We recently moved into new cooperative learning groups and have been working together on a range of activities. One task involved designing and making a shoe from scratch. This was particularly challenging as the shoe had to stay on and fit a member of each team. There was a time limit and each person had a role to carry out to help complete the task.
Although each group came across a number of problems they all successfully completed the task by making a strong and wearable shoe. Miss Thompson was so impressed she had to try them on…well the ones that were big enough.
You all came up with a unique design from trainer to slipper to sandal…they all looked fantastic! There was lots of cooperating going on within each group too. You were able to come up with a design by agreeing on one idea or by including an element from each person’s design. At the end each group had to evaluate their shoe and show it to the rest of the class. Well done P5!
We have been using online and physical maps to develop our understanding of Scotland’s geography. The country can be split into three main areas; uplands, lowlands and islands. These areas are made up of farmland, mountains, lochs, rivers and miles of coastline. We will be looking more at the unique features of Scotland’s landscape throughout the term. 😊
We worked with our learning partners in ICT to find and search for a number of places in Scotland using Google Maps. The learning from this activity helped us to piece together and label a map of Scotland in our cooperative groups. We had a good idea of places in and around Dundee but had to really think about areas and cities further a field. We shared responsibilites and completed our maps correctly. Miss Douglas has added them to our Scotland display.
This term we are going to be learning all about Scotland. During the first two weeks of term we did some paper plate weaving which required a lot of patience and concentration! Our colourful tapestries are now hanging up in the classroom. We will explore other weaving techniques in the coming months.
We have also been learning about Charlies Rennie Mackintosh, a Scottish architect, designer and artist. We looked at his work and found that he often included a rose in his designs. We created our own rose paintings using watercolours, crayons and pens.
We have been learning about nouns, verbs and adjectives this term during our class literacy sessions. We have been practising the skills we have learnt at various learning stations. These photos were of our verb stations. Firstly we had verb charades, where we had fun trying to act out some of the ‘doing/being’ words. Miss Bissett also had fun watching some of our actions! 🙂 Next up, we had to write a verb of our choice in funky lettering that matched the meaning, e.g. the verb ‘melt’ was done in melting lettering like an ice lolly in the sun. Some of our ideas were very ingenious. We had a ‘juicy verbs’ task where we had to upgrade the day-to-day verbs for ‘juicer’ more exciting ones. We also worked as a group to choose a location (noun) e.g. beach, and we had a set amount of time to come up with as many verbs as we could that you could ‘do’ at that location.
Finally, we had two other stations, a noun/verb/adjective sorting area with sentences to write and an animal verb station where we had to list verbs that animals could do, e.g. lion – roar, prowl, sunbathe, etc.
All in all, we had lots of fun putting our learning about verbs into practise. Next up….Adverbs! 🙂
This week we have been learning more about water. We learned that water can come in three forms – solid (ice/snow), liquid (regular water) and as a gas (water vapour).
We had hands on experience with the three forms (well, almost all three….we had to pretend that air was water vapour!)
We also met ‘Mr Freeze’ and experimented with his ‘life cycle’ 🙂 he started as a solid, then the heat energy in the classroom and from our hands (!) started to turn him into a liquid. He got several holes in his ‘clothes’ and he had to be carried in a jug for the rest of the day. This morning, he had completely melted and was now a liquid. His ‘clothes’ were put into the bin and he was poured out onto the concrete outside. Later on, we hope he will have evaporated and changed into water vapour (gas) to start his life all over again in the water cycle.
We have been learning more about the water cycle this week. We made our own rain clouds using shaving foam and water coloured with blue food colouring. It was so much fun! The shaving foam represented all of the rain drops when they start to condense to make a cloud. We used a syringe to add weight to the shaving foam cloud, just like what would happen in real life. The cloud would eventually get too heavy and the water droplets would get bigger and fall as rain. The proper name is precipitation! It looked really cool.
As part of our IDL topic ‘Wonderful Water’, we have been learning all about the water cycle. We know the names of the four main stages of the cycle. The first is evaporation, next is condensation, after that it is precipitation and finally collection.
We were learning about what actually happens at each stage. To demonstrate the stages of the water cycle, we carried out a simple experiment called ‘Water Cycle in a Bowl’.
We half filled a clear glass bowl with boiling water. We put a mug in the middle of the bowl, making sure that no water got inside. We then measured what the water level was. We covered the bowl with cling film and watched what happened. We made our own predictions about what we thought would happen, based on what we know about the water cycle. It was very interesting! 🙂
