This month, P7 have been exploring and discussing the changes that happens to the human body during puberty. We have discussed body parts, changes unique to males and females as well as educating ourselves on menstruation and period poverty. We discussed personal hygiene as well as consent and individual rights of people, particularly online. 

We have been busy creating our own business plans outlining our unique ideas for the Summer Fayre. P7 explored subject-specific vocabulary including 'investment', 'returns', 'profit', 'loss', 'breakeven' and 'consumers'. We discussed the difference between products (goods) and services before deciding what business we would like to offer. We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday 3rd June to see what we have been working on!

P7 have been using KNex to explore area and perimeter of irregular and regular 2D shapes. They have had to call upon prior knowledge of using the grid method of multiplication and the bar method of division to support them when calculating larger totals. Some of us have experienced calculating the area and perimeter of circles and semi-circles rounding pi to 3. 

P7 have been exploring money through their IDL in Enterprise where they have been adding final totals, subtracting investments and costs before finding the difference to calculate profit. 

We have started reading our next BugClub text to continue to improve and practise our reading comprehension knowledge, understanding and strategies. 

More P7 pupils are volunteering to read aloud during Literacy lessons and they are really pushing themselves out of their comfort zone ahead of their transition to high school. 

In Numeracy we have been focusing on area and perimeter as part of our focus on measure. 

We have been looking at some units of measure (mm, cm, m, km) and we are beginning to confidently convert between units when calculating the area. 

When working out the area of a square, rectangle or parallelogram P7 know to use the formula A = L x B. Some of us then have used this formular and halved it to calculate the area of a right angled triangle. 

This month we have continued with Decider Skills. We look forward to our weekly input from Ms Nicholson and Mrs Fowler. 

We are beginning to relate the situations and scenarios to real-life situations that we may face in our daily lives with a particular focus on high school transition and residential opportunities. 

This month we have started working on our informal letter writing. 

We are pretending it is 1939 and that we have been evacuated to the country. Using parenthesis, punctuation and subject-specific vocabulary, we are writing a letter in first person narrative including some emotive language too. We are almost at the editing stage and we can't wait to share them with you. 

In Numeracy we are using our knowledge of fractions and fractions of an amount to convert percentages into decimals and fractions. 

We discussed where we might see percentages in a real life context and created a huge list for the wall. It got very competitive! 

For the remainder of this term we will look at percentages of an amount and applying this knowledge to solve realistic challenges. 

This month we have started progressing through 12 of the skills attached to promoting positive mental health and making positive choices. 

Mrs Fowler and Ms Nicholson are supporting us with this once a week to help us be the very best version of ourselves in an ever evolving society. This is important in preparing us for the transition to high school next term!

We continue to enjoy our weekly Mandarin inputs. We have been exploring colours and countries this month. 

Everyone gets engaged throughout these lessons and there is a huge buzz in the room when the lessons are going on. Kahoots have shown to be an extremely popular way to demonstrate our learning.

We are currently learning about World War 2. We discussed the potential causes of the war and the Treaty of Versaille. 

We listened to the radio recording of Britain declaring war on Germany before looking at how life changed in 1939 for the people of Britain. So far we have looked at evacuation and identity cards. We will now look at Anderson shelters, rationing, the blackout and the Blitz. 

As part of our World War 2 topic, we are reading Goodnight Mister Tom. We are thoroughly enjoying the experience of Willie Beech as he is evacuated from the city to live in the country with Mister Tom and his dog Sam. We are comparing the experiences of evacuees. Some of us have really connected with Willie and can discuss his thoughts and feelings as the novel progresses.

In Literacy we have been reading The Eejits which is a Scots adaptation of Roald Dahl's 'The Twits'. We have been working on a number of reading comprehension strategies with a particular focus on clarifying and visualising. We read the description of Mr Eejit and Mrs Eejit before drawing our own visualisations.  

We started off this term by looking at the life and work of Robert Burns in preparation for our Burns Supper at the end of the month. We have created invitations to invite our families and have been practising some Scots poetry, dance and songs to perform. We have recently performed a poetry recital for the class of one of the two Burns poems we studied: 'Up In The Morning' and an extract of 'Tam O' Shanter'. 

In preparation for our work on fractions, we have been further consolidating our knowledge of division strategies.  We have been using a bar method to help us visualise the links between division and fractions.

We are also working to improve the speed and accuracy of our mental calculations.

Alongside our endurance running focus, we have been participating in weekly basketball lessons. 

We recapped dribbling and the three main types of passes (overhead, chest and bounce) before moving on to team games. We will now explore the scoring system used, how to improve our accuracy aiming at the basketball hoop as well as using pivots to improve our passes. P7 have been very competitive during our PE lessons and are demonstrating excellent team work and co-operation skills! 

P7Bl have been really engaged in their weekly Mandarin lessons. They have been learning words and phrases through songs, videos and practical experiences. The picture above shows us learning how to correctly hold a máo bǐ (writing tool). We practised writing numbers, symbols and our names before trying to write the Chinese symbol with the most (56 in total) strokes. The symbol above is one of the amazing attempts by one learner in P7Bl. 

P7Bl have been participating in daily song practise in preparation for our upcoming Christmas concert. 

We have been excellent role models for the younger pupils during the singing rehearsals. 

Despite some of the songs being new, P7 have tackled them with a positive attitude and have thoroughly enjoyed performing for other classes during rehearsals. 

Some of us are also taking on speaking parts and are busy behind the scenes learning the lines. 

We look forward to seeing you at the concerts soon! 

We are very lucky to have a specialist teacher come into school on Fridays and teach us Mandarin. So far, our teacher has introduced us to the four different tones used in Mandarin as well as a very catchy song about ice cream! P7Bl were very enthusiastic during their first Mandarin lesson and were a great representative for Borestone Primary whilst our specialist teacher was visiting. 

We are continuing to work through the Harry Potter novels. We are thoroughly enjoying sharing the second book together. We are currently on chapter 10 and are on track to potentially begin the third novel before the end of term. Watch this space!

Towards the end of October, P7Bl were practising their endurance running skills. We know the importance of warming up before a run, keeping a steady pace as well as warming down afterwards. We have practised using stopwatches to time our own and others personal bests over different distances. We are looking forward to the Cross Country event organised by ActiveStirling taking place on Thursday 7th November. 

This month we have welcomed Mr Smith into our class. Mr Smith is a fourth year student from the University of Stirling who is currently undertaking his final placement in P7Bl. 

P7Bl have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Mr Smith - it's like he's always been here!

This term we have been enjoying learning the skills and qualities it takes to play as part of a football team. P7Bl have been practising their dribbling, passing and shooting and they have really demonstrated their willingness to work as part of a team. 

This month we have been busy applying and interviewing for various leadership roles within the school. We all worked incredibly hard to demonstrate our different skills for different roles. We are all happy with the roles we were allocated and everyone has really shown themselves to be true leaders within the school. 

During reading comprehensions sessions we have been enjoying reading Oliver Twist. We have been focusing on reading aloud with a loud clear voice, good pace and expression too. We clarified new vocabulary using an online dictionary and thesaurus and we have been using this new vocabulary knowledge to answer inference questions using evidence from the text to support our answers. 

In numeracy we have focused on place value. Using the concrete, pictorial, abstract approach we can represent, expand, write and describe numbers with 5 and 6 digits. Some of us have been challenging ourselves to work with 7 and 8 digit numbers. Next month we will work on rounding numbers to the nearest 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 and 100,000. 

Our IDL this term is Natural Disasters. We have been learning about tectonic plates with Ms Sewell and how the movement of these plates causes different types of natural disasters to occur. In September, we will be conducting our own research on volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis among other disasters. We will then use this knowledge to support our writing of a newspaper article.