A huge well done to Audrey and Michael who took part in the school talent show, the XA Factor, today. It was lovely to see our class being very supportive as they clapped and waved handmade posters. Audrey wore a beautiful sparkly outfit to perform her fantastic dance, which she did with great confidence. Michael amazed everyone by managing to lift 44kg during his weight lifting show. The audience and judges were very impressed by both finalists!

This term, the class novel we are reading is Ottoline and the Yellow Cat 💛 It is a mystery novel which has a mixture of detailed pictures and text. Last term, we were learning to find evidence within a text and we are now having to put that to the test as we search for clues in our novel this term!

In the first two lessons, we learned to form questions and share our opinions. We are each keeping a notebook of clues that we find and any predictions or questions that we have as we read. Our third lesson focussed on understanding the thoughts and feelings of a strange little character called Mr Munroe who could not speak. We had to look for clues about his body language and actions in the novel.

We tried a drama technique called a ‘Forum Theatre’. Two pupils were the actors and the rest of class had to instruct them how to act by looking back in the book. In particular, we had to look for verbs and adverbs. We had so much fun using props to enhance our drama.

Ten o’clock: Ottoline inspecting the curtains and Mr Munroe trying to get her attention.

Eleven o’clock: Ottoline inspecting the polishing of the door handles and Mr Munroe trying to get her attention.

Twelve o’clock: Mr Munroe is starting to get fed up of being ignored!

Our class working together to instruct our actors.

Ottoline inspecting the hoovering and Mr Munroe still trying to get her attention! Have you noticed the additions to Mr Munroe’s disguise as the day has gone on?

Mr Munroe in full disguise (flippers and all) whilst Ottoline inspects the folded laundry. We don’t think Mr Munroe will try to get her attention again!

As we get into the Winter season, Primary 4.1 have been busy exploring the beautiful natural phenomenon called The Northern Lights or the Aurora.

This term we are studying history and learning all about The Vikings. It is thought The Vikings believed the Northern Lights illuminating the sky were the reflections of the Valkyries’ armour as they led the warriors to Odin, the God of wisdom and war.

We watched an educational video all about how the Northern Lights occur and saw beautiful footage captured over Canada and Iceland. We then accessed a Menti on Chromebooks to enter 3 WOW words to describe what we felt about the Aurora. All of our words appeared on the board in a word cloud. We have been focussing on widening our vocabulary and using a thesaurus in Literacy.

We then moved on to creating our beautiful artwork on triangle card. We applied our knowledge of watercolours to create a paint wash with the colours commonly found in the sky: blue, purple, green, red and pink. Once dry, we use fine liner pens to create details, like trees in the foreground and mountains in the background.

“If something is far away, it looks smaller.”

We enjoyed relaxing music and videos of the Northern Lights whilst we painted. We hope you like our artwork as much as we enjoyed making it!

We are happy with our finished art work. 🎨 Some of us have started to self-assess our work to highlight what we did well and what we want to improve on.

Primary 4.1 had the best time celebrating the festive season and the end of term this week.

We all looked fantastic in our outfits for our Christmas party. 🎄 Our classroom has been all cosy and decorated for Christmas so we took some pictures by the fireplace.

We have been learning how to code using Scratch, Scratch is a programming language where children can program and share interactive media such as stories, games, and animation.

We have been learning words that relate to coding: sprite, code, debug, variable.

We have loved this experience, staying resilient when our code doesn’t work and trying to solve the problem. Everyone has been creative and used their problem solving skills. We have also been reading instructions carefully. On our last week, the pupils chose what they would like to code. One pupil even managed to code our entire story book ‘Ours Brun’ in French!

Pupils can sign up for a free account at home if they would like to save their work. They can sign into this at school to save their projects.

Primary 4.1 had lots of fun raising money for Children in Need. We discussed how Children in Need could improve the lives of children. We had a dress down day to raise money. We visited the gym hall for games then we visited the Toy and Book sale in the ICT Suite. We thank all the families and children of Cross Arthurlie for helping to raise money for such a worthy cause.

Primary 4.1 have been busy in Numeracy and Mathematics and they continue to link maths to other areas of the curriculum and their everyday life.

The most exciting news in November was that Primary 4.1 were the overall winners after coming FIRST in the East Renfrewshire SumDog competition. We were so happy with our team effort as we managed to answer the most amount of maths questions correctly.  Every single person made a difference to our score and we are so proud of our achievement! We got a special announcement at assembly from Mrs MacDonald, a certificate from SumDog and we were each gifted 5,000 Sumdog coins. We worked out the maths: 5000 x 27 pupils meant that overall P4.1 received 135,000 coins! Wow! 😃🏆

The Diamonds have been brushing up on their multiplication and division facts over the last few weeks, using their Times Tables Rock Stars booklets, Hit the Button and SumDog to revise. We can all see a big difference in how quickly we are able to answers correctly.  Here we are during one of our daily warm ups answering with number fans.

Happy Halloween! 🎃

P4.1 have been learning to use different media with increasing control. For a few weeks, we focussed on drawing creatively and adding lots of detail to our pictures. We previously drew a beautiful Winter scene for our Christmas card. For Halloween, we studied the significance of Sugar Skulls in Mexico and talked about the detail that can be added to them.  Afterwards, we used oil pastels to bring our skulls to life with colour! Oil pastels need to be used with the right amount of pressure to get a good coverage. We also explored how we can layer and blend with oil pastels.  They all turned out beautiful in their own way. We LOVE our work and we hope you do too!

On the day of Halloween, we recapped some French vocabulary that we had been exploring in one of our independent-working areas.

We used some of the vocabulary to read and understand a French poem. In lessons, we gave been learning about how French adjectives come after the noun. For example, un chat noir is a black cat. 🐈‍⬛ We then had to colour the Halloween pictures correctly, recognising if they were masculine or feminine words and how this can change the spelling of the adjective.

We finished the day off with some Halloween fun! 🎃🧡  We shared some good Halloween jokes, took turns to go Boo-ling with some cute ghosts and cheered each other on as we went dooking for apples 🍎

Primary 4 1 explored the theme ‘Maths in Motion’ during Maths Week Scotland.

The children discussed the different jobs they believed used Maths with their talking partner and wrote them on the board. We soon realised that most careers use maths in some way and how important it is that we engage in learning all different types of Numeracy and Mathematics! 

Our first challenge of the week was to create a skier that would travel the furthest down a slope. We watched footage of skiers going down slopes and noticed how their skis are usually parallel. We agreed the best material would be K’nex and we got to work in our partners!

We were very creative when we were building our structures, not focusing on look but mainly speed.

“I made something but then I took most of my pieces off because I realised that it made it go slower. Mine is very simple so it is light.”

Once our structure was built, we tested it down the slope in our classroom. We discussed different ways of making the test fair. and how we could measure who went the furthest.

For problem solving, we explored the number of different ways a ball could fall into a cup through a Pinball Machine. We drew diagrams on our mini whiteboard and made a table to help find the answer.

Later in the week, Mrs Denny set another challenge. Everyone had to design their own marble golf course with limited materials ⛳ Everyone was so impressed  with the end result and we all had lots of fun playing the courses at the end.  We had to make our way through the course in as little turns as we could. Mrs Denny was impressed by our creativity, teamwork and problem solving. 👏

Some children chose to work on the BeeBots, making them move to specific places or creating directions with the movement cards.

Primary 4.1 have been busy learning through play and challenging themselves in various areas of the curriculum.

We have all set targets that we would like to work towards achieving by Christmas. We learned all about SMART targets and made sure that we picked something specific, achievable and relevant to us. We displayed our targets in balloons as a reminder to work on them every day!

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A popular choice from the pupils of P4.1 was to improve speed and accuracy of particular multiplication tables. We have been playing lots of games to help revise multiplication and related division facts. Here you can see our Tuff Tray and examples of us playing Uno Maths Games, ZAP, SumDog, Times Tables Rock Stars, Hit tbe Button and Power Towers to revise.

Primary 4.1 have been introduced to Blooket Quizzes. Pupils can be quizzed on any topic as they play together in class. The more questions they answer correctly, the more they can play the mini-games. To revise our multiplication and division facts, we played the Racing game. We LOVED watching our Blooket animals race up the track against each other and we had lots of fun whilst revising our Numeracy skills. You can watch us play here.

Every day when we come in from lunch, there is calm music playing and everyone gets comfy with their personal book. We have 10-15 minutes of just reading for enjoyment! Some of pick a book from the library, others bring some in from home and others like to listen to an audiobook. We look forward to this relaxing time every day 😊 We have been exploring the texts on Get Epic and completing comprehension quizzes online to help us apply the strategies we learn in class independently.

September 13th was Roald Dahl Day and we celebrated with puzzles and a writing activity. We chose to write character desciptions of either Miss Honey or Miss Trunchbull. We focussed on using lots of ambitious vocabulary and connectives in our writing. We were so impressed!

We were very grateful to have so many lovely family members in our classroom for Open Afternoon, even on one of the hottest days of the year! We shared what we knew about bones whilst we made a skeleton from cotton buds. We also managed to construct a working model of the lungs.