**Star of the Week**

Well done to James Benson  who was awarded star of the week for last week.  James received star of the week for always working hard and completing his tasks to a high standard. Well done, James! 🙂

French

We have been continuing to learn the months of the year in French this week. We have been using this song to help us learn them and we completed some tasks where we had to match the English to the French and also practise writing the French months.

Maths

We have been continuing to work on measure and have been learning about weight this week. The Pentagons have been converting between g and kg and cm and m and ordering big measurements.

The Triangles,  Semi-Circles and Squares have been understanding what a kilogram is. We passed around a kilogram weight and were all very surprised by how heavy it was! We then had to think of objects in the classroom that we thought would weigh around 1kg. We tested this out using the balancing scales.

We have  been estimating weights of objects and choosing the most appropriate answer. If possible, we then tested our estimations using the scales.

Science

We have started a mini science topic that we will be working on throughout most of this term. Our topic is the human body. We started this week by thinking about the skeleton. We discussed our prior knowledge to begin with. We then used the following website to learn about the position of the bones and to raise our awareness of their proper names.

http://www.abcya.com/skeletal_system.htm

We were all very excited and keen to learn about the skeleton and were very enthusiastic. We have a life-size skeleton in class at the moment which we decided to call Mr Bones (although we’re not sure if it’s a girl or boy!) Our task was to work as a group to try and label as many bones of the body as we could.

Our next task was to cut out a jumbled skeleton and join it back together again in the correct order using split pins. We then used our mini skeletons to work with a partner and test each other about some of the names of the bones and where we would find them on our skeletons.

Topic

We all had another piece of a puzzle and had to find our groups to find out what our new topic was going to be and our new topic is..

CASTLES!

Again, we discussed our prior knowledge and told Miss Dow any questions or things we would like to do in our new topic and she made a note of our suggestions. Our topic is going to focus on timelines, using evidence and castles in general before having a specific focus on local castles.

Writing

Miss Dow asked us to write a letter of complaint to Dominos. We had to imagine some issues that we could have with a delivery/pizza and use facts to describe this in our letter. We had to try and explain how we were feeling and use strong language to show how unhappy we were. We were all very keen to share our completed letters of complaint by reading them to the class.

Spelling

We were revising some of our previous sounds this week and working as an individual, pair or group to try and write down words that used a given sound. We used whiteboards to write down our answers.

** Star of the Week **

Well done to Conor for being awarded star of the week for excellent effort and improvement with his spelling. Keep up the fantastic work, Conor! 🙂

Topic – Scotland

Scots Language Descriptions

This week we have been learning lots of Scots words. We had to apply this learning to write a short description about an animal of our choice. We enjoyed trying to say the words, guess what they might mean and sharing our work with the class.

Body Parts in Scots

We also learned what all of our body parts are called in Scots. We had to draw a character or person and label the body parts using the correct vocabulary.

Scots Instructions

Miss Dow read out instructions in Scots and we had to follow the instructions. This worked well since we had just learned body parts.

Poetry and Stories

We have been practising reading and talking in Scots and comparing the language to how we normally talk. We read ‘The Gruffalo’ in Scots and a variety of poems from books that children brought in.

Maths – Measurement

In maths we have been working on measurement. We have had to ESTIMATE the length/width of an object and then measure it using a ruler or metre stick. We have also been comparing lengths and ordering objects by their measurements. We had to decide what was the best measurement to use. eg – smaller items would most likely be measured in mm and distances would be measured in miles or even km.

Circle Time

We had a very memorable Circle Time this week. Miss Dow chose a few of us to act as characters in a story and as she told the story, the actors had to improvise and act out what was being told in the story whilst the rest of the class listened and watched. The story was ‘The Girl Who Cried Wolf.’ We then spoke about the moral of the story and how it applies to us. We know that sometimes people don’t tell the truth to try and protect someone. We spoke about the importance of telling the truth and being honest.

Health & Wellbeing

We  became a masseur/masseuse this week! We spoke about mindfulness and the importance of taking a break and being mindful if we start to get stressed or angry. We spoke about how massage can be used to make us feel calm and relaxed. We enjoyed practising on each other!

French

We revised days of the week and colours. We were looking at the months of the years. We sang a song on Youtube and played a game. When Miss Dow said a month in French, we had to jump up if our birthday fell in that month. She made it easy to begin with by saying the months in French in the correct order but then it got a bit trickier as she said them in a random order!

Joined Handwriting

We had our first ever joined handwriting lesson. We know that our writing might become a bit messier before it becomes neater as we are learning a new skill that we have never done before. We were learning the ‘un’ and ‘um’ join. We self-assess our handwriting by drawing a little 🙂 next to our best, most successful attempt at a word and a 🙁 next to the ones that needed the most work.

Dancing

Since we have been learning about Scotland, Miss Dow taught us some of the steps of the Highland Fling. Grace was a big help too since she goes to Highland Dancing lessons. We were worked very hard and were very sweaty by the end of it! We then learned a new dance that Miss Dow calls ‘in, two, clap, clap, clap’ which was also lots of fun.

Library

Our library helpers were so fantastic this week! We had some technical difficulties with the scanner but managed in the end. Here we are being very independent…

Happy New Year to you all, I hope you had a lovely time.

We’ve been straight back to our normal routine this week and are ready for an exciting term.

Topic

We had a puzzle to solve on Monday morning to find out what our new topic was going to be.. we each had a piece of a puzzle and without talking we had to find our group and make up our puzzle. Each puzzle created a picture of a clue to what our topic was going to be..

the answer was… Scotland!

Lots of us have been bringing in Scottish books and objects to share with the class.

We started off our topic by thinking about all of the Scottish cities that we know. (Hopefully we all now realise that Union Square is not a city.. :/ ) We discussed the position of these cities on a map and spoke about cities that are up/down from Aberdeen and the time it takes us to get there. We were able to use this knowledge to help us plot the cities on a map.  We could use atlases to help us too. Throughout the rest of the week Miss Dow has been testing us and asking us to mark the different cities on the Interactive Whiteboard from memory.

We have also been learning about some Scottish myths and legends such as the Loch Ness Monster and Kelpies. In small groups, we had to use an information sheet to create a poster to teach other people about the myth we had been given. We had to include facts and pictures and make sure our poster was bright and eye-catching.

2019 Wishes

We had to think about our school resolutions/targets. We spoke about areas of maths and literacy that we wish to improve and work on this year/term. Some of us also had time to think about some wishes for at home – lots of children are wishing to be more helpful at home with cooking and cleaning their bedrooms! We wrote our wishes on a coin so that we could drop them into our wishing well on our wall display in the classroom.

Maths

We started by revising o’clock, half past, quarter to and quarter past times.

We have been continuing with ‘time’ in maths this week. Some of us have been using a rhyme and our knuckles to work out how many days are in each month of the year.

We have been playing matching games to help us. We have also been thinking about the order of the months and what months happen in each season.

On Thursday we were thinking about measurements of time – hours, days, seconds etc. When Miss Dow said ‘start!’ we had to count up to 60 seconds and stand up when we thought a minute was up. Some of us stood up as early as 40 seconds and some of us were standing up as late as 2 minutes! We learned some words we can use to help us count in seconds (elephant, mississippi etc) and then we were set a 1 minute challenge.

We had to work with a partner and use a 1 minute egg timer to see how many repetitions of an action we could do in a minute! We had to record our predictions before we could test if we were correct or not. Our predictions improved as we progressed through the sheet. The actions included things like burpees, writing our name, star jumps and even saying supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as many times as we could!! As you can see from the photos, we had lots of fun but were very tired by the end of it…

Art

This week we have been creating our own art in the style of a famous artist and designer, using his work as our inspiration. Since our topic is Scotland we focussed on a scottish artist – Charles Rennie Mackintosh. We learned a bit about his life and the fact he was an architect living in Glasgow. We know that some tea rooms he designed are now in the V&A Museum in Dundee. We noticed that his work is quite simple and uses a lot of basic shapes and a lot of lines. We realised that he uses a little bit of colour and that he is famous for his Celtic-looking roses. Our art work we produced was incredible – we definitely have some budding artists in our midst.

Circle Time

In Circle Time this week we were talking about when little things happen outside in the playground and in the class. We spoke about being able to ignore some small things if they are not very serious. We had to think about things that you would need to tell Miss Dow and things that you do not need to tell Miss Dow. We were given an example and had to use our hands to make a T if the example was a ‘tale’ and an S if the example was ‘serious’ and necessary to tell Miss Dow. This will be something we have to think about when something happens within our friendship groups in the future.