Today P6 & P7 continued their work with Andy McKechnie on leadership and dance. We finished the day by presenting a “showcase” to the rest of the school.

He explained how athletes focus on little improvements in lots of areas, “marginal gains” in order to improve. This ties in with the “can’t do it…yet” approach that growth mindset promotes.

Andy explained how visualisation and positivity can work together to encourage success. We role played the applause at the end of the showcase before we started to prepare it!

Our showcase performance used imagery from different Olympics & Paralympics over recent years. There were so many different dance genres included: Kopeira, disco, flamenco, Japanese drumming, hip hop, to name a few.

Andy got us to think about how to plan dance activities for other classes. We will have to think about safety and make sure the teams support and pay attention to each other.

He explained the “Halo effect” of using a movie or a sport to theme your dance, as this helps people to remember the moves better. He also suggested ways to include Gaelic language in the instructions too.

On Tuesday afternoon we had a fascinating afternoon with Mrs Mackay, Peripatetic Teacher of the Deaf, and her colleague Ms Bruce, Electronic Notetaker.

Mrs Mackay showed us a special music video to help us to understand what the different types of hearing loss actually mean.

We also watched a video about an award winning primary school teacher who is deaf.

We had a go at lipreading and realised how difficult it is, especially if you don’t know the context and if people aren’t using gestures to help to give the meaning.

We had a discussion about the importance of asking clarification questions if you don’t quite catch the whole instruction, or don’t understand the meaning of what has been said. Mrs Mackay is going to visit us again to do so more work on asking these types of questions, and to help us consider noise reduction in our classroom.

The whole afternoon really made us think about how we can communicate more effectively with our friends and families, especially with those who have hearing loss.

We look forward to welcoming back Mrs Mackay and Ms Bruce later this term.

Thanks to the hard work of our P7 builders, drivers and coders, P7s were recognised for their sportsmanship and perseverance at the recent Vex IQ Robotics event in Dingwall (Saturday 1st February.)

The team got a chance to share their news with the whole school at Wednesday’s assembly and then took their robot around the classes so that all the children could have a closer look.

We are all very proud of everyone in the team (including Miss MacDonald!) for all their hard work.

We have been learning how to write a balanced argument (“discursive texts.”) The P7s have chosen a question to research so that they can present arguments for and against and then explain what they think.

The questions being written about include:

Should dogs be banned from parks?
Should school uniform be compulsory?
Should all children be entitled to pocket money?
Should children be limited to one hour’s access to the internet per day?

Sometimes it is difficult to find reliable evidence for both sides of the argument!

The P6s and P7s need to remember to bring their PE kit to school tomorrow, as we will be doing our second Dance Leadership workshop with Andy McKechnie from “Jammin Fitness.”

On Friday 17th January, they had a very busy morning with Andy learning about voice projection, presentation and leadership skills as well as Olympic / sport themed dance.

The P7s are going to put their leadership skills into action next term, when they plan and lead 7 different Skills Academies for the rest of the school!

The class newsletter for this term was issued to pupils today.

P7 please bring P.E kit tomorrow (Friday 17th Jan) for your workshop with Jammin’ Fitness!

P6 please bring P.E kit tomorrow — Primary 5/6 ~ Miss MacDonald 2019/20

This morning we explored how collaborating with others can lead to increased creativity.

We played different versions of an improvisation game called “One Word Story.” We tried it as a whole class, then in groups of 10-11, then 5-6, then in 4s and then in 2s. P7 felt the most successful versions were when they worked in 4s or 2s. They thought this would make a great warm up for an imaginative writing session, so that is our next step!