PLHS - Support for Learning

This week sees a very special occasion in Scottish culture - when we celebrate Burn’s Night. The pupils will be finding out a little bit about the national bard during the course of the week and looking at some of his works. We will be looking for any poems or songs that might be relevant to our On Our Doorstep project and finding out if there are any famous poets from East Lothian. Families could perhaps help on this front by looking at home for information about East Lothian poems or poets.

We will be looking, especially, at the poem Ma Toon, written by Preston Lodge S4 pupil, Andrew Davidson. A lovely portrayal of life in Prestonpans, it was published two years ago as part of the national School’s Poetry and Architecture competition. We might even ask Andrew to pop in and see us - to tell us how he got his wonderful ideas!

Elsewhere in the Enhanced Learning Programme we will be…

Science

Continuing our weather station construction work! With a rain gauge now ready for action, we need to concentrate on building our barometer, temperature gauge and wind vane. We will be very busy putting recycled materials to very good use. See ELP Science for more details.

We will also be continuing to make our weather forecasts using the weather board in Ms Cleland’s room - and using an interactive weather map to plot the weather for the coming week. It is very busy in ELP Science currently and we must make sure we do not forget to feed Fingers!

Maths

Last week we moved onto expressing dates as numbers - eg Burns Night is on 25/01/08.

This week we will be consolidating that progress and also considering how time can also be expressed as numbers too. How would 12 o’clock look like in digits on a digital clock? We need to be able to recognise times shown in various ways - how do they all connect to one another?

ICT

Having finished our letters for America, we will be printing them off so that we can send them away. We will also be using the internet to help us find out more about Robert Burns. Once we find something interesting we may include this in our files to send to Ohio. What might we discover on the web about Burns that could be of interest to our American friends? After all, they may be mistaken who we mean…

PE

We are still working on improving our gymnastics and we are having lots of fun doing it!

CDT

In CDT we are now making bird tables for our bird garden. This ties in very well with our science project on East Lothian animals from last term. We have already made bird feeders and water bottles in science and this work with Mr Cruickshank will give us somewhere to put them, other than the trees and bushes!

We will also be singing a lot of songs whilst we work away - a favourite definitely seems to be You Are My Sunshine!

Music

In music we continue to practise our keyboard skills. We especially enjoy playing Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day!