As you should all be aware, a text was sent out last week to share the following information with you…

We will be performing ‘There’s a Sunflower in my Supper’ on

Thursday 20th June

9:30am

Dining Room

Everyone welcome 🙂

I’m so disappointed that something seems to have happened to all the photos from our prior blog posts!

Topic

Parts of a Plant

We have been learning this week about the different parts of a plant – seed, bud, roots, stem etc. We have also been learning about the stages from a seed growing into a plant. We had to complete a labelling task where we had to label the correct parts of a plant.

Planting Sunflowers

As part of our topic we have planted sunflower seeds. We discussed what a plant needs to survive and this has linked nicely to our performance of ‘There’s a Sunflower in my Supper’ and some of the songs we sing about plants. We will have to keep a careful eye on our plants to check that they get water and light to grow.

Writing – Newspapers

We have been continuing our learning about newspapers. We started to write our own newspaper articles this week. We took it very slowly and started with our headline. As a class, we voted to see what we wanted to write an article about. The most popular choice was the recent van crash into the Cults Tesco so this is what we wrote about! We included a picture and caption and we included an introduction to explain briefly what had happened.

Maths

We have been continuing to learn about angles. We know that a right angle measures exactly 90 degrees. We had to hunt around the classroom for right angles. We have created our own little measurers to work out if the angle was smaller or bigger than a right angle. Some of us have also been learning about the points of a compass and had to follow instructions on a map.

Performance Props

We have been continuing to work on our props for our upcoming performance. We have been practising hard and hoping it all turns out well!

Speech

We have been starting to think about using speech. We had a worksheet with sentences that included some speech and then we had speech bubbles. We had to find the speech from the sentence and write it into the speech bubbles. We had to remember NOT to include speech marks but TO include other punctuation such as full stops and exclamation marks.

Writing – Newspapers

Over the next few weeks we will be writing newspaper articles. To start this, this week we looked at an example of an article from the Fairytale News all about Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. We had to work with a partner to highlight different things that we will always find in newspaper articles. These included direct speech, facts, dates, an introduction and headline. We then were given a real newspaper article and we had to read it with our partner and see if the article had the same features. We had a sheet to record our findings and we looked at 2 or 3 different articles. This has been a good introduction to newspapers and will be continuing with this next week.

Art – Props

We have been working hard to create lots of props and parts of costumes for our play, “There’s a Sunflower in My Supper!” I promise that a date will be coming at the beginning of next week of when you are invited to come and watch us. We are continuing to work very hard in our rehearsals and our songs are sounding amazing!

Topic

We were applying our knowledge of animal classification again this week. We had a few pictures of animals and we had to say whether they were a mammal, amphibian etc and we had to write WHY we know this. We also had several sentences such as, “These animals are warm blooded” and we had to tick the groups of animals that the sentence applied to.

Sports Day Practise

Activities

We set up all of the activities that we will be completing at our potted sports in the gym hall this week. We got the chance to practise all of the stations so that we are very confident and know exactly what we are doing on sports day.

Races

We had lots of fun taking part in lots of different types of races, some of which we will be doing on Sports Day. We spoke about the importance of sportsmanship and not boasting when we win. We all had lots of fun as you can see from our photos.

French

We have been continuing to consolidate our French knowledge of days of the week, months, numbers to 20 and questions. We had our taster session with Madame Shepherd since the P7s are at Dalguise. She was so impressed at our knowledge and pronunciation and we are excited to see her on a weekly basis in P4!

Maths

We have all been working on chimney sums with week. Some of us have been doing takeaway sums with ‘borrowing.’ This has been tricky but we’ve all managed very well.

Norwegian Day

On Friday this week, it was a very special day for Norwegians and for one particular pupil in our class. He was able to tell us all about why Norwegians celebrate on the 17th May each year and we asked lots of questions to find out more. He is going to bring in a few things on Monday to talk to us more about how he celebrated the important event. Well done! 🙂

Spelling

This week we have been working on our spelling sounds. We discussed the sound and came up with as many words as we could that used the same sound. We had to think carefully to work out how to spell them. Some of us were also practising writing common words on the big whiteboard.

Writing

We started a writing assessment this week. We had to try and work on our own and we had to imagine that new children were thinking about joining our class and we had to tell them lots of positive things and why they should join our class. We had to use WOW words and we highlighted them so that we could see them clearly. We also were making more effort to use word mats and dictionaries. We have been reading our work aloud to ourselves to try and help us proof-read and change any mistakes.

Maths

A lot of us have been working on chimney sums this week. Some of the sums have involved carrying which was tricky to begin with but we seem to have the hang of it now! Next week we will be moving onto subtraction chimney sums. Some of us have also been working on our addition and subtraction and trying to do sums mentally at times. We are definitely showing improvement and are practising lots!

Rehearsals

We took advantage of the lovely weather at the beginning of the week and had an outdoor practise of ‘There’s a Sunflower in my Supper!’ We have also had a practise inside and it finally all seems to be coming together so we hope to have a performance date very soon.

Topic

We have been very busy this week with our topic learning. We are enjoying finding out all about animals and nature.

Animal Classification

We used the new toys that had been brought in on Monday to sort them again into the correct categories. It was a bit harder since there were more reptiles and some trickier toys to think about!

Food chains

We have been learning about where animals get their energy from. We know that food chains use arrows to show the flow of energy and we know that all food chains start with the sun.

We know that PRODUCERS produce their own food and that CONSUMERS eat the food. We had to draw an example of a food chain on a whiteboard and we also had to create our own food chains on a worksheet.

Miss Dow read out sentences and we had to use the given cards to show the flow of energy in a food chain. It was quite tricky!

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!

There is no written homework this week.

Instead, we have taken our scripts and song sheets home for an assembly that we are working on, “There’s a Sunflower in my Supper.”

For homework, I’d like the children to spend some time looking over their words and becoming familiar with them. Narrators do not have to learn their parts off by heart but can practise the words and using a loud voice.

I cannot upload the CD tracks due to copyright, however, the following website has small clips of the backing tracks for the songs under ‘listen and watch’ which you may find useful.

https://www.outoftheark.co.uk/theres-a-sunflower-in-my-supper.html

and there is one song on Youtube..

Other schools have filmed the production and uploaded to Youtube which may also help to get the backing tracks..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1OzlBDPLMg&list=PL9c7TE8RdhYC3e352gpr7i6hJ_1EU0JRg

Hopefully this all makes sense and everyone is keen to share their parts and words with you! 🙂

This week we have been learning how to say our name and say how we are feeling in French.

We know that there are a few different ways to ask and answer.

Children wanted to use the following song at home so here is the link!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbQIDw05A8M

Trip to Crathes Castle

On Tuesday we had our trip to the local Crathes Castle.  We were all very excited and had been counting down the days until the trip since we found out we were going!

We started our day on the bus out to Crathes Castle. We all enjoyed looking out for the statue of the famous legend Rob Roy on the bridge in Culter. We got to Crathes and it was a beautiful day!

The first thing we did was meet our tour guide, Charlie. He was very friendly and knew lots of facts about the history of the castle. He was very impressed with everything we knew about Robert the Bruce and how he gave the ground to the Burnett of Leys family who built and owned Crathes Castle.

We started the tour in the kitchen of the castle. We had to guess what a lot of the objects were used for. One was used for grounding oatmeal and another was used for pancakes!

We heard all about the legend of the ‘Green Lady’ and how some visitors see her in the castle. We had to be careful going up and down the stairs as there was a trip step on the 11^th step and they were very steep!

We went into the room where they would put people on trial. We had a judge and a note-taker and the class had to decide what the criminal had done wrong!

We were able to spot some of the features that we know are in a castle such as arrow slits, battlements and we spotted where the original portcullis would have been.

Next we had our snacks and a bit of time to run around in the grounds of the castle. After that, we got into our small groups and did our scavenger hunt. This tied in nicely with our new topic, ‘A Bug’s Life’ as we were looking at nature and had to find a lot of different things. We had a list of things to find. The list included finding something squidgy, a sign we know people had been there before us, something soft, something close to the ground etc. Some of us went into the walled garden to do the scavenger hunt whilst other groups chose to go into the woods!

Lunch time was next! We had a lovely day for it and some of us had a game of rounders after we had finished eating.

We then spent our time taking part in an art activity. Again, we used our clipboards to lean on. First of all, we had to draw the outline of the castle as accurately as we could. We were in the perfect position on the castle lawn to allow us to do this! Next, we had to use detail and more accuracy to draw the windows and door. Finally we had to add as much detail as we could – flags, plants, benches, railings, decorative plaques so that our pictures were as realistic as we could possibly make them.

To end our trip, we had a small bit of time left to play in the park! We ran off all our remaining energy before getting back on the bus to go back to school. A lot of us were so tired that we fell asleep on the bus!

We had a brilliant trip and couldn’t have asked for better weather. Some of us even said it was the best school trip we’d ever been on! It was a great way of ending our ‘Castles’ topic from last term and getting focussed on our new natural topic. We will be doing some follow up work next week using the results from our scavenger hunt and we are going to write thank you letters to Charlie for his fantastic tour.

Finally, a big thank you to Mrs Smith, Mrs Close, Mrs Broadribb and Mrs Robertson for coming and helping on our trip. It was much appreciated 🙂

Have a lovely long weekend everyone!

I hope everyone is looking forward to our trip tomorrow!

Just a quick reminder in case you’re unsure..

• children should wear school top/jumper but can wear comfy bottoms/trousers/shorts/shoes
• children should bring a packed lunch and water bottle and will be bringing their school bag with them on the trip
• children should bring a waterproof coat (hopefully we won’t need them!)
• bus will leave school at 9.15am and return in time for home time at 3.15pm
• children can bring a pencil/rubber from home if they’d like but I will be bringing some from school too.

Looking forward to it! 🙂

New Topic

We watched a surprise clip this week which was a big clue to our new topic. Our new topic is going to be called ‘A Bug’s Life.’ We will be learning about different types of animals, insects, habitats and looking at plants and growing. We are also going to be working on a very exciting drama performance linking to our topic which will be keeping us very busy this term!

Syllables

We were thinking about syllables this week. This is when a word is split into its individual sounds. We had to decide if the words had 2,3 or 4 syllables and colour it correctly. We found that if we clapped whilst we said the word then that was a great help! It was much easier than we thought it might be! If we were finished, we had to think of our own words for a partner to work out the syllables.

Maths

This week the Triangles, Squares and Pentagons have been starting to look at division. We know that  this means sharing/splitting into equal groups. Some of us have been using concrete resources such as counters and cubes to help us share out into equal groups.

The Semicircles have been working on chimney sums. We know that if a question says ‘how many altogether’ then it must be an adding sum. We had to create our own written problems. We read them out to the group and everyone else had to calculate the answer.

Writing

In writing this week we listened to the story of Goldilocks and the 3 Bears. Our task was to change a part of the story and re-write our very own versions! Some of us had more than 3 bears, some of us had Goldilocks being eaten and some even had the bears being arrested! We will continue to work on this piece of writing next week. We also had some P7 boys come to work with a few of us and show us how we can use the laptops to help us with our writing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KndSVsY5HWM

Drama

To link with our writing, we had to act out one of our new stories of Goldilocks and the 3 Bears.  Our performances were very funny and involved lots of chasing and humour! We need to work on ensuring we always face the audience and don’t have our backs to them. In future lessons we are also going to set up a ‘stage’ area to make sure the audience can always hear us.

Circle Time

We had a discussion in Circle Time about CONFIDENCE. We discussed what confidence is and the fact that people have different levels of confidence. Some people have very low confidence and can be quite shy and anxious and some people have a lot of confidence and rarely feel embarrassed or awkward. We spoke about a few of our experiences where people had used their confidence in a negative way and had been a bit boastful. We had to volunteer to walk and act as if we had very low confidence or very high confidence. It was lots of fun! This linked nicely to our recent  gym lessons with Miss MacCrae as we have had to discuss how to win/lose appropriately.

Health and Wellbeing

As the weather was so nice this week we headed out to the playground to do some Health and Wellbeing. Building on our learning from last week, our challenge was to list or draw as many food items as we could think of and put them into the correct categories on the Eatwell Plate. We also used the interactive whiteboard to do a bit of this too. This is the website that we used…

https://www.healthyactivekids.com.au/teachers/online-games/whats-plate-kids/