A short and sweet post this week since we’ve had a short school week 🙂 I hope everyone had a lovely long weekend. I can’t believe we’re now on the final stretch to the end of P3!

NYCOS Singing Taster

On Monday, we had Fiona from the NYCOS choir come in and give us a singing taster. She did lots of singing games which involved us working with a partner. We knew lots about the body parts we use to sing and she was very impressed! We played a game where we made a circle and sang a little song and when the song stopped, the person Fiona was standing behind joined onto her train and had to go in and out of the circle before the song ended. It was lots of fun! We also played another one where we made a boat out of 2 people and in the middle was a third person, the Captain. We had to swing our boat in time with the song we were singing and when the song was over, the Captains could swap boats, again, it was lots of fun! Fiona runs the NYCOS choir so if you are interested, a leaflet with more information was taken home by each child in the class.

Topic – Animal Classification

In topic this week we were learning all about different groups of animals. We were very good at naming a wide variety of animals. We learned about reptiles, amphibians, mammals, insects, fish and birds. We know that mammals have hair/fur, are born as a small version of their mother and drink milk when they are young. We know that reptiles have scales and that amphibians can live in and out of water. We were very interested to learn about the different categories of animal and asked lots of very good questions.

Vertebrate or Invertebrate?

We then learned that animals can be vertebrates or invertebrates. If they are vertebrates then they do have a back bone and if they are invertebrates then they do not. This was quite interesting after learning all about bones as part of our Human Body science lessons and learning about the spine. A picture of an animal would appear on the whiteboard and we had to use our hands to show a ‘V’ or an ‘I’ to show what we thought the animal was. A few that we had to find out about were snails, caterpillars and fish. What do you think they are??

Cut and Stick

We had to apply our new knowledge of animal groups to organise given pictures into the correct categories. We worked in small groups to do this. The only mistake some of us made was that we got a bit confused with reptiles and amphibians.

Animal Sort

We brought in some animal toys from home in order to do this job. We had labelled hoops with each of the categories. We had to choose a toy and put it into the correct group. We then used a timer to make it a bit more fun and had 2 children go head-to-head to see who could sort the most animals! We are going to continue this next week to try and beat our time. We are hoping we can find some insects, birds, amphibians and reptiles at home so we can make it a bit harder! Today we had mostly mammals.

We also completed a written job where we had to think of 2 animals to draw in each category.

Writing

This week we wrote thank you letters to Charlie, our tour guide from Crathes Castle. We had to give detail about our impressions of Crathes Castle when we first arrived, our favourite bits of the tour, our favourite part of the trip and also what we learned from our visit. Once they are all finished, we will send our letters to Charlie. We can’t believe it’s over a week since we went!