Christmas is on the way!

It has been a busy and exciting time this term with the children working hard on creating lots of artwork that they can take home at the Christmas holidays.  We have made trees, snowflakes, ‘Christmoose’ pictures, Reindeer cards and 3d reindeers to help decorate the Grotto.  Fairy Mary and Fairy Noel have helped us build a grotto and now it is decorated the children will be given time to use it for imaginative play.  It looks fab.

We have continued with our numeracy learning using the Lynda Keith model and the children are enjoying the challenge of working with a variety of strategies and activities.

The countdown has begun and the children are beyond excited and are looking forward to our class party next week.  Fingers crossed Santa makes an appearance.  We would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year when they come.

Loving learning in Base 2!

What a busy few weeks we have had!  Our base has been hard at work preparing for our show ‘The Circus Extravaganza’ and have now finished all performances.  We were so good that we are having a celebration afternoon to celebrate our hard work and success!

Recently we have been working on PV (Place Value) and following the Lynda Keith numeracy planner.  We have used a lot of active learning to engage and learn and enjoy being challenged.  We have been looking at 2 figure to 5 figure numbers and are recording our learning through pictures as a new method as studies show that this helps us remember what we have done and learned.

In our literacy work we have been working on common and, most recently, proper nouns and enjoy the group challenges set; we all try to get to our challenge as it earns us more dojos!

Christmas is just around the corner so once we have finished our ‘Circus’ topic we will be getting into the Christmas spirit by learning about traditions at Christmas and conjuring up a few pictures to decorate our classroom then our home.

We also took part in a survey related to homework and are bringing a survey home for parents to fill in.  The school are keen to get your view on this so please send in as soon as you can so that the staff can get to work on the results of this.

We loved performing and seeing all our proud parents/family at the show and would like to say thank you for sharing this special day with us.

The Greatest Show comes to Galston!

Primary 3 have been learning about the Circus; inspired by ‘The Greatest Showman’ film.  We talked about what we knew and what we wanted to know about the circus then decided on our activities too.

We have already learned about the great PT Barnum on whom the film was based and wrote fact files using the information we took.  We also learned about the history and laws of the circus and have been finding out facts about circus animals as some circus’ still use animals in their act although most don’t anymore.

Our class have also been getting their creative juices going  by making ‘This is Me’ circus bunting to decorate our class as well as creating massive magical clown bow ties.  We chose where we wanted to display our ties and also took pictures of us wearing them.

Our topic board has had a Big Top Circus added to it that we painted red and white.  We all get to be ringmasters with our top hats and the Star Dojo gets to take pride of place in the centre of the circus for a whole week too!

We have also started learning about symmetry and went outdoors to learn more.  We looked at a ladybird to see if she was symmetrical and voted using sticks for the graph and cones to vote with.  Our final vote was 25 people said yes and 4 said no making the overall vote that the ladybird was symmetrical.

To finish we got to choose groups to work in and had to use the nature box and things we found in our playground to create our own symmetrical pictures.  It was great fun!