Easter Week!

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday, all of the children were very exciting to share their holiday news with the class on Monday. We have had a very lovely week this week with most of our work having an Easter theme! This has included Easter crafts, maths and even writing! It’s been a nice way to start back to school after the holiday to ease us in gently…

Easter Maths

We had to complete an Easter mosaic sheet where we had to use add/subtract/times tables to work out the answers of each tile and then colour it in a specific colour, depending on the answer. Some of us were even learning the 8, 9 and 11 times tables which were very tricky!

We also designed some Easter eggs that had to show symmetry. We used mirrors to help us. We had some very fancy ideas and were very creative.

Easter Writing

We wrote another list poem describing as many things about Easter as we could think of. We started by mindmapping in small groups all of the nouns we could think of to do with Easter. We then repeated this for adjectives and verbs. This worked well as a planning page if we ran out of ideas! Some of us were even challenged to add a fourth word to each line of our poem, by adding in an adverb which some children learned describes the doing word. Our poems turned out really well and had some lovely, descriptive lines in them.

Easter Cards

We took part in an art activity where we had to use many different types of line and pattern to fill in a little bunny rabbit. It was hard to think of lots of shapes and patterns but we all managed it! We then cut it out and turned it into an Easter card to take home.

Hatching Chick Craft

Again we used our design and creative skills to design an Easter egg. We had to cut it out and design a little chick to be hatching out of the egg. We used paper fasteners to join both parts of the egg together. We could choose how we wanted the egg to crack – straight, zig zags etc. Some of our chicks even had flowers in their feathers or wore a crown!

Easter Egg Decorating

We were each given a polystyrene egg and we had to come up with a design of how we would like to decorate it. We had to plan out our ideas using a whiteboard so that we were sure what we wanted to do. We had to choose appropriate resources from a wide variety to stick onto the egg. Our designs included golden snitches, peacocks and lots more.

Eatwell Plate

In a non-Easter related lesson, we were thinking about healthy eating and we were looking at the ‘Eatwell Plate.’ We were learning about different food groups such  as protein, dairy and carbohydrates. We then played a game on the board where we had to choose the food group that the food item belonged to. Our task was then to use a paper plate and create our own meal that met the proportions of the Eatwell Plate. Some of us chose to draw the parts onto our plate which made it a bit clearer. We had lots of good idea and it brought up lots of discussion about our diets and what we usually eat at home. We will be continuing our learning on this over the next few weeks.

Play-doh

For our play zones this week, 2 of the boys helped Mrs Philipson to make play-doh! It was a nice change to have as one of our play zones.

Health and Wellbeing

We have been thinking about feelings and what makes us feel a certain emotion. This week we have been thinking about what makes us feel angry.  We are learning that there are lots of different emotions and that people react to things in different ways.

Outdoor Art

This week we have been doing some transient art. This means that our artwork is only temporary and won’t last forever. We had to work as a group to collect resources from outside – sticks, stones, leaves etc and then we had to create a piece of art using our collection. Our creations included a duck, a volcano, a house, a unicorn cupcake and even a dog! The results were fantastic and we all worked so hard!

Maths

We have been using our ActiveLearn logins this week to play some addition and subtraction games. We enjoy using the laptops and had lots of games to choose from. We could work our way through the levels collecting lots of points.

Mother’s Day

(Warning: don’t read any further if you haven’t received anything from your child and don’t want to ruin the surprise..!)

 

This week we have been creating beautiful mother’s day cards to say thank you to our Mums for being so amazing. We used hand prints and fingerprints to create a pot of flowers and we wrote a message inside.

I hope you all loved your Mother’s Day pictures and messages that were in the Evening Express on Monday. We were all very excited for you to finally see them!

Writing

We discussed lots of adjectives that we would use to describe our Mummy. We then had to follow a pattern to create a poem that used lots of similes. We know that a simile is when you compare one thing to another and it uses the word ‘as’ or ‘like.’ The poems that we created were amazing and had some very thoughtful similes in them to describe our lovely Mums 🙂 We then wrote out a neat copy which was good for us to practise our handwriting skills. We hope you liked them!

Science

We applied our knowledge of the human body to design our very own board games during Open Day. We had some brilliant ideas – including question cards, jail, missing spaces, ladders to skip parts of the game board and we all managed to think of some very good questions about bones and organs! When we were finished we were able to play our games which was lots of fun.

Open Day

I hope you all enjoyed open day and seeing your child’s work and class achievements. Thank you so much to everyone for coming and the lovely feedback. I hope you all have a lovely, relaxing holiday and look forward to more busy and exciting learning in term 4 🙂

Don’t forget to buy a copy of the Evening Express today to collect your very special Mother’s Day portrait and message that we have each designed, especially for you!

I have been promised that our class will be published in today’s supplement.

Hope you like it!

Topic – Robert the Bruce

We were drawing Robert the Bruce – Oliver

We were doing Robert the Bruce portraits – Grant

The chain mail took ages to draw! – Sophie

We were learning to do line drawings using only black and white – James B

The chain mail was probably the hardest bit – Jamie

We drew Robert the Bruce step-by-step – Lena

We used crosses to plan where his eyes, mouth and nose would go  – Luca

Maths – Information Handling

We had to roll a dice and whatever number it landed on, we had to colour a square on the correct bar on the graph. – Luca

We had to stop once one of our bars reached the top of the graph – Arran

We’ve been learning about using tables and surveys about favourite types of food and movies – Rebecca

We were then using the information and putting it into a graph – Holly

We first had to draw the axes – Eilidh

When we were using graphs we went around the classroom asking people to complete our survey – Johnny

We had to write the numbers beside one axis to show the number of pupils who had voted – Callum

We used tally marks to collect our results – Ross

Graphs always have to have the topic as a title – Dylan

Graphs have to have a good title – Ashar

Library

In library we had to be quiet and we had to read our books very quietly on our own – Tylar

It took me a long time to find a book I wanted – Grace

Sometimes the computer doesn’t like Miss Dow and doesn’t let her scan our books!!! – Jamie

Writing

We had to draw a castle that had 3 items inside and a way to get in and out of the castle and then we used that as our plan to do a piece of imaginative writing – Alex

We had to think of 3 unusual things to put in our castle that we would use in our writing – Lola

Learning Journeys

We have spent time this week choosing work that we are proud of or worked hard on and we had to write in our learning journey why we chose the piece of work – Oscar

We had to choose our favourite piece of work to put in our learning journeys and write why we chose it – James B

Getting Outdoors

We were playing rounders outside this week – Lola

We swapped teams when we were playing so that everyone got a turn to bat and run – Lena

In rounders we had to hit the ball and there was one person who threw the ball and we only had 3 chances to hit the ball. If the ball went far then we could run far! We had to  try and not get put out! – Tylar

Before we did rounders, we did the daily mile to warm up – Grace

I managed to catch the ball without dropping it which meant that the teams had to swap over! – Jamie

Open Day

We got to decorate invites for open day – Holly

I used smell pens to draw loads of pictures – Johnny

I used my favourite highlighters to do lots of lovely patterns – Sophie

We had to decorate an invite to our parents to invite them to open day – James B

I did a Charles Rennie Mackintosh rose border since we have been designing our own art work like him- Grace

We had to write ‘to’ or ‘dear’ who we were going to give it to and ‘from’ and then our name – Oscar

We hope you can all make it!

Keeping Active

We have been making up our P.E time this week with a bit of Go Noodle in the Studio and the daily mile! We had to think of lots of different ways to move around the playground – skipping, hopscotch, jumping, even walking backwards.

Newsround

After watching Newsround on Thursday we had lots of questions about BREXIT. We discussed what Brexit is and what it would mean if it goes ahead. We are watching Newsround almost every day to keep up to date and find out a bit more…

Science

We were very lucky to have a visit from Arjun’s Mum who spoke to us all about the brain. She was very impressed at everything we could tell her about the body and said we were even better than some of her university students! Thank you for coming to see us!

Writing

We have been using our knowledge of jobs that were  in castles and we had to choose one to write a job description. We had to think about DUTIES, QUALITIES and SKILLS specific to the job. We had to apply our knowledge of castles to think about important aspects of each job.

Maths

We have been looking at information handling and on Monday we created our very own surveys. We could ask people in the class to answer our surveys and we collected our results using tally marks. We have also been analysing and using information in tables and bar graphs. Next week we will be creating our own graphs.

Topic – Castles

This week we have been learning about Robert the Bruce and why he is so important in Scottish history. We watched a video showing us the story of Bruce and the spider and why a little spider was so important.

Music

We have been continuing to learn about rhythm through using our bodies as instruments! We had to use body percussion instead of clapping which was very fun and we were very creative! We have been continuing to read rhythms, follow rhythms and play rhythms, We had a visitor join us for music this week and she was very impressed with how clever we were and how tricky the rhythms were that we were able to play!

Red Nose Day

To celebrate Red Nose Day we spent the afternoon taking part in Red Nose Day bingo, a fun wordsearch of Red Nose Day words and designing our very own red noses!  We enjoyed showing the class our red noses and ‘touch of red.’

Another busy week of learning 3D and I’ve been so impressed at how well we are doing, particularly in Music and Science. Have a lovely weekend and I’m looking forward to seeing what next week brings us 🙂

Achievements

A massive well done to Grant who has been awarded his bronze award at Beavers!

Dojo star this week was Holly for showing excellent listening and staying on task.

Star of the week this week was Jamie for his work in Maths, Music and ICT. Well done!

ICT

We were enjoying Google Maps. We were trying to make our own castle using Colour Magic. We could choose between Google Maps and Colour Magic. We had to use what we have learned to make sure our castles were realistic. On Google Maps we were continuing to look at Scottish castles all over Scotland.

written by Luca, Oliver, James B and Ashar

Topic

We had to find Crathes Castle and other Scottish Castles on a map of Scotland. We had to use an atlas to do this. We were locating lots of Scottish castles including Edinburgh, Drum Castle and Dunnottar Castle. This was a hard task because we had to use lots of different maps.

written by Luca, Oliver, James B and Ashar

Maths

This week we have been learning about tiling and we needed to remember all of our learning about 2D shapes. We had to cut out shapes and draw around them in our jotters to see if they could tile or not. Then we could colour them in to make a design. We discovered circles and shapes with curved edges did not tile.

We also got to go outside and work with a partner to look for examples of tiling in the playground. When we found something we had to note it down on our clipboard. When we came back inside, we shared our shapes and findings with the rest of the class. When we came back inside, we shared our shapes and findings with the rest of the class.

written by Luca, Oliver, James B, Ashar and Conor

Problem Solving

For problem solving we had to think very carefully in case we got anything wrong and if it was right we could mark our work. We had to try and get all of the ice creams with different flavours on them. There was vanilla, mint, strawberry and chocolate. We also had to colour in the flavours on the cones. We needed to try and make the cones in a bit of an order to make sure we had all flavours. We went over the answers as a class on the whiteboard.

By Sophie, Lena and Tylar

Music

We were learning about how to play musical instruments and how to play rhythms on the instruments. We were playing ta and rest and ta-te notes. We had to drum or shake or ting out a rhythm! We went to the GP so that we could play the instruments. We got into little groups and we had rhythm cards which we had to play in our little orchestra! We needed to be able to say the rhythms and we also made our own rhythms.

By Alex, Callum, Georgie, Luca, Osa and Ross

 

World Book Day

Our Favourite Books

We brought in all of our favourite books to talk about in class.

We had to sit with a partner and tell them our thoughts and opinions about the book.

By Jamie

Creating Bookmarks

We made bookmarks  and they were laminated so that we can use them when we read.

By Oscar

Designing Book Covers

We had to design a new front cover for our favourite book. Our cover had to have the title and the author and illustrator. We also had to draw a picture on the cover using our knowledge of the book.

By Arjun, Johnny and Meishana

Book Quiz

Some P7s came to us and did a book quiz. The winners got a book mark and a pencil. There were 4 rounds of questions. The first round you needed to decide if it was true or false.

By Eilidh and Tylar

Mini Books

We were making our very own mini books. We got to write our own fiction or non-fiction books. We had to fold and cut paper in a special way to create our books.

By Rebecca, Lola, Holly

 

 

 

Class Meeting

We had our first ‘class meeting’ about what we enjoy and what we would like to change in our classroom. – Arjun

We wanted to change the play zones a little bit – Lena

We wanted to add some new dojo point options so that sometimes we can get 2 points instead of always 1 – Jamie

We decided to change the wet area as we are a bit bored of the job that is there. We are going to have water instead of sand. – Tylar

Class meetings allow us to share our opinion about our learning and classroom environment. One person will make notes so that we have a record of our decisions and discussions.

Maths

We have been learning about vertices and edges on 3D shapes. – Amy

We found it funny that we were learning about 3D shapes and we are the 3D class! – Sophie

We know that the cube is a special shape as it can have a lot of nets, maybe even 10 or 12! – Grant

We used blu-tac to help us count the faces, edges and corners of shapes. – Meishana

We have a play zone now where we have to make 3D shapes by creating their nets. We got to do this in Maths this week and enjoyed it a lot. – Alex

Writing

We were doing story writing this week. – Ashar

We did story writing about Shrek, Fiona and Donkey. – Osa

We had to continue the Shrek story from when he was rescuing Princess Fiona from the dragon. – James B.

We watched a bit of the Shrek movie and we had to continue the story from when they were running down the path away from the dragon. – Luca

We had to make sure the characters were still in our story. – Rebecca

We used highlighters to go over our full stops and capital letters to make sure we were using them properly. – Eilidh

We had to use the success criteria to make sure our story was good. – Lola

Music

We were looking at crotchet and quaver notes again and we had to make a 6-beat rhythm. – Callum

I brought my drum into school and I played some rhythms. Lots of people liked my first song. – Arran

RME

In RME we were learning about Islam and where Muslims worship. – Johnny

They worship at the Mosque and we were learning that Muslims do 5 prayers a day. – Arjun

In the Mosque you would find a Qiblah which is a fancy wall that faces Mecca. Also a washing area where Muslims wash their hands, feet, face and mouth before entering the Mosque and they take off their shoes as well. – Sophie

We also found out about prayer mats. They use those for praying because they pray on the ground. – Luca

I told the class a bit about Islam – Ashar

Literacy – Alphabetical Order

We were learning about alphabetical order and putting words in order beginning with a, b, c and d and other letters. – Rebecca

For alphabetical order if things are not in order you can rub them out and do them again and put them in order with the right letter of the alphabet. – Tylar

We need to look at the second letter if the first letter of some words is the same. – Holly

ICT

I enjoyed looking at Google Maps. – Oliver

Our job was to look up local castles and see what they looked like. – Logan

We went onto Google Maps and searched for local castles.  We searched for Crathes and Drum and other local castles so that we could see what they looked like inside and outside.  We could see where they are compared to Cults. – Arjun

 

Here are the URLs for the homework tasks due Monday 4th March.

Alphabetical Order

https://www.roythezebra.com/reading-games/alphabetical-order-1.html

http://www.crickweb.co.uk/ks1literacy.htmland then scroll down and choose ‘Alphabetical Order 1’

Capital Letters

https://www.roythezebra.com/reading-games/capital-letter-beginner-1.html

https://www.roythezebra.com/reading-games/capital-letter-1.html

Maths

Our new maths topic we have been looking at this week was shape. Some of us were revising 2D shapes and some of us were learning about 3D shapes. We have been playing a lot of games to consolidate our learning and we have had a big focus on looking at our maths success criteria for the lesson and traffic lighting to evaluate our learning and understanding of the lessons.

GoNoodle

We have been trying to find the time to fit in some GoNoodle this week!

Science – Human Body

Did you know we have 2 lungs and one is slightly bigger than the other? Did you know that when we breathe in we get oxygen and we get rid of carbon dioxide? Our organs are very important and we need them to survive. We were FANTASTIC and learned lots and lots of interesting facts about the lungs and how the lungs work to help us breathe. This is the second organ of the human body we have been learning about after previously learning about the heart. We listened to some songs (slightly annoying but very memorable!) to learn about the lungs…

‘breathe in.. lungs get bigger..

breathe out.. lungs get smaller!’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPk4esW0Rbw

We took big breaths in and out to try and test this. We then took part in a quiz where we had to predict if a statement was true or false. We voted to show our answers before finding out if we were correct or not.

Topic – Castles Junk Modelling

Our challenge was to create a junk model castle whilst applying our prior learning of castles and some of the parts that a lot of castles would have – moat, drawbridge, arrow slits, battlements etc. In order to do this we had to work well together as a team and keep checking back to the success criteria to ensure that our models were successful. When we were finished we had some more time to add characters and a little bit more detail. We had lots of fun applying our knowledge and cooperative skills.

Gym

There were lots of small badminton games going on in gym this week. A lot of us are being very kind and encouraging to others and have been using positive language and praising each other when we do well. We have all progressed a lot since the start of the block.

Golden Time

The Blue Unit started a new system for Golden Time this week. Every teacher in the unit is holding a different activity in their classroom/outside and each class gets a few spaces in each activity so that children can choose and sign up to a wider choice of organised activities. In our class we are going to try having different tables signing up first each week to try and keep it very fair and so that everyone is being treated equally. If we are some of the last tables to sign up one week, we will be one of the first the following week and so on. This seems to be working better – lots of happy children at the end of Friday. Activities will change every few weeks.

I hope everyone had a lovely long weekend 🙂

Handwriting

We have been continuing to work on our joined handwriting. We’ve been discussing the fact that we need to keep practising in order to become good at using joined writing and that it’s ok to find it tricky until we get better at it. We must be positive! We are also having to think about how single letters are formed to ensure that we are joining correctly.

ActiveLearn

We have been using the ActiveLearn website this week to do some active maths games. We will be taking our logins home next week and sometimes we will have games set for our homework to complete. The games have levels to work through and you collect points in every game. We were working on sequencing, addition, subtraction and other areas of number.

We also played a game on Topmarks where we had to shoot odd or even coconuts. A lot of us are finding this tricky so it might be an idea to have a go at home! We spoke about numbers being in the 2 times table or when we count in 2s being even and numbers ending in 1,3,5,7,9 are odd.

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/learning-to-count/coconut-odd-or-even

Spelling

We have been working on spelling our common words and applying spelling rules to write and spell words correctly. We took part in spelling activities – we have been doing a lot of active learning this week which we have enjoyed.

Library

We go to library every Friday. We have class library helpers each week that help with the scanning and issuing of books.

Valentines Day

We were learning the story behind why we celebrate Valentines Day. There was a priest called Valentine and he married couples in secret as the Emperor forbade people to get married so that they would join his army. It is believed that Valentine managed to perform a miracle and cure a blind girl. On the day that he died, he wrote a letter to the girl and signed it ‘Your Valentine.’ Some people believe this is why we celebrate Valentines Day today. We then made 3D hearts.

Health and Wellbeing

We have been learning about empathy and ‘the maze’ through watching the following videos on ClassDojo. We have been sharing our own experiences and asking lots of good questions!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENIB2H3S_oQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6WNRMj4970

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRjYgfFnrL4