sheldon, who taught in P2 last 

year, carried out their jumps. 
 
Afterwards, Mrs Russell said that it was an 

amazing experience and she loved every minute of 

it!! She was even happier when she got home and 

counted up all the money that had been raised from

both our school events and her own sponsors and 

found out that £2496.31 had been raised!!!! 

This is even more than she had ever expected and 

will definitely be enough to help finish building 

Mphunzi School's classroom - and a lot more!!

Mrs Russell showed us all the DVD of her jump. Her 

plane went up to 10,000 feet before she jumped out 

with an instructor and free fell until she reached 

5000 feet high. The parachute was then pulled and 

she was able to control it until she landed in a 

heap on the grass!!!

Everyone deserves a huge round of applause for 

raising so much money for Mphunzi School, and 

we are glad Mrs Russell and Miss Sheldon made it

back safely to the ground!!! :)

Have a look at Mrs Russell's photographs of her 

experience...

 Primary 7, Room 19.