This has been a busy week.  We used our knowledge of symmetry, number patterns, multiplication, fractions and letter puzzles to solve a murder mystery in maths.

During assembly Mrs McKenna told the purple wing a story about an old man who sold his house and went sailing away on a boat.  We were asked to share the story at home.   Today R volunteered to share the story with the class to ensure anyone who missed it yesterday got caught up.  He shared the story with confidence and was even able to get the secret trick to work first time.  He even got a round of applause.

During art we created 3D effect planet pictures using chalk pastels making sure we shaded and smudged to create an atmospheric design.  We also used our knowledge of nets of 3D shapes to create 3D rockets.  They all look great on the wall.

We also worked on our problem solving and team work skills to complete a challenge – we showed great resilience and ensured we followed the rules (which actually made it more fun).

As part of our homework we were asked to think about a way of remembering the order of the planets.  These are some of the examples we came up with:

• My Very Excited Mother Just Saw Us Napping
• My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets (if you include Pluto)
• Mom Very Easily Made Juicy Sandwiches Using Nutella

Dear Parent/Carer,

I hope you find the following information useful.

Learning focus this term:

Through our topic Space we will be learning about:

• The Solar System
• The moon landings and future missions to Mars
• The challenges in sending humans into space.

Core Literacy:

Our class novel this term is The Jamie Drake Equation.  We are using this to write imaginatively and to explore aspects of grammar, such as openers, conjunctions and speech punctuation.

Core Numeracy:

This term will be focusing on

• Fractions, decimals and percentages
• 3D shapes and their nets
• Properties of 2D shapes
• Scale
• Symmetry
• Angles

Core Health and Wellbeing:

Our primary focus this term is looking at how we are all different and how we can celebrate, and support each other.

We are learning about people’s core beliefs about looking after the planet through creation stories in RME.

Homework

Homework will be sent home on Friday’s.  A follow up letter with further information will be sent out in the next week.

Lost Property:

We are aware that children sometimes misplace jumpers and other items of clothing. Please ensure that your child’s name is on every piece of clothing that comes into school. Children are given opportunities to find their property in class and throughout the school. If your child comes out of school without some of their belongings, they will be given the opportunity to retrieve their property the next day.

Kind regards,

Miss Ferguson

Our current topic is space. We have been looking at the solar system as well as the moon landing in 1969. Along side our topic, our new novel is ‘The Jamie Drake Equation’. It is about a young boy whose Dad is an astronaut working up in the International Space Station.

In literacy we have been writing descriptive pieces of writing, using the senses to describe what the character is experiencing. We have also been working on direct and indirect speech and punctuating our work correctly.

We have been working hard with lots of fraction work. Carrying out a variety of tasks from simplifying, colouring in fractions of a shape and finding equivalent fractions.

We had a visit from the SSPCA and  we were introduced to a robot cat. Using an app, we programmed the robot to move and make noises. We also learned how to look after animals and prevent animal cruelty.

The week was a short week, but we fitted a lot in.

Some of the class began to present their homework projects to the class. We had a wide variety of focuses, from women in the war, technology, animals, medical and the trenches.

The class chose a variety of different ways to present their work. A group of girls performed a drama piece in Scots language highlighting the impact the war had on women.

Others chose to use a slide show, posters and models to showcase their work.

In numeracy we have been working on different multiplication strategies. We have been looking at using the column method and the grid method. Some of us have been multiplying 2 digits numbers by a 2 digit number.

The final lesson of  gymnastic in P.E. we created, performed and filmed ourselves in small groups presenting our gymnastics routine. We had to include a variety of moves from a jump, balance, a travelling move and a roll.

During literacy we wrote postcards and diary entries from a soldiers perspective. We looked at what information we would want to send home to our families compared to being honest in our diaries. This is developing our learning looking at writing personal accounts and writing informal letters.

We have also been looking at creating similes and metaphors and we will be continuing to include these in our writing next week.

In numeracy we have been looking at multiplication. We started multiplying by 10, 100 and 1000. We moved onto looking at written methods of multiplying 2 digit numbers.

We had a visit from The Royal Highland Educational Trust who came to show us how to make bread. We used the wheat that we had planted last year in the garden and made two types of bread.

As well as our bread making session, we also started our chanter lessons. We all have our own chanter and we started to learn how to play a couple of notes. We will have a lessons every week and are looking forward to learning more.

This week in literacy we went through our classroom library and had a look at the books and decided if we wanted to keep them on the shelves or to put them away for now. We looked at the cover and the blurb to decide and noted down our opinion. Lots of us found new books that we want to start reading.

We also took some time to write a book review as many of us have recently finished a book. We summarised what the book was about, who the ideal audience would be as well as our recommendations.

During our Newsround slot, we have a reporter who goes around the class with a microphone gathering questions and answers from the audience. This is helping to develop our talking and listening skills and keeping us up to date with news from around the world.

We have been continuing our work with subtraction and looking at different methods and approaches.

During our topic slot, we watched a couple of videos about trenches and were surprised at how small and busy they were. We looked at why they were designed the way they were and how the soldiers lived and worked in them. We drew a picture and labelled the different parts.

We went outside along with P6S to experience  what it was like to send messages without talking. We used the Semaphore Flag Signalling system which is represented by arm signals to communicate letters of the alphabet. The two classes had to send and decode each others messages without talking. We imagined we were out in the trenches and this was the only way to communicate.

Welcome back everyone!

We got stuck into our work right away and produced lots of good work this week.

Our literacy focus this week was writing an informal letter. We looked at the structure and the content of letters. In our book Private Peaceful, Tommo found out that his brother Charlie and his friend Molly had been lying to him. We decided to use the skills we worked on through out the week and wrote a letter as if we were Tommo. We used lots of adjectives to describe how hurt and upset we were.

During the war recruitment propaganda was used to convince people to come and join the army. We looked at posters and discussed what the images and the text were promoting. We planned and designed our own posters.

In maths this week we were looking at different ways to approach subtraction calculations. We used number lines to help us count back and count on to help solve the calculations.

We did it!

On Thursday we performed and delivered two performances of our ‘Alloa’s Great War’ show. A huge thank you to Mr and Mrs Smith from Tapsalteerie Theatre Company for working with us to produce such a fabulous show. We had parents, members of the public and a lot of our school friends come to watch. Quite a few of us also took on extra roles due to last minute changes and we worked hard to deliver our new lines. As well as singing, acting and performing, we also learnt a lot of local history about what was happening in Alloa during the First World War.

It was Poverty Awareness week and we had a visitor from The Gate Charity. She came to talk about what the charity does to support people who are struggling as well as working with people of all ages. We created mind maps highlighting the activities and support that is on offer.

We also took part in a BBC Teach lesson all about emotions and mindfulness. We’ve heard some great ideas about good ways to relax our body and our mind and how we can express our emotions.

We’ve had a busy week continuing to rehearse for our show. Mr and Mrs Smith have been in most days and are helping us to develop our acting skills and projecting our voice.

It was Scottish Maths Week this week and we carried out a lot of problem solving tasks using all the knowledge we already have as well as trying new strategies to find the answer. We also turned detective and had to solve lots of different tasks to identify the villain of a crime. We worked together to collect clues and cracked the code to catch the villain.

We have been enjoying our class novel Private Peaceful and we discussed what we liked and disliked about the story so far. Some of us are enjoying the adventure and friendships the characters are experiencing and a lot of us really don’t like Grandma Wolf.

On Monday, it was Redwell’s 5th Birthday celebration where we all came together in assembly to celebrate the school and everyone in it. Then on Thursday, along with P6S we performed a song at our Harvest Assembly.

This week in numeracy, we put together our learning from our measuring lessons along with our estimation skills from place value. We went around the classroom estimating the lengths of objects and then checked our estimates by using our rulers to measure.

In literacy, we planned, wrote a draft and ‘published’ our news article about the ‘Mystery Plane Landing’. We focused on sequencing the events in order.

P.E. this week was all about trust, communication and working together. Firstly we were joined together in pairs and had to navigate our way around a course, and then we were blindfolded. We had to listen to our partner who was directing us and trust them to lead us around.

We also continued working on our posters advertising our show. We hope you can all make it to come and watch.