As part of our Health Week, each class was asked to lead a short session where they demonstrated a work-out to the rest of the school. We did our session earlier today, leading the school in a work-out based on our own recording!
Many apologies that the quality of the sound is not good- we used the huge speakers in the hall, which played the song very loudly, yet clearly. For some reason, I think the camcorder couldn’t cope with the volume!
The 2012 Schoolovision contest came to its end last Friday, and it was a great day for our P5/6 pupils as they learned that we had finished 4th out of a total of 38 countries from right across Europe, with our version of The Proclaimers’ song, I’m Gonna Be (500 miles).
So, many congratulations to the pupils for their great work in preparing the song! Norway were the outstanding entry, and they won the contest, followed by Ukraine and Spain, who came 2nd and 3rd.
Our 2012 entry to Schoolovision is now on the blog, ahead of Friday’s deadline, when all 39 countries’ songs need to be there. With entries from as far north west as Iceland, right down to Azerbaijan in the south east, we have already seen that the standard for this year’s contest is probably the highest yet! By Friday, we should have entries from new members Luxembourg, Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine, as well as Azerbaijan and Bosnia & Herzegovina’s which was the very first song uploaded last month.
We all enjoyed watching our entry this morning, and we should thank Castlesound studios in Pencaitland for allowing us to use their venue, as well as Gavin Tully-Jackson from Haddington who filmed the song for us. Thanks too to Miss Traill, who worked very hard to ensure that we sang fantastically at the recording studios! How will we fare against 38 other countries? We’ll find out next Friday, 25th May!
Yester's winning cross country runners celebrate with the trophy!
This morning the Yester cross country team headed down to Hallhill in Dunbar, to take part in the annual East Lothian Cross Country Championships. After two months of training, we hoped that our very competitive youngsters would do well. Usually there are either five or six schools who enter the small schools’ races, but this year there were a total of nine schools in our races!
Despite that, we are delighted to report that we emerged victorious yet again, returning with the trophy for the 5th year running! Not only that, but our fastest runners were the fastest of any pupils at the event, from either small or big schools from throughout East Lothian! Well done team!
Where's the ball going now?
In the gym today, we were playing team benchball games, with each team trying to score by passing the ball to their respective goalkeeper. It’s a very fast moving, all-action game, so I tried to capture some shots of the players in mid-game action- with mixed results! However, hopefully these pictures give a flavour of the fun the class had!
Who has the strongest lungs?
With Stuart Hamilton, at Castlesound Recording Studios.
Here are some thoughts from the morning:
Megan -”We had great fun and it was a great experience for all of us!”
Joe – “It was really fantastic to see all the equipment there!”
Caitlin – “It was a really cool experience!”
Lauren A – “It was fun but it was quite hard work.”
Angus – “It was really fun seeing how a professional recording studio operates, but it was hard work!”
Finlay G – “We’ve all got our hopes up- we hope to do really well (possibly even win!) but this was a once in a lifetime experience that not a lot of people are able to have.”
Daisy – “It was a great day and a great song to sing!”
The class rehearse!
Filming in the studio…
Choosing where to stay…
Deciding which type of car might be best to rent…
Working out how much money will be left!
Our task in ICT this morning was to budget for a family holiday to anywhere in Europe. This gave the class lots of scope to go wherever they wanted to, using either Ryanair or Easyjet as the flight carriers. We had learned the basics about how to book flights, accommodation and car hire last week in Money Week, when the class were asked to budget for a holiday to Finland, so this represented a leap forward in terms of allowing each pair to actually explore and decide what appealed most to them.
The budget was £3000, which included flights for a family of four, accommodation in the country you cose to fly to and car hire, as well as considering how much money would be needed for the duration of the holiday as spending money. At the end, we shared our plans with each other, and heard of some tremendously diverse and creative ideas in which to spend (or not spend!) all of the available budget!
We were hopeful that we had done quite well in Thursday’s orienteering competition at John Muir Country Park in Dunbar…
If you click on this link from the Outdoor Learning team’s blog, you might enjoy reading about the result! Not only did we retain the P4/5 trophy, we also won the P6/7 trophy too! Well done to all the pupils who took part!
On Friday, some of the P5/6 class were invited by Dundee University to make a presentation about the work connected to International Education we have done here at Yester Primary, to B.ED students, who are learning to be teachers.
This was a very interesting 45 minutes, so thanks to those who participated in it! We told the student teachers about some of the projects we have undertaken, and how to create links with classes in other countries, before the meeting finished with the students from Dundee singing their own version of the Proclaimers’ song, I’m Gonna Be (500 miles), which we then repeated from our end! Let’s hope they follow us when we sing our song for Schoolovision soon!
We had a visit today from Generation Science, and the class all carried out various experiments, including testing for acids and alkalis, mixing acids and alkalis together to see what happened, and recording the results, before finally watching and recording how various reactions occur when they mixed various substances together. Click on each picture below to see a larger version!
Creating Viking Powerpoints
Yesterday, as part of our project on Sweden, we learned a bit about the Swedish vikings. Today, as a follow up in ICT, we have been researching the Swedish vikings ourselves, and creating our own viking powerpoints.
Playing the Finnish game Molkky!
In the gym over the past few weeks, we have learned a variety of scottish dances, including Strip the Willow, The Gay Gordons, The Haymaker and The Waterdown Reel. All of these could be used in the forthcoming ceilidh later in the month at Garvald hall!
Andy explains what we need to do.
We had a very enjoyable morning at Haddington’s Neilson Park, where we all completed a wide range of orienteering courses.
Many of us are now excited about the forthcoming East Lothian competition on March 1st, and we hope to have some representatives in the team.
With Martin at the check in desk!
Here is our entry for the 2012 version of The European Chain Reaction. It took us quite a bit of time to plan and put it together, and each and everyone in the class took part and collaborated to help make it happen.
We now need to wait and watch all the other entries from across Europe appear- they need to be uploaded to the blog by Friday 13th January. Then, once everyone has watched all the entries and voted for their favourites, the winning country will be announced on Friday 27th January.
A couple of weeks ago we learned that our great Chain Reaction project had won 1st prize at the recent MEDEA Awards in Belgium. Today, the co-creator of the project, Dave Schrauwen, advised me that the presentation he gave to the judges that day is now online. The video describes how the European Chain Reaction project was born – and I must admit, the first three minutes of the presentation are a great advert for us here in Yester, as Dave describes exactly what the motivation for the project was!
Having won the school around £1000 in ICT software a couple of weeks ago, our Chain Reaction for 2012 is nearly complete! Many weeks ago now, we filmed the majority of our technical chain reaction, and we will complete it next week, by using our lift and the stairs to finish it off with a flourish! I will then edit it over the Christmas holidays, as it needs to be uploaded to the project blog by Friday 13th January.
Meanwhile, all teams in the contest this year have been asked to introduce themselves to each other by creating a shorter, “Human Chain Reaction”. We filmed ours yesterday, and you can see it below, as well as the others which have already been uploaded to the European Chain Reaction 2012 blog.
The multi award-winning International Education project, Schoolovision is back!
Over the past couple of weeks, schools from right across Europe have been signing up to the 2012 version of the contest, which is now into its 4th year. And the great news is that Schoolovision 2012 is promising to be the biggest, and best yet! Already, a total of 37 European countries have confirmed they’ll take part- including, for the 1st time, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Russia and Ukraine!
The contest follows the timeline of the Eurovision Song Contest, meaning that all countries need to choose, practice, video and upload their chosen songs to the project blog by Friday 18th May – eight days before the real Eurovision. The following week we all need to watch and evaluate each song, before Yester’s P5/6 class will lead a Europe-wide webcam conference, where we will call in the votes from each country taking part, on Friday 25th May, starting at 9.00am UK time.
As soon as we have everyone’s votes, we will announce the winners, who will be sent a specially engraved trophy to keep. We anticipate this announcement will be made at around 10.00am UK time.
Have a browse of all the schools and countries taking part on the Schoolovision blog.
I can present a bit about Christmas in other European countries, showing the differences that exist in different cultures.
Back in early 2011, I created the European Chain Reaction science project with Belgian teacher, Dave Schrauwen, and it was a very popular project undertaken by P6/7 last year. We were joined by primary schools from 11 other European countries, who all undertook to create their very own chain reactions. The project was the focus of a visit by HMIe in March 2011, and after speaking to some of the children involved at the time, the inspector described it as one of the best collaborative pieces of work he had seen produced by any school in the four years he had been looking at International Education across Scotland.
Yesterday, in Brussels, the project won 1st prize in the category of best example of Cross Border European Collaboration, at the 2011 MEDEA Awards!
As a result, Yester Primary wins a software package suite valued at more than £1000! Fantastic news!
As you know, we worked on creating our 2012 Chain Reaction a few weeks back, and we hope to finish it shortly, allowing me plenty of time to edit the footage for our entry into the 2012 European Chain Reaction.
You can read a bit about the entry to the MEDEA Awards here.
I can work with a partner in the gym in a safe manner.
I can compare and order a variety of fractions.
Last Friday, P5/6 worked on a passage about the Braer oil disaster which occurred in January 1993. We were concentrating on trying to write fluently and quickly, as well as finding out a bit about what actually happened.
This led us nicely into drama, where we set out in small groups to discuss how we could recreate the disaster through mime alone, without using any words!
Finally we gave a demonstration of each group’s work to the class.
Preparations for our FlashMeeting webcam conference with our Finnish link school.
We took a photo of the whole class this morning, to email to Finland, along with lots of questions that we plan to ask during the webcam conference next week.
Although I won’t be able to post the actual link here, I will be delighted to send the url home to parents who wish to watch the recording of the event afterwards. All the FlashMeetings we have hosted over the past three years have been recorded, and they always make great viewing afterwards! Let me know if you wish to watch the event at home!
In spelling today, we worked collaboratively with a partner in our own group. Our task was to find our spelling list words in a dictionary together, then write the meaning of each word in our jotters.
I can find the meaning of my list words by using a dictionary.
Earlier today, the whole class worked collaboratively to produce a short and very scary story… Click the link to listen to it and see if you can work out which piece your child contributed to the overall story! 
On Wednesday p5/6 created a whole class spooky Halloween story. We did it in our tables making different sentences. We all had to think of one or two sentences to add in to the story. Once we had thought of our sentences Mr Purves recorded them. Once all the tables finished their part of the story we got to listen to the class story. We all thought that our class story was very good and would scare adults easily! All the class thought that this challenge was very good fun and would love to do it near Hallowe’en again!
Lauren A & Lauren T
Spooky Halloween class story
I can use an ICT program such as Excel to create a spreadsheet.
I can use MS Excel to create a spreadsheet about Europe.
We made great use of the new 2010 version of Microsoft Excel this week in ICT, when we worked collaboratively to create and save our own spreadsheets. The “European passports” that the Global Citizenship group recently obtained for all the upper classes provided the perfect stimulus for this set of lessons, as they are packed full of great information that the class could transfer to their own spreadsheets.
Earlier today, the whole class worked collaboratively to produce a short and very scary story… Click the link to listen to it and see if you can work out which piece your child contributed to the overall story!
Spooky Halloween class story
On Wednesday p5/6 created a whole class spooky Halloween story. We did it in our tables making different sentences. We all had to think of one or two sentences to add in to the story. Once we had thought of our sentences Mr Purves recorded them. Once all the tables finished their part of the story we got to listen to the class story. We all thought that our class story was very good and would scare adults easily! All the class thought that this challenge was very good fun and would love to do it near Hallowe’en again!
Lauren A & Lauren T
Spooky Halloween class story 2
We have been working with Miss Traill for the last few weeks on our African Drumming skills, and today we performed what we had learned to the other classes in the school.
Recent Comments