Hi everybody!

I hope you have been enjoying reading our fortnightly catch-ups about our learning. Please click the link below for our curriculum newsletter which tells you all about the learning coming up over the next term,

Termly Newsletter Kilmaurs Jan-April

Mrs O’Neil

Welcome back to our P4/5 blog! I can’t believe we are at the end of our first month in 2022 already!

Literacy

Pupils have been really enjoying their work on Scots vocabulary. In our reading we have been using strategies to help us identify the meaning of unknown words. We looked in detail at our Scots poem ‘Last Nicht’ and used our strategies to work out what our poem was about! We used our learning to retell the main events of the poem.

In writing we have been working extremely hard! We wrote descriptions in Scots and we even included alliteration!

A peerie puggie wis painting a Scots flag.

The crabit coo cooking cookies.

A braw broon brock wis blawing up balloons.

We have also been reading a variety of poetry styles and identifying the features of them. This week we created our own cinquain poems. These poems have a structure based around the number of syllables in the lines.

In spelling, we are focusing on silent letters. Pupils are taking part in a variety of activities to build their confidence spelling words with silent letters. We have been on phoneme hunts, timed spelling activities, fixing the errors and much more!

Numeracy

In Maths our pupils have been outside measuring heights and lengths using various measuring tools. They particularly enjoyed using a trundle wheel to measure the length of the playground. Can you believe it’s 66 metres- not quite the length of a football pitch which we discovered measures 91 metres.

 

In number work, pupils are building on their strategies for multiplying. We have played games and used our knowledge to solve problems. Pupils are becoming more and more confident everyday!

FRENCH

In French learners have been greeting one another and expressing how they are feeling.
Please ask your child Ca va aujourd’hui ? How are you today?And hopefully they will reply with

Through fun songs, rhymes and interactive games learners have been counting to 20 in French and are now able to recognise the French number words. This week’s challenge is to learn numbers up to 100.

PE

Pupils really enjoyed their first lesson in gymnastics. Pupils worked together to create a variety of balances.

IDL

Our first topic this term is all about Scotland and Scottish inventors. Pupils have been learning about timelines. They worked in duos to research Scottish inventions and to order them correctly using a timeline. Pupils were very impressed with all the wonderful inventions that came from Scottish inventors.

We have also looked at examples of Pop Art and created our own Scots vocabulary pop art! We researched how tartan was made and looked carefully at colours and horizontal and vertical lines to make our own!

Calendars

Pupils have also worked hard on their own calendars for 2022 to bring home. They designed a cartoon back ground to add their photo into. The finished calendars are fabulous!

Well done P4/5 for all your hard work!

Thank you for reading our Blog post and we’ll be back soon with another update.

Remember to check Teams for any important information.

Mrs O’Neil and Mrs Howat 🙂

HAPPY NEW YEAR

I hope you all had a lovely and relaxing time during the holidays.

P4/5 are back to school with a bang and are working incredibly hard!

FESTIVE FUN

Before the holidays the pupils enjoyed lots of festive fun, including their party, Christmas dinner and a pantomime! Unfortunately I was isolating and missed out on all the fun! Luckily Mrs Howat was there to make sure everybody had a great time.

CHRISTMAS THEMED MEASURING

On the lead up to Christmas what better way to learn to measure than to be up to your eyes in tinsel. Learners measured carefully to make their own snowmen rulers, compared lengths of Christmas tinsel, lights and beads, measured Christmas ornaments and decorations in metres and centimetres and created their very own Christmas trees by measuring lengths accurately. Here they are in action…

 

PASSION PROJECTS
A huge well done to all of our learners who presented their final project posters to the rest of the class. A lot of hard work and dedication went in to the research, planning and presentation of all the facts learned about their chosen personal topics.

LITERACY

This week we have been exploring the phonemes ‘gn’ and ‘a_e’. Pupils are becoming super confident using their Active Literacy spelling strategies for their phoneme words and common words.

As part of our New Year activities, the pupils created NY party poppers. On the streamers, pupils chose three things that they would like to improve on in 2022. P4/5 thought very carefully and came up with lots of super resolutions, such as working on recalling their 3 and 4 multiplication table and working on using their reading strategies.

We used our new year resolutions to write a letter to a friend. In our letter we recapped our 2021 and picked out highlights of our year as well as our hopes for 2022. We have explored the use of paragraphs too and we tried to use them in our writing.

We have been working hard in our reading, identifying different question types. We have explored literal (find it) questions and inferential (prove it) questions. We used our story ‘The Tin Forest’ to create  questions for our classmates to answer.

To complete our work on ‘The Tin Forest’, we created story maps. In our story maps we have to pick out the main events and summarise the story.

Story Maps

If our story maps were successful we would be able to retell the story in our own words to our partners.

NUMERACY

For a fun revision lesson on our addition and subtraction strategies we played Number Hunt. We had to become detectives and find our numbers hidden around the classroom.

We also continued to explore our strategies for multiplication through Number Talks.

  

We built on this learning and took our numeracy outdoors!

We also had fun applying our knowledge of multiplication facts in some dice games.

PE

We built upon our tennis skills from before the Christmas holidays. We really worked hard on our control and played lots of target games.

STEM

To complete our STEM topic, we explored electrical circuits. We identified what an open and closed circuit was and investigated circuits using bulbs, spinners and switches.

We combined our knowledge to complete a challenge. We had to help out a poor clown who’s nose wouldn’t light up and his bow tie wouldn’t spin! Thank fully, our budding electricians sorted this all out!

What a busy first full week back! Thank you to all the pupils for their hard work!

Next week we will begin our block of learning on Scots language. For homework pupils will begin to learn a poem to perform to the class.

Keep an eye out for an important survey on TEAMS for the pupils to fill in next week.

Thank you for reading our blog!

P4/5 Mrs O’Neil and Mrs Howat