Burns Celebrations

Well done to all Primary 7s who took place in our Scottish Celebration at the end of January.  Everyone tried really hard to learn a piece of poetry by Robert Burns, and our finalists on the afternoon performed really well.  Congrats to Paul, Usaama, Tom, Martin, Joanna and Nicky for getting to the final and to Paul and Martin for winning!

We also had  a Burns art competition - well done to Jay, Caitlin, Laura, Hamish, Taylor and Tom for being selected as our finalists, and to Jay and Hamish for their winning contributions!

To add to our exciting celebration of the life of Robert Burns, we were lucky enough to take part in a Glow Meet where the people who discovered a very important letter which documented the last few days of Robert Burns' life, were able to talk to us and lots of other children all across Scotland about how they made their exciting discovery.  It was very interesting and we are lucky to have heard first hand about such a great piece of our Scottish history!

Primary 7.

ZooLab Visit!

On the 25th of January, Primary 7s were visited by a whole host of creatures from the rainforest!
Zoolab is a company who look after animals from different places like the rainforest.  The man that came to talk about the animals was Lee.  He brought some animals with him to show us; a milipede, a giant African land snail, a Madagascan hissing cockroach, a scorpion, a rat snake and a rat.  We got to hold the different creatures and we enjoyed learning about them a lot!

Mrs Russell has uploaded our photos to Glow of the day - check out the Primary 7 documents folder!

By Inayah, Primary 7.

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!

Bearsden Bandits!

After 6 weeks of Geocache adventuring in the great outdoors, P7 Room19's Bearsden Bandits club has sadly come to an end.  Our Geocaching club has been a great success with us exploring Mugdock Country Park in all weather conditions; our wellies definitely came in handy on more than one occasion that's for sure! We end our club for the season with a total of 7 finds and zero DNFs!! (We rock!!)

We are looking forward to the club starting back up in the spring so that we can go on some more adventures with WeeLezalee and Lowriepops!

Mugdock Gunrange!

Mrs R has posted the photo PDFs of our adventures in the Primary 7 Documents folder on Glow, so log on and check them out!

Until next time..... BEWARE OF THE MUGGLES!!!!

Termly Update - Term 2

Primary 7 have had a very successful first term.  They have been enjoying the World War II topic and lots have taken part in events within and outwith school. 

This next term Primary 7 will be continuing work on World War II, focusing more on the Holocaust as well as the events which led to the end of the war.  Both classes will be going to the Theatre Royal in November to see a production of the novel Carrie's War which they have enjoyed reading in class.  Everyone is looking forward to the trip to Scotland Street School and the People's Palace as well.

In other news, lots of work will be going into our Christmas Concert this term, with Primary 7 focusing on songs from the Naughties!  The classes have rewritten some popular songs from The Charts and given them a Christmassy feel!

A super term lies a head for Primary 7 so be sure to check back on our blog for updates on our adventures!

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!

SLF Lego Rocked!!

We had the best time at the Scottish Learning Festival on Wednesday!  SLF Lego in the morning was brilliant and then we had a great time exploring all of the other stalls in the afternoon with Mrs Russell and Mrs Park.

BPS SLF Lego Team with a very cool robot!

Our morning was split into two sessions; Lego Challenge and either Stop Frame Animation or Green Screen Filming. 

The Lego Challenge was excellent - we got to make ducks, a giant, a spinning top and football goals and fans.  We used the WeDo Lego software to programme our models so that they reacted in a way that was specific to our design criteria.  It was so much fun!!


The Stop Frame Animation challenge let us create a model based on a giant creepy spider and then we continued to reposition and photograph it until our short film sequences were complete - our creepy spidery models liked to eat EVERYTHING!!

The Green Screen filming using iMovie was a favourite with everyone who tried it out.  We got to film ourselves as robots and then make us appear in different images on screen.  We then altered our voices to make ourselves sound even more roboty and we added musical effects.  The finished films are hilarious!!

Overall it was such an amazing day and we are now all very excited about sharing our knowledge of how the WeDo Lego software works with our friends in school.

Mrs Russell has made a little film of our day which we showed to our friends back in class on Thursday.   They were all really impressed!
To watch our film, click play...

We are really proud of our achievements and Mrs Russell said we were a credit to our school.

BPS SLF Lego Team!

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!

The war is over!

After 4 months, we have finally finished our World War II and Judaism topic!  It has been brilliant and we have all worked really hard.  We have now all handed in our personal projects and Mrs Russell is really looking forward to reading them all as they all look fantastic.  We'll all get our feedback back from her in the New Year.

Our Privy Room filming is now all finished and Mrs Russell has helped to edit our shots.  She has put it all together on DVD for us to watch.... we can't wait to see it!! 

(Written by Primary 7 Room 19, via email)

Christmas Art and Poetry

We have been busy creating Winter WonderLand-Scapes during art recently... all this snow has given us lots of inspiration!  We used blue sugar paper as the base and then blended different coloured chalks and pastels to create a very realistic vision of what we would see if we looked out a window into a snowy countryside.  We finished them off by adding a touch of white glitter to the hills and then attached them to our window frames.  They look amazing up on the wall outside our class! 

Mrs Russell read us lots of different styles of winter poems from her little book of poetry and then, using our art as our inspiration, we got to choose any type of poem to write.  We could write about anything at all and in any style as long as it was to do with winter.  Our ideas were great and the poems are amaaaazing.  You can read them all in between our landscapes!

Photos to come soon!!

(Written by P7 Room 19, via email.)

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.)

Privy Room Uncut?

Another busy couple of weeks for Primary 7... have a read at our thoughts!

On FRIDAY THE 13th, we started practicing social dancing for our Christmas Dance.  The jury's still out on whether we LOVE the dancing with a partner bit, however we are really looking forward to getting all dressed up... it is only a few weeks away now!


On Saturday the 14th of November, 20 runners from P5-7 took part in the first cross country race of the season.  Brendan and Euan commented on their performance in the boys' race:  

"It was really really really muddy and we were really slow!"   

Even though it was a very muddy Saturday morning, we still managed to achieve fantastic results;  In the P7 girls' race Catriona Booth finished 3rd, Caitlin Trotter 7th and Lauren Lyon 14th. This means the girls won the 1st team place - 11 points ahead of the team in 2nd place!! Well done to everyone who took part!

Our Privy Room from the book Carries War which we are reading as part of our reciprocal teaching, is totally finished!!! It has now got a little garden with a wall behind and we made a shovel for its compost heap which would no doubt start to mount up very quickly!! (Yeugh!) 

We are now going to use it like the Diary Room in Big Brother and make a movie, its sooo exciting!! We are going to dress up as different characters from World War II and make Privy Room entries on camera.  We have all been busy planning out exactly what we want our characters to be like; we know everything about their backgrounds and we even know what they are going to be talking about once they get in there.  We will all get a chance to make a short clip and we are starting our filming next week!! It's going to be GREAT!! Definitely STAY TUNED as there will be some very memorable characters making an appearance that's for sure!! We can't wait!!


We tea stained our Evacuation Letters this week to make them look old and slightly crispy - they now look FANTASTIC! Check out our photos of them down the side of our blog!


In class we also wrote a story called "THE BELLIGERENT BLITZ!" which was about the emotions and panic which people faced when an air raid siren went off during The Blitz of WW2.  We are going to upload our pieces of writing to our WW2 group on Glow so that we can read and peer assess them.

Miss Gallacher has been teaching us about The Holocaust.  The best part was learning about a Jewish man called Ernest Levi.  He was an amazing man because unlike so many people, he managed to survive! We watched a video about him when he was in school and he was talking about his distraught life during WW2.  It was very sad learning about the concentration camps!

In other non WW2 related news...  **CONGRATULATIONS**  to the seven primary 7s who attained their Level D maths this week, they should all be really proud of themselves!

Our resident origami expert Raymond was invited along to primary 6 room 17 to show Mr M's class some of his fantastic paper creations on Friday.  GO RAYMOND!  



Finally... On Friday the 20th of November, as a school we decided to "Do Something Different" for Children in Need.  Everyone (even the teachers!) took part in a Pyjama Day... it was so much fun! The Pupil Council, along with some primary 7 helpers, ran a Swap Shop and we had a raffle and lots more!  Everyone had to pay a fine for not wearing our uniforms - it was worth it to be so comfy though! 

DRUM ROLL.... Bearsden Primary managed to raise £435 for Children in Need!!  Well done everyone!!

PHEW!! Another week over... Have a great weekend everyone!!


Written by Primary 7, Room 19 - via email.

The Privy Room is complete!!!.... and a lot lot more!!

Another great week in the life of P7 Room 19...

Wahoo! We finally finished our WW2 garden privy!

It looks good enough to use and it even has it's own

toilet paper...awesome!! (If you like the feel of

newsprint that is!!) Updates to follow on our

“Privy Room” adventures!

This week we painted our German U-boats which

look amazing! It was lots of fun but very messy :)

U-boats were German war submarines which went

under the surface of the water.

We have also been making paper Japanese aircraft

to represent the attack on Pearl Harbor; the

significant point during WW2 which caused the

US to enter the war. We have started to hang them

up around the classroom.

Work on our WW2 personal project began this

week too. We had to email Mrs Russell our

introductions so she could give us feedback. In

language we learned how to skim text in books

and online to help us understand the meaning

of a source quickly and allow us to decide

whether it would be useful to us in our research.

We started learning a bit about the Holocaust

and how Anne Frank was involved. We began

making Holocaust Journals... a bit like Anne

Frank's diary!

Our evacuation letters are almost finished now.

We had to write them in the old style handwriting

which was difficult but looks great! We can't believe

that's how people used to be taught how to write!!

The letters 'f, s, r, h and k' were favourites!

Some of the girls in primary 7 have been getting

together at lunchtimes to start planning a dance

for the Bearsden and Milngavie dance festival.

It's for primary seven girls, and they have to
make up a dance and choose some music and then

perform it at Milngavie Town Hall on Monday

the 30th of November. There are ten girls in the
dance group and they are working with Catriona

Sheilds who is helping a bit with the dancing and

supervising. It's really fun and it's a nice way to

spend a cold lunch time!

In other news, we finished watching a dvd about

racism on Monday with Mrs Monkman, and on

Wednesday we played a great game in the gym called

“Cat and Mouse” with Mrs Russell... it was hilarious!

And finally... a huge well done to the Indian Dance girls

who performed at George Square last weekend. It

was a cold and wet day, but they carried on regardless

and brought home trophies for all their hard work!

Photos to follow we hope...!

Sayonara ;) !

Written by P7 Room 19... via email!

Anderson Shelters, U-boats and Japanese Aircraft over Pearl Harbor...

Anderson Shelters...

German U-Boats...

Japanese Aircraft over Pearl Harbor...

Toilets... U-boats... Fireworks... Football... and Halloween!

This week primary 7 room 19 have taken
part in so many exciting activities, here are
our thoughts on just a few of them...

On Monday, we started to make our classroom
privy. A privy is an outdoor toilet which was
used during WW2. The outer shed was normally
made of wood, and inside the toilet was very
basic and also made of wood. They used newspaper
as toilet paper and had to clean it out regularly,
making a compost heap behind!  We have not yet
made the shed, but we have made the toiliet
which we created out of cardboard and a class chair.

This week some of the p7 girls have been doing
Indian dancing. We are practising for a dance festival
at George Square which is on Sunday the 1st of
November and it'll be exciting!

On Tuesday, we watched a history DVD about Pearl
Harbor for our WW2 topic and then later in the week
we went on to first sketch and then make German
U-boats using clay.

We also had a fire safety talk on Tuesday to make sure
that we will all be very responsible with fireworks
because Guy Fawkes night is coming up.

On Wednesday, the primary 7 football team won the 
Bearsden and Milngavie football cup! It was held at
Garscube and our main rivals were Baljaffray as their side
were strong attackers. We got to the final and it was
against Baljaffray so we knew it would be tough. It was
0-0 at full time so it went to penalties. Harry made a great
save and so the game ended 3-1! We won!!

On Thursday night we had our Halloween disco. We
really enjoyed dancing with our friends under the colourful
spray from the bubble machine and dooking for apples.
We had a new healthier tuck shop this year with no sweets
and chocolate – our house captains and vice captains
worked really hard to make it a success. We had snacks
such as raisins and popcorn instead and everyone's
costumes were great! We will upload our photographs
very soon...!

On Friday we had a fire drill at lunchtime. Everyone
did really well getting to their class assembly point as
quickly as they possibly could.

What a great week we have had!!

Written by P7, room 19... via email!!