09/05/22 - We really enjoyed going to visit nursery today. We got to meet the P6's buddies and the P5s really enjoyed playing with and supporting the younger children, "it felt like we were mini teachers" . It is great to be able to explore all areas of our school and build lots of new relationships again.

During term 3 we took part in the Heartstone Story Circle project. The project uses Heartstone Odyssey Stories, literature, photo documentary, and history as a vehicle through which to generate discussion and debate, helping to develop literacy, confidence and self esteem as well as critical thinking. The strength of the project lies in its creative approach using an engaging story together with linked images from the present and past to explore the many facets of prejudice and intolerance- not just how these issues manifest themselves in everyday life but where the ideas behind the prejudiced behaviour may have come from. The project provides an innovative route for children to understand intolerance due to background, race/culture, faith, disability and gender; learn to recognise it and have practical interventions in place should they see an incident happening. It also provides a route to build contact with other communities and backgrounds, reduce isolation, build empathy and understanding, to see the common human story. The project explores identity, being proud of yourself and raises aspirations.

Mrs V from after school club also worked with a small group of children from across the school. Together, with Mrs V's group we created an exhibition that showed our learning and our work from the project. Everyone in school was invited to attend. You can see our exhibition here.

Our parts of the exhibition included:

• Refugee Poems/ art work - encouraging people to look at life from a different point of view

• Pyramid of Hate - showing how prejudices can escalate

• Mice at the observatory - Diversity and Equality protest

• Star Constellations Artwork

• Kind Mind - the power of emotions

Term 4 Overview

An intergalactic adventure to save Planet Earth!

We are delighted to finally be able to share with you our performance of : The Last Aliens.

This term we have had a fantastic opportunity to work with the professionals at Scottish Opera to put together this performance that links to our previous learning on climate change and the 26th UN Climate Change Conference that was held in Glasgow, in November. The performance also includes themes of diversity, equality and kindness that have linked to our learning around our Hearthstone Novel from this term. The pupils put their all into learning the song and the actions as well as stage directions and performance skills. We really hope you love it as much as we do and would greatly appreciate your feedback via the following links :

1. https://www.menti.com/ofcs9sm342

2. https://www.menti.com/nqzq2m447u

3. https://www.menti.com/iitdkynmxv

I am delight to present to you P5, P5/6 and P6 in our performance of The Last Aliens:

Check out the video below to see all the P6/5 Scottish Opera Fun

Congratulations to Josh, our pupil Of the month for his fabulous efforts and progress in maths.

When you don't confine a child's thoughts, ideas and notes to margins, lines and page borders they instantly become more engaged.

Of course children need to be able to write on the line, in clear structures and neat handwriting but sometimes these pressures of presentation take away from the quality of learning for some children. Take the normal contraints and pressures away and learning instantly becomes more fun.

The children really enjoy this simple activity of writing on our table tops instead of our whiteboards or jotters. Today, it was spelling. We identified lots of different ways of making the "I" sound then did some dictionary work to fill our table sections.

Some people noticed that the letter y can say i and e.

21/01/22

This term our IDL is “Ancient Classic Civilisations” (Greece and Rome) Today we learned the story of the Trojan Horse and we set to work building our own.

The children were in groups of 4 and everyone had a job

Resources Manager - in charge of all stock and resources

Joiner - in charge of sawing and sanding the wood

Engineer - leading on building and construction

General Manager - responsible for team safety, production and teamwork

We swapped the roles every 15 mins to enable every to experience the different jobs. The children worked so well together.

It was great to hear discussion among the groups As they encountered design challenges. They were able to identify those in their team who had appropriate skills and nobody was left out. The children loved using the real saws, sandpaper and wood glue and came up with some fantastic design plans and ideas.

A truly enriched learning opportunity including skills such as :

#design

#problemsolving

#physics

#lifeskills

#measurement

#craft

#safety

#logic

#teamwork

Keep your eyes peels for our final creations. I will share when we are done .

We worked together as a class to create our own meme captions for the pictures below. Can you think of any captions of your own?

Hello and welcome to our virtual open day. Unfortunatly we still can not invite you into our class in person but we hope that you enjoy the pictures and videos we have to share with you today. This term we have been doing some very special BSL lessons. We hope you enjoy our BSL rendition of "Last Christmas". We had lots of fun practising and performing. We worked as a team to practise the chorus and then split into smaller groups to do each verse. We hope you enjoy.

We also brought some festive cheer to our corridor and our community by creating some sensational, seasonal snowflakes. and Christmas cards. We had to use lots of concentration and problem solving skills in creating the snowflakes. We also needed our fine motor skills and had to think about symmetry. Some of us chose to work with a partner . They are super effective and intricate.

Morrisons donated some Christmas card templates which we coloured and wrote a special message inside. These were delivered to some of the elderly people around Inverness. We got a phonecall from a lady who recieved one of the cards who was 90 years old and used to be a teacher at Lochardil. She was delighted.

As well as developing our BSL skills we have been learning about the members of our family, in French. Miss MacDonald brought in her family tree to show us, that her Granny researched. We learned all about Miss MacDonald's family as far back as 1750. Some of us were inspired to find out more about our own family histories and spoke to our parents and grandparents to find out more. We decided to create our very own French family trees to help us practise the French vocabulary . We turned these into some fantastic calendars for 2022. We will bring them home and update the pictures as they are finished.

Wednesday 15th December - Our Literacy Key Assessment Tasks have been sent home in schoolbag mail today. We have worked hard on create an imaginative piece of writing "Stuck in a Snowglobe". We hope you enjoy it. Please complete the home cog and return to Miss MacDonald before Wedneday 22nd December.

3/11/21 We had a very interesting lesson today about stereotypes,prejudice and discrimination linking to ourHeartstone projectbook.

Each child was the CEO of their own business. There were 7applicants for an engineering post . Each roundwe found out onemore thing about the applicants and had to choose 1 person to"fire" based on what weknew

Round 1: first name

Round 2: Surname

Round 3: Picture

Round 4: Sexuality

Round 5: Physical and Mental Wellbeing

Round 6: Skills and Qualification

There was lots of interesting discussion around why we fired whowe did, common prejudices andunconscious bias. We also spokeabout equality and gender stereotyping .

Oct 7th 2021: Hi everyone and welcome to our Virtual Open Classroom Day.

We would love nothing more than to be able to invite you all in tovisit our classroom in real life, to see whatwe have been up to thisterm. but whilst there are still restrictions in place, we have createda virtual version ofour classroom for you to visit.

Please click on the link below and then click Present to see someof our displays and items in our virtualclassroom. Everything inthis virtual classroom has a link that will take you to albums ofphotos, videos andexamples of our work. If you click on the veryflattering character of Miss MacDonald you will find a further setofinstructions and guidance on how to navigate our virtualclassroom.

Once you have had a chance to have a look around please clickon the feedback post it or the links below tocomplete our schoolexit poll.. If you click on the family sign or the padlet link you canleave feedback for thechildren in our class - they will be able tosee this updating throughout the day.

Thank you for taking the time to visit our virtual classroom.

Miss MacDonald and P6/5

Virtual Classroom: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1G6pvlzY98O4VxeCO48laoHNdlOp3b4dcK9A4TehJSZ8/preview

School exit poll: https://forms.gle/B9Yw8npxWxmb4GP68

Pupil Padlet:https://padlet.com/chloemacdonald1/dcpch096nf78j0u3