Week beginning May 25th 2009…

Apologies for the lack of ELP diaries over the last two weeks. This is due to Mrs Binnie being appointed Acting Principal Teacher Pastoral until the summer holidays to cover for Mr Main, who is now Acting Deputy Head.

However, there are some important dates we would still like to take the very quick opportunity of reminding you of…

May 27th 2009 – last day of the extra sports at Moray House

May 28th 2009 – school concert in the evening (if your child is involved you will already have had the letter home)

June 1st 2009 – provisional date for change of timetable but this is still provisional – we will keep you up to date

June 5th-7th – rewards weekend for outstanding effort by winning S2 pupils – those involved have already been contacted. Well done!

June 22-26th 2009 – Activities Week. More details will be sent to you in due course about the planned trips. Parents should be aware that there has been no booking form this year as the format of Activities Week has changed.

ELP Diaries will recommence after the summer holidays – thanks!

ELP French update…

FRENCH- Fishy Goings On by Ms Russell

We have joined forces with the Art Department’s Mrs Kazimoglou, and are developing ideas for One Scotland. In order to tie in with the French Spring festivals, particularly Le Poisson d’Avril, we will look at Places to Visit and Deep Sea World -the first of its kind in Scotland.

 

Time to Rhyme in ELPs

In English we have been looking at and finding rhyming words and we will be continuing with this all week. We have played Rhyme Bingo and have to listen very carefuly for the end sound of words like : house/mouse;fair/square. This is a great game to pass the time, especially in the car, on the bus or train. Instead of bingo you could give pionts for the highest number of rhyming words your child can find.

Challenge them further by using everyday objects around the house like plate- late, state, great, mate.

Bed – said, fed, led, tread.

Visit the library and borrow a copy of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes or Michael Rosen’s Pilly Soems.

 

 

Week beginning January 12th 2009…

This week on the ELP Project we will be working on a number of new initiatives. A New Year has seen some new projects taking shape and we will be spending the next few weeks building up to a special treat of visiting the above well- known local garden centre…

ELP Gardening

In ELP Gardening this week we will be continuing to plan our own ELP Garden Centre. We have been considering what might go in a Garden Centre – taking advice from pupils and staff who have visited one, searching the internet for information and looking at newspapers and magazines for clues. We have started to map out our own design and are in the process of learning the vocabulary we will need to label our plans. Key words we have been learning include:

• flowers
• trees
• shed
• ladder
• leaf
• fork
• plant
• pot
• water
• pond

After the half term break in February we will be looking to make a visit to Dobbie’s to see how our plans compare with the real thing, check out the play area and practise using money by buying a cup of tea or a glass of juice.

ELP Maths

ELP Maths this week will see us continue to reinforce a number of life skills on a daily basis. We will continue to persevere with the time, using money and interpreting calendars. We will also be using our lovely flowers to practise counting in 10s. This resource ties in well with the overall theme this year of the “garden of life”. We will also be using the Learning and Teaching Scotland website for their Ice Cream Van game in order to encourage the children to use their increasing money awareness – and build up towards an enterprise project we hope to run in February. Parents are able and welcome to use the Ice Cream Van game at home using the internet.

The following link takes you to it (and the very useful and popular Luncherama)

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/numeracy/findresources/interactivegames.asp

ELP Science

This week in Science we will continue to look at teeth!

We will be looking at the hidden sugars in our food that can cause our teeth and gums to become unhealthy if we do not look after them. We will be looking at how quickly cola drinks can rot teeth – and other materials. We may even be getting the chance to look at some human teeth, as the tooth fairy is due in Mrs Binnie’s household this weekend! So much for us to get our….erm…teeth into 😉

ELP Cross Curricular

 We will be starting our Valentine Enterprise initiative this week…watch this space!

ELP PE/HEALTH

Thanks to Ms Russell and Mrs Reid for helping us become university students this week!

For the next four Mondays we will be going to Moray House PE department at Edinburgh University to undertake extra swimming, dance and gymnastics. Each Monday we will need to bring a packed lunch and our PE kit/swimming things.

Joyeux Noel et Bonne Année

“Bonjour, Ms Russell, ça va?”

“Bonjour, ça va bien ,merci. Et toi?”

“Oh, comme ci comme ça. Au revoir Ms Russell”

“Au revoir”.

 

Which translates :

 

“Hello Ms Russell are you ok?”

“Hello, yes very well thank you. And you?”

“Oh so so. Good bye Ms Russell.”

“Good bye.”

 

They particularly enjoy the opportunity to say “Bof!”

Which means “ Not so good”.

 

We have also made Christmas cards that say Joyeux Noël and posters, which show the months of the year.

 

So from the ELPS and Ms Russell

 

Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année!

 

Can you do better?

 

 

 

          

 

 

  Missing Words

 

 

 

Ms Russell gave a sheet that had sentences with missing words.

At the bottom of the sheet was a list of words that would fit into the spaces – one word for each sentence.

 

However Ms Russell knows how clever we are and she folded the paper over so we couldn’t see the words and we had to think of alternative words.

 

We all took it in turns to read, and we had Ms Russell and Sophie and Mrs Cullen to help us, but we really tried as much as we could on our own.

 

Here is a selection of the sentences and the words that were suggested __(__)__alongside the many words we came up with!!

 

1. I ___(hit)__ the ball very hard.    kicked       threw
2. The ___(wind)__ blew in the trees.   balloon   kite  hat   paper
3. The bad dog___(bit)__ a hole in the slipper.   chewed    ripped    ate
4. My sister has __( six)__ dolls   Barbie    Bratz   china    19    baby
5. We sailed on a _(big)__ boat to France.  slow   fast    fancy   Sealink
6. Sam’s mum took __(him)__  to the zoo.  me   you  friends  us   a bus

 

So use your imagination whenever you can to improve your vocabulary!

What do you call a deer with no eyes?

the-eye

Okay, bad joke alert – but relevant to this week’s Science lesson nonetheless! 😉

On Wednesday in Science the ELP pupils investigated the workings of the eye. (Pun intended).

Earlier in the week we had enjoyed the wonders of the optical illusion – discovering that the eye can fool the brain into thinking it is seeing something removed from reality. Now we were going to look more closely at how this amazing part of the body works…

Here is our model eye.

We used this to help us investigate the inner structures that are more difficult to see than, say, the eye lashes or eyebrows. Look at the attached worksheet Mrs Allan made to help us discover more about the eye. Key terms that we were interested in learning included :-

• the eyelid
• the eyebrow
• the pupil
• the iris

Extension key terms we were interested in included

• the retina
• the lens
• the sclera
• the optical nerve

We learned in S1 about making a rainbow using a glass block called a prism. We loved the ROY G BIV song and it still helps us remember about bending light to make the colours of the spectrum. We needed to use this prior knowledge to help us work out what happens in the eye when we look at an object. In the eye the light is also bent – this time by a lens. We thought about how this works – and considered that one of our classmates had more than one pair of lenses. Can you think why?

We considered the pupil of the eye – and did a straw poll to decide what it is. A number of ideas were put forward…

• it is a black spot
• it is a dot
• it is a hole
• it is like the front of a camera

We decided to try a simple experiment to help us deduce what the pupil may be…

We paired up with a friend. One of us covered our eyes with our hands so that we could not see anything. We waited until our partner had counted to twenty before uncovering our eyes. Our partner stared into our eyes and watched what happened. Something special appeared before us…

Look at the picture on the right. It is a drawing of a “dilated eye”. This is how our eyes looked as soon as we took away our hands. The pupil was large and the iris was small. As our eyes adjusted to the light again the pupil began to get smaller…looking more like the drawing on the left of the diagram below.

We deduced that the pupil must be able to get bigger and smaller – and that it was more likely to be a hole rather than a dot or a spot. A hole that might let the light in…

 

 

A walk in the park…

Using Looking and Thinking text book we have created a story called A Walk in the Park. We looked for clues, and gave the people in the picture names and identities. The ELPs are very good at naming people!

We all contributed, and hope you enjoy the story.

 

It is a warm spring day and a mother and her two children are walking through the park. One child is too small to walk and is being pushed in a pram. The other child is holding his mother’s hand. Bobby is the little boy who is holding his mum’s hand, and the baby is called Bryce.

A dog is sitting down and has been tied to a tree. The dog is looking at the baby in the pram. The dog is called Frodo.

Rob and Hecker, the gardeners, are reading a newspaper. They are sitting on the park bench. They have been busy digging and planting new trees to make the park look tidy.

Granny Joan and Susanne are walking over the bridge and they are going to town to do their shopping and have some lunch.

Grant is on his bike on the other side of the park hedge watching the steam from the train.

 

 

Nov 2008.

 

Magnificent muscles…

magnificent-muscles

Batista may be one of the most famous wrestlers on the planet at the moment (and one of Dale’s favourites!) but he is also well known for his muscular physique.

We have been looking at how muscles are important to the body :-

• their job (function)
• their position (site)
• their size
• their workings (moving levers or other jobs requiring muscles)
• the number of muscles in the body

Did you know that whilst we have just over 200 bones in our skeletons we have more than 600 muscles helping us function? 

Every time Batista pins down an opponent or throws them he is using a number of these muscles to move his bones (levers). However, he is also going to be using muscles in a number of other ways including…

• his famous “six pack” of muscles in his torso will be helping him pull opponents, hold himself and opponents in positions.
• his “six pack” will help him flex his spine,  stabilise his torso and body, flex his trunk and his hips
• his facial muscles will work when he smiles, stares and especially when he scowls
• his tongue muscles will work when he tries to psych out his opponents or shouts with joy or pain
• the muscles in his digestive system will work more if he is scared or if he has eaten food that needs digesting

Batista needs his magnificent muscles to stay on top of his profession and he has to work hard to maintain their size and strength – but we all need our own magnificent, if less prominent, muscles to go about our daily lives too.

So we can do this…

and this!

DID YOU KNOW IT TAKES MORE MUSCLES TO FROWN THAN IT DOES TO SMILE?

We introduced the idea of levers (the role that bones play in our skeleton) by looking at the garden seesaw. We improvised by making our own classroom seesaw out of a plank of wood and a block to act as a pivot. We were set the challenge of seeing whether the smallest person in the class could use this seesaw to lift Mrs Allan off the ground…

We had lots of fun working out that this depended on how long the lever was and how far away the mass you were trying to lift (ie Mrs Allan) was from the end of the lever (the seesaw). The best bit was we completed our task!

We then moved on to consider how our bodies move these levers inside us – and  how some muscles do not have the job of moving levers.

Muscles that move levers were found in our legs, arms, hands, feet and the like. Muscles that didn’t move levers could be found in our face, head, digestive system and so on…

Using the attached worksheet we began to explore more about our muscles, stopping to spend time on literacy along the way

• we investigated whether the muscles in our body were the same as the mussel in Musselburgh?
• we concentrated on the “le” ending and “el” ending in other words – apple, bubble, trouble compared to excel, revel and rebel
• we practised reading some key terms and sentences about muscles
• we practised writing some simple words that are relevant to muscles

Week beginning October 20th 2008…

This week is a shorter than normal one thanks to a staff In-Service Day on Monday 2oth October. When we resume on Tuesday we will be coming back to school on NATIONAL APPLE DAY.

National Apple Day celebrates the use, versatility and importance of the apple in our diet and lives. As the cross-curricular umbrella theme for the ELP project this session is “The Garden For Life”, it is only fitting that we mark National Apple Day in some appropriate way…

ELP Gardening

Almost as if by fate the ELP pupils have a double period of Gardening on Tuesday 21st October! This allows us to spend some quality time investigating the apple and reflecting on the gardening lessons we had in September where we took some of the apples from our garden and made delicious winter desserts with them – see ELP Gardening for more information about our Apple Crumble and Baked Apples with Sultana recipes!

In our National Apple Day celebrations we will be looking at the structure of the apple and identifying key components (the skin, seeds, core and stem). We will use these key terms to undertake an activity that will involve an array  of art, use of motor skills, literacy skills (learning the words skin, seed, stem and core), biology and gardening.

Using real apples and a clear photograph of the inside of an apple the children will match up the names for each part of the fruit on a handmade representation of an apple. They will be encouraged to explain in their own words what each term/part of the fruit is, where it can be found and – as an extension target – what “job” it might do. We will dissect the real apple (teacher demo with interaction from pupils) and find these items…where will the seeds be?

Finally, the best bit of all, this week our “healthy snack” will be some lovely juicy apples!

ELP Social Studies

This week in ELP Social Studies we will be visiting our local Scotmid to investigate how many Fairtrade products they sell – and what they are. We will also be looking to find out which countries our Fairtrade goods come from…

ELP Maths

Due to the October break we will be looking to consolidate on what we were learning before the holiday. Money will once again be at the forefront of this week’s lessons and we hope the children had a great time undertaking their Holiday Maths Challenge in their local shop over the break!

ELP Religious Education

In ELP RE this week we will be looking at the story of Noah’s Ark with Ms Strachan. The tale of animals going into the boat “two by two” will help us reinforce our learning in maths – where we have been working on counting in twos. In addition, we wonder how much the children can recall from last year’s science lessons on light and rainbows?

ELP Craft and Design

This week in Craft and Design we will be making a start on our Wishing Well for the school garden. Once more we are incorporating the umbrella theme of the Garden For Life into our everyday lessons. We will construct the wishing well out of wood and have located a local wishing well that we would like to base our structure on. Mrs Binnie took us to take a photograph of it so that Mr Cruickshank can help us build our own.

 

ELP Science

In ELP Science this week we will be continuing to look at the human body – and how our work using our own home made garden seesaw might help us work out how our limbs move…

ELP Book

Continuing our garden theme the ELP classroom book this term will be Henry the Poisonous Centipede!