What’s the time Mr Wolf?
We’ve been playing some online games to help us become more confident in telling the time. Here’s some of the links we’ve been using.
http://www.visnos.com/demos/clock
https://www.topmarks.co.uk/Search.aspx?q=time
http://www.maths-games.org/time-games.html
Physics in p4/5 via loose parts play
Do you know that height and weight is related to acceleration? We found this out today in maths…or was it higher physics?! Miss Tulloch set us the challenge of making a ramp for a ball to go down. Each group member had a different task; height measurer, weight measurer, measurement recorder and ball releaser.
Magic Potions
Did you hear about our magic potions? Wondering how you make one yourself? Well, we used our knowledge of measure to measure lots of delicious ingredients to create our potions and then wrote up a set of instructions to make your own.
Angle Art
We learnt angles through outdoor maths. Miss Tulloch was so impressed to see all our outdoor learning transferred well into our check ups back in the classroom. Have a look at some snaps from our angle hunts and our collaborative angle art.
“Everytime two lines meet an angle is formed”.
We worked in groups of 3 or 4 to create angle artwork. One person had to make right angles, another obtuse angles, another acute angles and someone else had to mark every angle using cubes. Can you see who used their problem solving skills to work out that we had three different colours of cubes for three different types of angles?
World Book Day
We enjoyed sharing our favourite books today, with the added luxury of being extra comfy in our pyjamas (Miss Tulloch included!).
World’s Largest Lesson
Throughout our Vikings topic we have been relating it to the Global Goals and recently took part in a ‘world’s largest lesson’ about food. We compared what the Vikings ate and what we ate and considered the ways in which these were made.
Have a look at some of the meals we designed (notice how good we are getting at labelling our diagrams!)
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I have just seen that Gretna has 15cm of snow. Why don’t you get out and measure the deepest bit of snow you can find? If you don’t have a ruler or tape measure, just use a part of your body as a marker or any object in the house and see how many you have to pile up to until it’s the same height as the snow. Ask if you can leave an object outside to monitor how much the snow is falling over the day.
Can you make some 3D shapes, draw some 2D shapes or tiling patterns in the snow? What’s the easiest shape to make? Let me and Miss Murray know!
Can you create a simple poem about your snow day? There’s plenty words that rhyme with snow. “Let it….”
We can always learn even when we have a day off school!
We have shelter!
We have made our Viking families, and now they have a settlement to live in.
We thought about the different shapes buildings have. We realised roofs had triangle shapes and walls were rectangle. We noticed that walls joined at right angles and if the angles weren’t strong that buildings would collapse.
We knew Vikings used natural materials so we went outside and collected things we thought we could use. We then did a lot of trial and error to come up with our very different designs. The houses that came out best were the groups that worked best together! It was very interesting for Miss Tulloch to observe.
p4/5 Secret Book Club!
Miss Tulloch invited class members to join a secret lunchtime book club on a Thursday. She expected about five people to want to join so she was sooo happy when more than half the class turned up!
We will get these First Ministers Reading Passports filled up soon enough!
Have you at home seen the reading passport? Ask about it and set a reading challenge. If you think your child has lost theirs please tell them to ask for another from Miss Tulloch.
STEM
As our Viking storyline develops we need to build a settlement for our Viking families to live in. Today we were outside collecting materials to do this, remembering what we had researched about what materials the Vikings used.
We considered the shapes that are used when making buildings and how to join them together. Right angles were mentioned in corner construction- this is something we haven’t even covered in maths yet! Engineering lessons have so many possibilities.
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On Wednesdays we have begun a section of outdoor maths. During this time we are learning position, movement and direction. It seems silly to be stuck inside when we do most of our moving and directing outside! We have definitely made progress already as we can now show Miss Tulloch our left hands with confidence.
Did you have enquiring minds coming home asking about compasses? We were learning about compass points so made our own on the playground to help us remember them, have a look below. Our main learning point we took from this was that North isn’t always ‘forward’. This was confusing at first but by using the railway line as a marker for south we began to understand. 
This was our initial game to decide where East was. Mia was even considering wind direction to help her work it out- I liked her deep thinking! Most of the class made the same decision in the end. 
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WOW!! So impressed with our recent homework, keep it up girls! There are lots of house points to earn for homework effort. Please make sure your child is doing their homework every week, spelling AND reading. I hope this level of effort is going into your personal Viking research projects.
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Jan 2018.
Happy New Year! We’ve been back a week already- although feeling recharged we’ve done so much already that it feels like we’ve been back a lot longer.
Maths this term we will need to be doing some extra practice on our times tables as well as continuing practice of our basic number bonds to 20. As I mentioned with the last set of number bonds workbooks that I handed out, if anybody would like more, please just ask but you can practice them verbally at home also. Timetables to focus on to begin with are 2,5 and 10 as revision. We will be learning at least the 3 and 4 in class. The more practiced at home, the more I can push the class during school time! Ask us to give you directions as we will be practicing these- particularly our lefts and rights as these are hard to remember!
In literacy we have an initial focus on poetry as Burns day fast approaches. You will notice we have ‘Street Talk’ home to practice. Please take time to listen to me practice this as I’m sure it’ll make you laugh! We will then move onto letter writing as we pretend to be Viking invaders and settlers.
In reading we have all been given new reading books. We currently have non-fiction books as Miss Tulloch wants us to practice the specific skills of information finding to help us with our Viking topic.
And onto the Vikings! We have been given mini research groups and for this topic a lot of our learning will be done from self-research using our vast collection of books and at times the internet. Of course Miss Tulloch is going to check up to ensure we are focussing on the right areas. We will be creating Viking families and experiencing the trials and tribulations they encountered. Miss Tulloch will be handing out a personal project task to do- she is giving a whole month for this to be completed so expects some excellent projects!
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I hope you have a great Christmas break, the second term flew by!
We enjoyed a variety of different lessons, particularly our focus topic on Buddhism. We were amazed to find out a building like Sam Ye Ling was situated so nearby- we were convinced it was from China! Here we are looking at traditional Buddhist artefacts and trying to remember what they are used for in their culture. There were some very tricky words that were different to anything we had heard before. We certainly know what a lotus flower symbolises after making beautiful artwork of them. Quiz us on the story of Buddha- I wonder who would be able to remember it?
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We enjoyed playing different games related to our learning, such as in grammar we played a memory matching game to help us learn our tenses. This became quite competitive! It was also great to see us working together as a class to complete a tenses domino game also.
Todd was delighted to be first in the class to gain all three cards in our memory matching tenses game.
(we were working with such speed to place our cards down before the bell went that it’s gone a bit blurry!)
18th December 2017
P4/5 are busy rehearsing for the school concert today as we have a dress rehearsal with Miss Dennis!
P4/5 Class Newsletter
New update coming soon.
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Hello and welcome to p4/5 class blog!
After a few technical difficulties we now have access to the blog site to keep you updated about what’s going on in our class.
Here’s your first insight:
This term we are having a whole class reading workshop on a Tuesday afternoon. This involves us sharing our reading homework, practicing our reading strategies and demonstrating our reading comprehension by discussing interesting points; answering comprehension questions and sometimes creating something new.
The different tasks we are faced with in our reading workshop cover the recommended skills of higher order thinking.
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