Visit to Denny Primary School

Today some of us visited Denny Primary School to learn how pupils there use Edward de Bono's 6 Thinking Hats. We would like to say a big thank you to Mrs McKenna for arranging the visit - a special thanks too, to primary 4 and Mrs Kirk for sharing their great ideas with us.

The children use the activities from their 'Thinking Wall' to sharpen up their brains ..... we tried the 'Sorter' game in our own class today - it was great fun!!

We have written a fuller account of how they use the 'Thinking Hats'. Follow this link to read our account and to see some pictures of their colourful 'hats' display.

We interviewed P4 teacher, Mrs Kirk, to find out more about how they use thinking hats in class and made a podcast to put on our class blog.

Click the link below to hear our podcast! ........ please give it a moment or two to load :)

http://primary7.wikispaces.com/space/showimage/denny+final.mp3

The Magic Box!!

Well - here goes - another podcast attempt! Some of the pupils interviewed their classmates to hear about their plan (so far) for our new imaginative story writing ... The Magic Box.
http://primary7.wikispaces.com/space/showimage/magic+box3.mp3

Click the link to hear the interview......but be patient, please, because it takes a wee while to load.

A website link

Have you ever wondered how is writing taught in school today? This is an interesting website with lots of advice for parents - try it out by clicking here.

In class this term, we have been writing our Autobiographies. We used 'mindmaps' to help us plan some of the chapters. The picture here shows examples of these on our classroom wall. They helped us to organise the paragraphs in our writing. In our writing pages, some of us decided to use extracts from our autobiography to let you know a little bit about our hobbies, our families, important events in our lives and who our friends are. Rebecca has written all about her life so far, and Ryan has told us what his hopes are for the future - good luck Ryan!

2 Stars and a Wish

Here is one example of the children's self-made worksheets. They use these to assess their own, and each others' writing. They know to add 2 'star' comments (things that have been done well) and they then add a 'wish' for the future......how could the writing be even better?
try

Here are the comments that Lisa put on her page:

"2 stars and a wish is , 2 good polite comments on their
piece of writing and a thing you think they should try and improve on. My class
use this on all our writing and work with a friend . The 2 stars and a wish idea
is great it helps you be truthful and honest with your friends and you won't
feel bad. My class have designed our own layout of 2 stars and a wish , we drew
2 stars and some to do with a wish and what we do is write in them. I think all
schools should use this idea .It will help the class co-operate together. We
also talk to the class about the persons work so it's like a little
presentation."

She also commented on some writing using '2 stars and a wish'

Jamie has started a fantastic thriller like story 'please read

• Star 1~ Fantastic description and detail well done
• Star 2~ Brilliant use of detailed words great start
• My wish ~ FINISH IT (because its superb)

The Story so Far

Well! We've made a start - but not without some hiccups! We discovered yesterday that the children can't call their link pages the same name. We called them all my stories, but we realised that Marc's writing was appearing in everyone's page and over-writing what they had just written!

Fortunately, Sean decided not to follow my intructions and called his page a slightly different name..... and his writing was still there ( not following my instructions earned him 10 marbles on this occasion!!! Thank you Sean).

Today some pupils left the 'blog' site without saving their work. Oh dear - a lot of typing disappeared into cyberspace!

However, I logged on tonight to have a look and was heartened by what I read. Check out the children's pages .... and a great big thank you to Lisa for her lovely comments about her classmates' writing! She is so right - keep going Jamie, Josh, Danni and Jeanan ... and everyone else!

Mrs V