The last few weeks have been very busy. Have a look to see what we have been up to…

We have even been visiting Alloa Academy on a Wednesday morning. This is a great opportunity to develop our computing skills and we have been really enjoying it.

We have started some Decimal Fractions work for our Maths focus and are making the link between decimals and fractions. We applied our learning to an Olympics task this week by ordering 100m sprint finishing times from fastest to slowest.

We have been focussing on describing the setting in our writing and have been up levelling the vocabulary we use.

Our Science work has been on developing our electrical circuits skills and knowledge. We created series and parallel circuits this week.

We have been learning about Comic Relief this week as Primary 5 and Primary 1 are leading this event. We had to think about how we can share our information with the rest of the school  and we had to make decisions about which activities we were going to do.

In science we are learning about electricity. We have been learning about electrical circuits and symbols. We carried out a series of experiments and discovered that in a series circuit, if you add more bulbs with one battery the bulb becomes dimmer and the opposite also happens, if you add more batteries with one bulb the bulb gets brighter.

In maths this we are continuing to learn about fractions. There are poroper fractions (eg 1/2), improper fractions (eg 3/2) and mixed numbers (eg 1 1/2).  We have also been comparing fractions to each other. Which is harder than it sounds!!!

In reading and in writing we are learning about plays. We have been reading play scripts and looking at this style of writing. In drama we had to act out scenes from a play.

Through our Romans’ topic we have been learning about lots of different things including:

• Who were the Romans?
• What did a typical Roman soldier wear?
• What are Roman numerals and how do you read them?

We applied our understanding of Roman Numerals to break codes.

We created mosaics, this was a popular type of art in during the time of the Roman Empire.

We have created and annotated diagrams of Roman soldiers, keep an eye out for these in our learning journals!

We we have been carrying out research using books and the internet.

We are really enjoying our new class novel Wonder by R. J. Palacio. We have been using it to help us to develop our understanding of plot, character and setting.

With Mrs Brown we have been looking at the character August. We had to use the text to help inform us about what we know about him so far. We used adjectives to describe his character.

With Mrs Hallahan we looked at a different character, Julian. We discussed how the author uses words and phrases to infer ideas about Julian and develop the tension between August and Julian.

In Maths we have started working on fractions and also data handling

We have now started our new class novel, ‘Wonder’ by R.J Palacio, and we are really enjoying it so far.

As part of our Literacy learning we used story cards to create our own stories. We had to choose different coloured cards and put them together to create a story. It was lots of fun and we’re keen to do this activity again.

We performed our Scots song, Caledonia, to the whole school during our Scots Assembly. We picked the song because we learned that Caledonia was what the Romans called Scotland, therefore linking nicely to our topic.

We made a timeline to help us understand how long ago the Romans lived. We had to sequence key dates from history using our knowledge of BC and AD, we’re great at it now!

David demonstrated his excellent problem solving skills by holding a Rubiks Cube masterclass! My homework is to learn how to solve one too – wish me luck!

Thank you so much for all your support with our War Horse assembly, the children all did a fantastic job learning their lines and performed brilliantly yesterday afternoon. It was great that so many people were able to join in with our afternoon.

It definitely has been a busy start to the new term for us and we are now looking forward to getting our teeth into our Romans topic and our new class novel, Wonder.

Keep checking our blogs for updates!

Welcome back! I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and New Year. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for the lovely cards and gifts I received.

We’ve been using the theme of New Year as a stimulus for our learning and this week our maths focus was around being able to read and understand a calendar. We’ve completed some problem solving tasks using calendars from previous years.

We’ve also made a wish for ourselves for 2019 and used a dandelion to represent this. We had great fun finger painting our dandelions this week.

Here are our first pictures of 2019…

We’ve been busy designing and creating our own multiplication and division board games. It’s been lots of fun and they look fantastic!

We’ve also been solving a Christmas themed maths problem every morning and it’s a great way to wake our brains up!

Quiet Critters were introduced to our class to help us stay quiet and focussed when we are working. We are working together to beat our weekly Class Dojo total and keeping our Quiet Critters on our tables helps us achieve this. Last week our grand Dojo points total was 612. However, we have already beaten that for this week!

We took part in the Redwell Christmas Show and it was lots of work. It was amazing. We had been rehearsing lots of different songs and some of the class even took on solo parts.

We did a Christmas ‘Who Killed Santa?’ murder mystery task. We had try to find out who killed Santa by interviewing the suspects, listening for clues and coming up with our own conclusion about what happened to Santa. Ask your child who the guilty person was!

We have been trying to solve some Christmas maths problems. They were tricky but we worked hard and found the solutions.

*Thanks to Ruan, Jay, Olivia and Harris for contributing to our Blog this week.

Red Rowan and Green Elder are developing their problem solving skills this afternoon. They are using a ‘guess, check and improve’ strategy to work out the answer to the problem.

Comment on this post of you can work out the answer! Thank you to Miss MacLean for sending us the problem!