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

Welcome back to our P4/5 blog and another catch up.

We’ve been busy working and looking forward to all of the fun festivities to come next week.

Hexagol

Last week, we were very lucky as Hexagol visited Kilmaurs Primary. We really enjoyed our slot and particularly enjoyed the challenge of hitting the light pads within a certain time!

Literacy

Spelling

We have been revising lots of our phonemes during a consolidation week. This week we are exploring the split phoneme ‘o-e’ and the phoneme ‘u’ with words like stone and cushion. We enjoyed tennis spelling where we threw the tennis ball to a partner and spelled out the words.

We have been working on our common words too. This week we did a Christmas themed fun task using snowflakes.

Writing

We redrafted our report all about energy as part of an assessment. The pupils were so proud of their work.

We are now looking at newspaper articles and identifying the features of these. We have a cheeky Kindness Elf that we need to write a newspaper article about next week!

Reading

We have been continuing to work on our reading strategies through ‘The Tin Forest’. We have been identifying clues in the text to help us understand the main character.

We also worked in duos to identify possible words that could be used where words were missed out. We had to read on and back to find clues to help us and to back up our answer.

Numeracy/Maths

We are continuing to work on a variety of subtraction strategies through our Number Talks. These including removal subtraction and counting on. We have been working hard on our multiplication tables and are beginning to increase our speed and recall. We can see the link between the 2x, 4x and 8x. Well done P4/5!

We have also been working on exploring the properties of 3D shape. This week we have completed a variety of stations to help us with this. We also challenged ourselves with prisms and some of us spotted a tricky pattern to identify the number of faces in prisms without counting them!

Our knowledge of 3D shape will come in very handy next week for our next Festive STEM challenge!

IDL

We have worked hard with Mrs Howat to create a wonderful display showing our knowledge of sustainability as well as our skills in one point perspective drawing! Go P4/5 and Mrs Howat! We created a sustainable town!

Following on from our learning on the design model for our Christmas STEM topic where we created an advent calendar, we explored materials and their properties. Pupils choose materials for certain objects and tasks and could explain why they choose those materials.

Little did we know that our knowledge of materials would be put to use  so quickly!

The Kilmaurs Kindness Elf dropped in and got himself stuck on our shelf with a very sore leg! Our challenge was to get him down from the shelf.  We worked in groups following our design model, to create a plan of action. We thought carefully about which materials to use and what their properties were. Then came time to test our designs!

We identified areas that went well and things that didn’t go so well. As a group we worked out changes that we could make as we reflected on our design.

Thankfully we were successful and the elf got down safely!

Thank you so much for reading our update! We are so excited to share a little selection of our learning with you!

Dates for next week:

Wednesday 15th– P4/5 Christmas Party- Pupils can come to school dressed in party clothes for the party in the afternoon or they can have a home lunch and get ready at home.

Thursday 16th– Christmas Lunch and Christmas Film Afternoon

 

Thank you for reading our update!

P4/5 and Mrs O’Neil

Primary 4/5 have been busy bees for the past few weeks. We’ve all been working incredibly hard. Pupils were delighted with their snapshot jotters and felt such pride taking them home.

Term 2 Curriculum Overview

Please click the link below to read what we will be getting up to in the next few weeks.

Termly Newsletter Kilmaurs Term 2.docx

Literacy

Spelling– P4/5 have been continuing to build upon their knowledge of phonemes and using the Active Literacy strategies.

In our spelling groups we have been focussing on the phonemes of ‘ough’ as in thought, ‘y’ as in shy and gym and ‘i-e’ as in shine.

Pupils are becoming super confident in breaking, making and blending their words. We are also identifying strategies to help us with trickier common words.

Reading– P4/5 have read the non fiction text “Antarctic Adventures” about Captain Scott and his mission to be the first man to reach the South Pole.  We identified the key words in questions and used skimming and scanning to locate answers in the text. We also identified the main ideas to be able to create a story map to retell the story to a partner.

This week we have started a new fiction text called ‘The Tin Forest’. The pupils blew me away with their prediction skills. Using just the title and blurb, pupils created what they thought the front cover would look like. They shared their front cover with a partner and had lots of super ideas about characters and setting based on clues from the blurb.

Writing- Through our reading we have been exploring different styles of reports and identifying the main features. We have used this to help us write reports of our own! We can create titles, subtitles and captions. This is super tricky but we are doing a great job!

Numeracy- We are continuing to work on our Number Talks and can identify lots of strategies to complete calculations. We completed an angles assessment and are feeling confident identifying and comparing right, straight and reflex angles. We have been working on solving problems and identifying the vocabulary to help us work out which calculation to do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IDL

P4/5 have been finishing off their sustainability topic by learning about climate change and the effect that global warming has on our Earth. We have identified ‘big’ steps that people could take to slow down climate change, such as driving electric card and using solar panels. Each pupil also choose 3 ‘small’ things that they could do to help.

 

 

 

 

 

P4/5 have started to get into the Christmas spirit through our STEM topic. We will be completing lots of challenges to help Santa during his busy December! We started off learning about the design process and the steps taken when designing something for a purpose. Pupils worked together in teams to create an advent calendar to help Santa keep track of the days as his head elf has gone on holiday!!

 

Thank you for reading our blog! Check back in 2 weeks for another update!

 

 

Welcome to the P4/5 Class Blog! The blog will be updated regularly with important information and details of all our learning!

Primary 4/5 have all settled well back into school and are working their socks off!

OUR CLASS

As we are unable to have visitors into our classroom at the moment, we decided to take photos of our learning space to show our families and friends at home.

In our class we have a library corner which is also a quiet space where we can take our time to relax. On our relax wall are a variety of different strategies to help us with tricky feelings. P4/5 have been exploring the importance of understanding and dealing with our feelings in a safe way.

P4/5 ROLES

To encourage the pupils to take on responsibilities and to build on their independence, we have classroom jobs and numeracy task boards.  During numeracy, pupils follow the task boards to keep track of their teaching time and tasks. Well done P4/5!

OUR SYSTEMS

In class, we have a points system. Each group collects shiny stones by following the class charter. When a group reaches 50 shiny stones, they receive a group reward. This could be activities like 15 minutes chrome book time or ‘Be the Teacher’ for a short activity.

Each group has already enjoyed one group reward since retuning to school!

Each time a group reaches a reward, they turn round one of the bunting letters. Once all the letters have been turned round the word will read CELEBRATION! When this happens, the class enjoy a whole class reward such as a small class party or 15 minutes extra break. This system really encourages team work and pupils are really enjoying celebrating each others’ successes.

REQUEST A SELFIE

Pupils can request a selfie of work that they are proud of. This can be work that they have persevered with or work that they are proud of. When a pupil attaches a selfie peg I know to take a photo of the work. Selfie work will be uploaded to our Blog updates.

 

POSITIVITY PEGS

We have pegs with lots of positive comments on them in our classroom. When a pupil is spotted doing something positive, another pupils can nominate them for a positivity peg. We have lots of kind, caring and supportive pupils in our class, so we are always celebrating with positivity pegs!

Thank you so much for reading our first P4/5 blog post. Remember to check the blog for regular updates.

Please click the link below to read our Term 1 Newsletter which gives information about our learning for the first term.

Termly Newsletter Kilmaurs Term 1

Thank you for all your support.

Mrs O’Neil