It’s been a very busy, Christmassy week here in 3D…
Christmas Shows
I was so impressed at the narrating, singing and actions in our Christmas performances. We have worked very hard and definitely saved the best till last! Everyone looked fantastic in their Innkeeper costumes – even if Miss Dow did find it a little stressful sorting 30 tea towels and headbands! Well done everyone – I am very proud of you all 🙂 We hope you all enjoyed watching us too. Here are some nice photos of us ready for our dress rehearsal and some silly face ones we insisted on being taken!
Let’s Create
This week we have started to make sock snowmen and sock penguins. A few of us still have to finish.
We have been making gift bags to sell to you all. First we had to make a plan so that we knew how our final design would roughly look. We had lots of fun and used many different textures and resources to finish our designs.
We have been making our ‘4 Season’ Calendars this week. This has involved step-by-step drawing, colouring, painting and sticking! It’s been a long process but the finished calendars are looking great – we can’t wait for you to see the finished results on Thursday!
Christmas Alphabet
We have been thinking about as many words related to Christmas as we can. Our challenge was to try and think of a word that began with each letter of the alphabet – some were easier than others!
Christmas Maths
We have been learning about grid references. We should use ‘along the corridor, up the stairs’ to remind us to look along the bottom first and then up to find the correct square. We had to follow instructions to create a Christmas tree that we could then decorate. We also had to complete maths addition and subtraction questions and colour them the correct colour to find a hidden Christmas picture.
Christmas Jumper Day
On Friday we all wore jumpers for Christmas Jumper Day. As part of our topic we had to design our very own Christmas jumper for the charity.
We kindly ask for a £1 or more donation towards your child’s decorations. All decorations will come home whether you wish to donate or not. This money will be collated and as a whole, put towards a future trip/event for the class.
As you are aware we have been very busy with our ‘Let’s Create’ topic and have been designing and creating our very own Christmas decorations. The children would like to ‘sell’ their decorations and will have a Christmas gift bag with at least 4 Christmas decorations/items inside.
If you cannot make it to our selling afternoon but would still like to donate, please send the money into school with your child on the day.
Happy December! We have a very busy last few weeks ahead of us. ..
Hanukkah
We have been learning about the ‘Festival of Light.’ We listened to the story of Hanukkah and discussed it altogether. We had to complete a wordsearch and match artefacts to their official names. If we were finished we could design our own menorah.
Christmas Rehearsals
We have been so busy this week with Nativity rehearsals in the gym hall. The Narrators have been using louder, clearer, fantastic voices each day we practise and the choir have been adding in actions to our songs and singing loudly. We can’t wait to perform for you all and hope to see you next week.
Science
The weather has finally dried up a bit which allowed us to get outside and test our parachutes! We used the climbing frame to get off of the ground and we had to drop our parachute and see how straight and how quickly or slowly it fell to the ground. As we predicted, the bigger parachutes did fall slower than the smaller designs. We also found that the wind affected our results so if we were to test them again we might get slightly different results. We had lots of fun testing our designs, it was definitely worth the wait.
Maths
This week we have been continuing with time and looking at o’clock times, half past, and some of us have also been learning quarter to and quarter past the hour. Miss Dow was very impressed that a lot of us already knew that the hour hand should be half way between 2 hours when it is a half past time. We have been telling the time on given clocks, drawing the hands on our own clocks and using digital clocks too. We have been using small clocks to show Miss Dow the time that she asked us.
Special Visitors
We have had some special visitors in class with us this week. Their names are Holly and Jolly and they are elves from Santa’s workshop. We think they came through their own ‘elf door’ which has appeared on our wall. Every morning when we come in, they are up to mischief. So far they have been hanging up their elf washing, hugging the Christmas tree and they even put up the Christmas tree for us! We can’t wait to see what else they get up to in the coming weeks.
They asked us to decorate the tree so we each got to put up a few baubles and decorations.
Gym
In gym we have been learning Scottish Country Dances. Some of us were a bit unsure to begin with when we were told we had to hold hands with a partner! But we soon got used to it! We had lots of fun and were very sweaty by the end of it! Our best dance so far is the Canadian Barn Dance.
Let’s Create! (Topic)
This week we have been using our design plans (completed last week) to stick our lollipop sticks together, paint them and then finally decorate them ready for hanging.
Art
We have started and completed the first few steps of a piece of Winter art. First we had to choose a colour to paint our Winter background. Secondly, we had to paint snow on the ground of our picture. We have also been drawing and colouring the Winter trees before we finish it off with more snow and lots of glitter! We have had to use a lot of different materials for this piece of art and think about size, position, texture and layering.
We won Star Class at the Infant Assembly again this week! Miss Mackay said that she couldn’t give it to another class as we were the best, even though we had it last week too! We couldn’t believe it!
Problem Solving
We have been carrying on with our ‘design a park/garden’ problem solving challenge this week. We had to finish off our plans of our garden and then we had to work out how many workers we need to run the park. We were given the price per day of what each worker would receive and we had to calculate (using a calculator if necessary) how much it would cost to pay the staff each day. Although it was not a realistic wage, we had to work together in our groups to calculate and agree on our decisions. We have been learning about COMPROMISE. We know that this means meeting in the ‘middle’ with someone if we cannot agree on an idea.
Cups of Kindness
On Monday we emptied our ‘cups’ that we created last week and read all of the lovely comments and compliments our classmates had left for us. The smiles on our faces (see photos) show how it made us feel! We had to choose our favourite one to hold up and share with the class. Some of us are keeping these notes in our personal trays so that if we every feel sad or not very good about ourselves we can go into our tray, read the notes and hopefully feel a bit better!
Reading
In our verbal reading this week we have been thinking about:
*reading at a good pace/fluency
*taking a short pause when there is a full stop
*reading new, unknown words
*reading with expression
Writing
We have started focussing on imaginative writing. We used story dice and when we rolled the dice we ended up with a smiley face, a question mark, a ladder and a rain cloud. We had to use each of these things in our story and try to make sure our story had a clear beginning, middle and end. We planned the story at our tables so that we could share our ideas and come up with one story together and then we wrote our story individually in our jotters.
Let’s Create! (Topic)
We have started to plan our next design challenge. We must use either 1 or 3 lollipop sticks to design a Christmas decoration. We watched Miss Dow draw some ideas on the board and we had to think of what design we wanted to do. Our ideas included elves, Santas, Rudolphs, angels and Christmas trees. We had to sketch a rough plan of our idea which we will use when we make our final designs next week.
Spelling
For spelling this week we have been doing ‘back writing.’ This is when we have to work with a partner and use our finger to spell one of our words on their back. They must guess what word we wrote and then we swap over. If we were finding it easy, Miss Dow challenged us to write the word in capital letters and see if our partner could still guess the word correctly!
Science
We are still patiently waiting for the rain to stop and grass to dry a bit so that we can get outside and onto the climbing equipment to test our parachutes! Fingers crossed we’ll manage to do this next week.
Play Zones
We have had lots of fun this week in our play zones!
What’s New?
We now have a new special box in our classroom. The box is full of brand new books that Miss Dow has brought in for us. If we have a spare 5 minutes (usually at the end of the day) Miss Dow chooses someone that has been working very hard that day and they can choose a special book to read to the class. This week we have read ‘Penguins’ which was all about penguins in a zoo who find a camera and take lots of selfies! We found it very funny and enjoyed seeing the selfies that they took at the end of the book. We also read ‘Sharing a Shell,’Â ‘Little Penguin Learns to Swim’ and ‘The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark.’
A letter has gone home to tell you that we are going to be dressed as innkeepers in the Christmas Nativity this year.
Here is the information just incase…
Christmas Nativity
P3D will be dressing up as Innkeepers for the Christmas performances. Please bring in a costume in a labelled bag as soon as possible (by Monday 10th December at the latest please).
This might consist of:
a tea towel and headband to wear on the head
a white/brown/navy etc top or dress
stripy pyjama bottoms or dark trousers
These are only some ideas so please feel free to bring in anything you feel is suitable for a Nativity innkeeper to wear or anything you already have at home. We are practising our songs a lot in class and are beginning to get excited about performing to you all!
A letter has gone home with the Christmas song words for the 3 songs we are doing in the Christmas performances. This is also part of the homework this week to ensure you know the words and are confident, particularly with ‘It was on a Starry Night’ as it is a song we have not done before.
Mrs Charleton was very impressed with the behaviour and hard work that went on in class last week whilst she was teaching 3D. Unfortunately there are no photos to show for it!
Star Class!
We had a lovely positive start to the week when Mrs Dalziel presented us with assembly star as we were the class who were listening the most and giving the best answers.
Active Maths
On Monday we used the laptops and ‘Topmarks’ website to play some maths number games. Some of the games we could choose from were:
Our reading task this week was to create a word search! We have had to find new and tricky words in our reading books and hide them in a word search. We then swapped with someone in our reading group to try and find the words that they had hidden. We had to identify new words and be able to spell them correctly.
Music – Rhythm Walk!
We know that a 1 beat note is called a crotchet.
We also know that this is a rest and it also lasts for one beat.
We had to use our understanding of this to clap out different rhythms that Miss Dow showed us. We use ‘ta’ and ‘rest’ to help us clap the rhythm and keep a steady beat without speeding up! The rhythms were placed around the GP floor and with a partner we had to go on a ‘rhythm walk’ around the room. Every time we arrived at a rhythm, we had to clap it out with our partner. If we were feeling confident, we could clap it without saying ‘ta’ and ‘rest’ which proved to be a bit trickier! Miss Dow then put a few rhythms together to make them even longer and we had to do the same again. We are getting very good at clapping different rhythms and reading crotchets and rests! We also got to make up our own rhythms which we had to clap to the class and they had to repeat it back.
Spelling
We used whiteboards and had to write out as many words as we could think of that used our spelling sound. If we couldn’t think of any more we could then look at the sounds the other groups had and try and think of words for those sounds too. Some of us were able to think of loads!
French
We have been practising our numbers 1-20 and days of the week.
Science/Topic – Parachutes!
As part of our ‘Lets Create’ topic this week we have been designing and making our very own parachutes! We started off by learning about GRAVITY and AIR RESISTANCE. Miss Dow was SO impressed with the discussion that we had and the answers we were able to share with the class. We know that gravity and air resistance fight against each other which makes an object fall slower to the ground. We could tell that a marble was going to fall straighter and faster than Conor’s postcard. His postcard fell slower and not as straight. We also guessed correctly that an elephant would land much quicker than a feather.
We watched the following video after our discussion which we all found hilarious! We had to predict what we thought would happen to the egg each time.
We were able to tell Miss Dow that a bigger parachute would fall slower than a small parachute as there would be more air trapped in the material and therefore it would have more air resistance, making it fall slower. We know that this is why a skydiver falls to begin with and when they let out their parachute, they go shooting upwards as the air resistance kicks in more than the gravity and with both air resistance and gravity, the sky diver falls slowly and safely to the ground.
We used our plastic bags to make our own parachutes. We had to decide what shape and size we wanted our parachute to be and how many strings it should have. If we were finished we could use the rest of our time to add a design to our parachute. To finish, we added plasticine to the end of the strings to act as a person.
Once the weather brightens up and the rain stops we’re going to go out to the playground climbing frame to test our parachutes.
Health & Wellbeing: Cupful of Kindness
We have been thinking about how our actions and words can affect others. We decided that when people say nice things or do nice things for us, it fills up our bucket/cup inside our bodies full of kindness and makes us very happy. When people do horrible, nasty things, it takes some of that happiness away and eventually could leave us with an empty cup and we would be feeling miserable and unhappy about ourselves. When we do nice things for other people it not only fills up THEIR cup of kindness but also OUR own cup. We then had to think of a time this past week where we have said or done a nice thing for somebody and share it with the circle in Circle Time. We used sharpies to design and decorate our own cups so that the class can write little kind notes and messages and put it in our cups to help us feel good and have good mental health. On Friday we are going to get our cups handed out and be able to read all of the nice things people have said about us.. hopefully all of our cups of kindness inside us will be overflowing!
5 minutes after our cups were finished, they were already starting to fill up…
I’m afraid this week’s blog is rather short compared to normal due to being absent and a busy week with parents evening!
Bonfire Night Art
We listened to the story of Guy Fawkes and we learned why he wanted to blow up the houses of Parliament. We learned that he was in the cellar of the houses of parliament when he was caught! We used wax crayons to draw different fireworks and bonfires. We had to press very hard with the crayons to ensure they showed up properly. We then chose either blue or black watered down paint to paint over the top of the crayon and the results were amazing! (art work has now been sent home)
Remembrance Day
When Mrs Charleton was teaching us on Tuesday we spoke about Remembrance Day and why we wear poppies. We got to make our own poppies that we will be taking home to use over the weekend. Miss Dow has also shared interesting facts with us about WW1. We learned that women had to do a lot of the jobs that men used to do as they had to leave their jobs to fight in the war. We also learned about the role that animals had in WW1. We learned that pigeons would carry secret messages in code wrapped around their leg and dogs and horses would pull trailers of resources for the soldiers and even acted as ambulances pulling trailers of injured soldiers to safety.
Let’s Create!
Our new topic is called ‘Let’s Create!’ It will involve a lot of problem solving, working as part of a team, designing, building and getting arty and creative! We started off by being set a challenge to build a rocket using only lego. As a class, we created our own success criteria that we then used to ensure we built a successful rocket. We all love using lego and so enjoyed this task.
Paired Reading
We meet with P7T roughly every fortnight to do paired reading. We read together with our partners, taking turns to read and they are good at reminding us to use expression and help us to become more confident with our reading. Some of us have even been using funny voices when we are reading with them! At times we also share our written work with them and enjoy sharing our success with our p7 partners.
Spelling
We have been working hard to learn and consolidate our spelling sounds this week. We used whiteboards to think of as many words as we could that use the same sound. We discussed this in our spelling group and Miss Dow wrote up some of our answers on the board. If we got a word wrong, she would write it up and show us the sound that it did use so that we could see why it was incorrect.
French
We have been learning the days of the week in French. We learned that they do not use capital letters for the names of the days and we used this song to help us to learn the order.
Welcome back to term 2! I can’t believe we are on term 2 already – everyone looks so much taller after the holidays! I hope you all had a lovely time – we have had lots of stories of trips away and catching up with friends and family which sounds lovely!
We are back into the swing of things and back to our normal routine this week…
Writing
Since it is bonfire night this coming Monday we wrote list poems all about bonfire night. All of our past learning about nouns and adjectives came in very useful for our poem! Each line of our poem had to have…
adjective – noun – verb (if we were finished we then had to add on a verb!)
We wrote an example together on the board and then we had to mindmap at our tables possible adjectives, nouns and verbs that we might want to use. Our poems turned out so well and we were able to follow the
‘describing word – place/thing – doing word’ pattern.
French
We revised our learning of colours and also counting 1-10 by playing bingo this week. We are mostly confident counting 1-10 but we need to work on recognising each number and knowing that dix is 10 and deux is 2 etc. This game really got us thinking and concentrating on each individual number. Miss Dow called out the number in French and we had to tick the number on our whiteboard that we had written in digits. Once we had all of our numbers ticked, we had to shout ‘BINGO!’
Problem Solving/Science
For problem solving this week we were challenged to design and build a boat that would float using only plasticine. To be able to do this, we had to think about floating and sinking. We learned that objects do not have to be big and heavy to sink. We watched the following youtube video that went into a little bit of detail about PARTICLES and that if the particles are very close together then the object is likely to sink.
We realised that the reason a lot of our boats sunk was because:
the walls of the boat were too small
there were holes/cracks in the boat
the design was too complicated
We then decided that it would be a good idea to make a new boat and try to improve our first design. Miss Dow told us that this is a problem solving strategy – to try and solve a problem, check if it works and then try to improve it. We worked in new groups and our new designs were much better with almost all of them being able to float and hold lots of marbles! (photos courtesy of Jamie)
Music
This term we are going to be focussing on Music rather than drama. This week we have been thinking about rhythm. Miss Dow showed us what a one beat note looks like (Callum knew that it was called a crotchet since he plays piano! – well done!) She also showed us what a one beat rest looks like. We practised clapping different rhythms and reading them on the board. Some of us were happy to clap one of the rhythms to the class and they had to guess what rhythm we had played.
RME
Through exploring
Bible stories, I can
describe some beliefs
Christians have about
God and Jesus.
RME 1-01a
I can talk about my
own beliefs, or express
them in other ways.
RME 1-01c
We listened to Miss Dow tell us the story of ‘The Tower of Babel’ and then we watched the following short youtube video of the story. We had really good discussions about the moral of the story and what Christians believe about God. The story taught us that we shouldn’t be greedy and that we are not better than other people – everyone is equal. We shouldn’t be selfish and Christians believe that God is the best and that we should think about him regularly. God cares about us all and not just one person.
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of our ‘Let’s Create!’ topic.
It will be part of homework next week to bring in a black (for penguin) or white sock (for snowman) from home but this is just a heads up.
