P4 have been very busy over the last few months and we have decided to make one blog post and include it all.

Our Sensory Garden has been a major focus for the school this term and we have become in charge of looking after all the flowers, plants and vegetables.  We have decided to name ourselves the Gardening Gang and after inititally planting all of the flowers etc, we go out each Wednesday in order to maintain and water them.  However, we have had to go out on extra watering duties because of all of the glorious weather we have been getting.  Here are a few pictures of the plants we have already planted.

We recently had a Day of Action in school for our Eco and Rights Respecting School committes.  We had lots of different activities to do with our parents and the Gardening Gang thought it would be nice to offer them the opportunity to plant a flower out the front of the school.  Devyn, Chelase and Ellie all went along to B&Ms with Mrs Paterson to buy 260 plants so that each child could make their contribution to the garden.

We really enjoyed the day of action and the plants that were planted are looking great!

Things are starting to slow down a bit now that we only have a few weeks left in P4.  We have been thinking about primary 5 and we can’t wait to find out who our new teacher will be, we are quite excited about our moving up day on Thursday!  In preparation for becoming a P5, we have been in training as Librarians.  This is a responsibility that comes with being in P5 and we have really enjoyed the training that the current P5 pupils hadplanned and delivered to us.

This term we are learning about Blood, bones and body part!  We made a list of all the things we would like to find out about and the list is so long that I think we will be extremely busy for the next few weeks. 

The first thing we did was get ourselves into new cooperative learning groups.  Here is a photograph of us with our group banners.

Last week we learned about the skeleton.  We labelled all of the bones in the body using words that we were familiar with.  Then Mrs Ross set us a challenge.  We had to use the proper names for all of the bones and label them correctly.  The skull is called the cranium, your femur is your thigh bone and it is the strongest bone in your body,  the ulna is your fore arm, the mandible is your jaw bone, your scapula is your shoulder blade and your sternum is your breast bone. There are lots more and we are hoping that we can remeber at least 5 of these difficult words.

Have a look at the display we have in our classroom that will help us to remeber.

Do you like our cotton bud skeletons?  We had great fun making them and putting them into lots of different postions.

We have been working on creating some raps/songs/poems about bones in our cooperative learning groups and we are looking forward to performing them to the rest of our class.    Look out for them appearing on our blog…

We have been learning about Roman Gods and Godesses.  We have been working in our Cooperative Learning Groups to research information about one God and One Goddess.  Each group had to make sure that they were researching different Gods and Goddesses than the others so that they could become experts.  We then put all the information that we gathered onto a poster and presented it to the class.  Here are some pictures of us doing our presentations.

A Contubernium researched The Roman God Jupiter and The Goddess Diana.

A Century reasearched The Roman God Pluto and The Goddess Vesta.

A Legion researched The Roman God Neptune and The Goddess Venus.

A Cohort researched The Roman God Mars and The Goddess Minerva.

The Cavarly researched The Roman God Mercury and The Goddess Juno.

We now know lots of information about these Gods and Goddesses like:

Minerva was born directly out of Jupiter’s brain – Abbie

Mercury was Jupiter’s youngest son – Dylan

Jupiter is the King of all Gods – Kirk

Neptune could raise his hand and a new island would appear because he was the God of the Sea – Adam

Mars was the God of war – Kieran

Venus was the Goddess of love and beauty – Jules

Juno was married to Jupiter and she was very jealous – Sirin

Minerva was the Goddess of Wisdom – Devyn

We also worked in our groups to re-write a story about one of our Gods and Goddesses.  The Calvary wrote about ‘Mercury and Apollo’, A Legion wrote about ‘Venus and Queen Helen’, A Contubernium wrote about ‘Jupitor, Juno and Little Io’, A Cohort wrote about ‘ Minerva and Neptune and A Century wrote about ‘Pluto and the King’.  Each person in the group was responsible for writing one part of the story and it was pieced together at the end.  If you come along to our Open Evening on the 26th of March you will be able to read these magnificent stories!

This week we were sad to say goodbye to Miss MacLean who was a teaching student from Stirling University.  Miss MacLean has spent the last 5 weeks in our class and so we were very lucky to have two teachers teaching us for a while.  We wish Miss MacLean all the best for her next teaching placement.

This week we also learned about Roman Mosaics and we worked on creating our own complicated pictures using small mosaic tiles.  What do you think?

A visit from the SSPCA was a great way to end our week.  Leigh was great fun and she had so many exciting stories to tell us about what goes on in her job and what a great job they do in order to keep all the animals (pets and wild animals) safe.  We enjoyed playing a game where we had to put ourselves in the shoes of the workers for the SSPCA and attempt to prioritise a variety of jobs that may arise for them on a daily basis.  It was such a tricky job but we now know that if an animal is injured then that becomes the most important job and we would need to see to that first.

Primary 4 have been so busy since we got back to school that we haven’t had time to up date our blog.  So here is a wee summary of what we have been doing since January.

We were really excited to start our new topic all about the Romans.  We have learned about the Roman Army and all of the groups that go together to make a Legion.  There are 8 men in a Contubernium, this is the smallest group in the whole Legion.  A century has 80 men in it and a Cohort has 480 men in it and then there is The Cavalry which has 120 men and they are used for scouts and messengers.  Altogether there was over 5,000 soldiers in a Legion.  We have used these names for our class cooperative learning groups and this is helping us to remember them all especially ‘contubernium’ because it is such a tricky word.

We really enjoyed making our mini and life size Roman Soldiers. They look amazing on our classroom wall!

We also learned a Scottish song and poem for our Scot’s Event, which was held in school on Friday 25th January.  We really enjoyed reciting our poem ‘A Dug, A Dug’ by Bill Keys because it is really funny and Ben from our class does it so well that he has been chosen to compete in the Burn’s competition being held this week.  We wish him the best of luck!  ‘ The Welly Boot Song’ was also great fun to learn.  It was really amusing listening to everyone singing in Scots.

As well as all of that we have been working on our times table skills in maths, focusing on beginnings, middles and endings in story writing and we have been introduced to writing Book Reviews.  As always the children in primary 4 have been busy busy bees.  They have  had a great start to the year and we are looking forward to taking on the rest of the challenges that face us in 2013!

Over the last few weeks we have had so much fun in Primary 4.  We have been working on all sorts of Christmas crafts, maths and writing activities so that we can create a little book to take home to our parents at the end of term. 

Mrs Ross thought it would be a fun idea for us to sew our own Christmas Bauble decorations and although it was tricky at first , we soon got the hang of it.  We sewed on some sequence on both parts of the felt bauble shapes and then we had to sew them both together, stuff them with cotton wool and sew them up.  They look great, we can’t wait to add them to our Christmas trees at home!

In the next few days we have got the Cakes and Carols Concert to look forward to as well as making our Christmas cards (Mrs Ross has a great ideas for those) and our church service to end the term. 

We hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday and we look forward to getting back into our new topic about the Romans in the new year.

Instead of having our reading, spelling and maths homework, Mrs Ross set us a homework challenge.  We had to use junk materials to create a 3d model of a landmark in Clackmannanshire.  Have a wee look at our creations and see if you can work out what landmarks we chose to make…

This is just a sample of the amazing completed models, hopefully we will be able to upload the rest soon.  Aren’t they amazing?  Well done P4!

Mr McLaren has been teaching us how to design our own computer games using a programme called 2DIY.  The first game we made was a drag game, then a placing game but our favourite game was the platform one.  We designed Santa’s Grotto with platforms on it and we had Santa collecting all the presents that were left by the elves.  We had to be quick though because the elves were trying to catch us at the same time. 

Hayden thought the game was amazing, Marcus had a brilliant time creating and playing the game and Sirin enjoyed creating the characters in her game.

Mr McLaren has been very busy in the middle floor teaching all of the classes how to use this program.  He has been teaching us how to create different games so Mrs Ross and Miss Fulton decided to let us be teachers for the afternoon and share our expertise with the other class.  P4/5 came into our room and we had great fun teaching each other how to create and play the different games.  P4/5 taught us how to create a pairs game and a jigsaw game and we taught them how to make a dragging game and a placing game.  We can’t wait to teach P4/5 how to make a platform game because we think they will enjoy this one as much as we did!

We would like to say a huge thank you to all of the parents that came to our Open classroom on Thursday afternoon.  We enjoyed sharing all of our work with you and I think our experts did a very good job at describing what was on display at their area. 

The children have worked hard to produce work of a very high standard and it was clear to see that they were very proud of our classroom and all of their work that was on display.

The best part was when they showed their parents their dance moves during ‘The Hippo and The Dog’  dance to show how comfortable they all are with each other.

Check out our photos below.

We had great fun on Friday because we were allowed to come to school dressed up in our Halloween costumes!  Everyone made such a great effort with their costumes and we all looked really spooky.

  Don’t we all look amazing?

We had a fun filled day in class, carving our pumpkin, writing spooky stories and poems and of course our Halloween party in the afternoon.  We got very messy catching our jammy donuts, searching for gooey body parts and ghosty marsmallows and of course we even got wet dooking for apples.  Have a look at our photos below.  Do you think we enjoyed ourselves?