Primary 4.2 had the best time celebrating the festive season during December, mixing learning and fun!

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 played lots of games and danced the day away at our party ❤️

We have been rounding up all of our learning in Term 1 with lots of revision. We revised spelling rules using different games. Check out our Christmas tree word pyramids, magnetic letters and morse code words!

We wrote fantastic imaginative Christmas stories about going on an adventure inside a snowglobe! ❄️ We shared our stories with P2 and it was lovely to have so many family members reading together. ❤️

In Numeracy, we have all improved our speed and accuracy when recalling our multiplication tables 🏆 We have also been improving the speed of our mental maths by using number fans, concrete materials and quick quizzes.

In December, we were learning to identify 2 or more lines of symmetry within a shape or picture. We investigated the natural symmetry within snowflakes using microscopic images and then created these beautiful symmetrical paper snowflakes to decoarate our classroom. We had to be very accurate when folding and cutting. We think they look gorgeous! ❄️

Over in the creativity corner,  some of us chose to make some sustainable decorations. We made a beautiful gingerbread garland from cardboard and Posca pens and giant snowflakes from scrap paper. We love how personal and handmade they look. ❤️

In ICT, we applied what we learned about coding in Scratch and tried coding a BBC micro:bit using Make Code.  The BBC micro:bit is a pocket-sized computer that you can code, customise and control to bring your digital ideas, games and apps to life! We turned our Micro:bits into thermometers to measure the temperature outside during our climate zone topic and we even turned them into Christmas decorations. Some people created Christmas images in lights whilst others had scrolling messages. We love our glowing digital tree! 🎄✨️

We have been making excellent progress in French, so much so we needed a challenge! P4.2 were encouraged to read, write and speak in French using everything they had learned from reading the storybook Ours Brun (Brown Bear) 🐻 We played French Games on the Chromebooks where we had to match words to pictures and build sentences. Some of us even recorded ourselves speaking in French on Padlet, which you can listen to here. We are continuing to be exposed to French texts and words through the French reading corner and listening centre. 🇫🇷

We have also connected our skills from Literacy and French by using a bilingual dictionary to look up the meanings of French words and figure out if they are masculine or feminine. We created these beautiful mini-books.

We loved seeing our Christmas designs come to life when our order arrived in December. Thank you for the huge support in your orders.

There have been many school events in December and we thank all families for their support with these. P4.2 particularly enjoyed visiting P7.2 during their Make £5 Grow Sale. We were very impressed by their advertising and business ideas. It was great to see so many older siblings setting such good examples. 🥰

 

A huge well done to our P4.2 representatives that took part in the House Quiz. We are so proud of you both and we had lots of fun playing along in the Christmas quiz with the whole school. 🎄

Well done to our violinist who performed at the Christmas Service on the last day. We are so proud of you! 👏

We all enjoyed playing games together, drawing and dancing on the last day. ❤️

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year when it comes. ❤️

It’s been a busy but a fun month in P4.2! November has been packed with learning, new experiences and achieving goals. We have been working with a lot more independence and have enjoyed learning outside, with new technologies and in the classroom.

Our new topic is based around learning about different climate zones around the world and how they affect living things.  We have explored Polar, Temperate and Tropical climate zones and we are starting to name countries within each zone. We are becoming more familiar with the seven continents and five oceans and can point them out on a globe and on a map in an atlas.

We have been focusing on social skills a lot in P4.2. We continue to hold circle times, class discussions and workshops to take a closer look at friendships, working together and compromise. To apply the skills we have been talking about, Mrs Denny has been setting us challenges and tasks to work together. Lots of decisions have to be made and discussed and everyone needs to be involved. One of the biggest challenges Mrs Denny has set has been for P4.2 to create their own display wall for Climate Zones. Everyone discussed who should do what, thinking about what skills would be best for the job with no help from the teacher. We helped each other to make decisions, gather resources and complete the task. We all think the wall looks wonderful – team work makes the dream work! ⭐️

We joined a live lesson ran by the National Museum  who explored biodiversity in Scotland within  a temperate climate zone. We have also been learning to take notes whilst watching and listening.

We shared the animals that we knew from four different ecosystems: urban, rural, forest and coastal. This fantastic lesson brought artefacts from the National Museum in Edinburgh straight to our classroom! We studied different insects and animals, including microscopic images and looking at the skulls of different animals and learning how they have adapted to their surroundings.  

We read books, watched and listened to videos and researched how living things, such as animals, people and plants, adapt to different climates and made notes. We used these notes to create some excellent non-chronological reports.

At the end of November, the fantastic Parent Council organised a special Christmas surprise for us. Dasher and Dancer, two of Santa’s reindeer, came to visit our school. We learned a lot about reindeer from the people who look after them for Santa. The reindeer were lovely and soft when we patted them. They gobbled up all the carrots we fed them and were ready for more! One reindeer only had one antler as they often shed their antlers at this time of the year. We LOVED meeting them and we are so ready for lots of Christmas fun in December! 🎄🦌

 

October has been busy in P4 2!

We have been revising our 3 and 4 multiplication tables and some groups are now moving on to learning the 6 and 8. We have been looking at patterns within these even-numbered tables to make them easier to learn and playing lots of games to familiarise ourselves with the facts.

As well as revising their 3 and 4x table, some children have also been learning to recognise fractions of a shape and a number. Pupils have been challenged with fraction dominoes, magnetic fraction boards and games.

[Fraction games with Miss Howells coming soon]

We completed our Human Body Science-based topic and made sure we answered all of the wonderful big questions we had asked as a class. One P4.2 pupil asked about CPR and defibrillators after the were spoken about at his football club. We teamed up with the P7s who were keen to share all they had learned in their Heartstart lessons. Some parents have supported our topic by sending in items for our class hospital role play area and xrays for us to study.  Thank you so much.

P4.2 have been learning to use different media with increasing control. For a few weeks, we have been 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!

We have also been studying the work of Tim Burton as many pupils really enjoy his children’s films. We studied the characters from The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie to notice the similarities in their features.

We used these features to create these Tim Burton inspired self-portraits, mainly focusing on the visual elements of line and tone. This was the first time many of us had experienced using charcoal!

One of the areas in our room at the end of October was the Spooky Words wall. Children had to use a bilingual dictionary to discover the words for each item. 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 noticing how this can change the spelling of the adjective.

In music, we have been learning 3 pitches (so mi and do) along with our rhythms. We sang a song together and one mystery person had to be a ‘ghost’ and sing a line in a funny voice on their own. The child at the front of the room had to guess who sang the solo. We had lots of fun trying to guess who the ghost was! 👻

On the day of Halloween we had some fun! 🎃🧡 We shared our excellent spooky character descriptions with P4.1, exchanged 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 4.2 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!

A popular choice from the pupils of P4.2 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 4.2 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.

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 😊

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We were very grateful to have so many lovely family members in our classroom for Open Afternoon. Sorry to those I didn’t manage to catch for a photo (or maybe you are grateful!) We spoke confidently about our learning and showed our family members around our classroom.

We had a fantastic day at the official opening ceremony of the Cowan Park Tennis Courts. We listened well to the instructions given by the Active School Coordinator and the Barrhead High Young Leaders. We then set off around our 6 targets, playing lots of different games to improve our tennis skills. 🎾

Hello and welcome to our Primary 4 blog. Here you will find photos and information about what we have been learning in school. We are not able to share photos of pupils at the moment but check back soon for a photo of everyone looking very smart on our first day in Primary 4.

We have settled into school well after our summer holiday. We are happy to see our friends and teachers everyday, and we are getting used to school routines.

Our PE day is on a Thursday and PE kits can be worn to school on this day. Reading and Mental Maths homework should be completed every day. Spelling is due on Friday.

We made ‘all about me’ hearts during our P4 taster day with Mrs Denny. We shared information about ourselves, our favourite things and our families.

We worked together to make a class charter as part of our Rights Respecting School Status. We chose 6 rights from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and voted on a theme. The most popular theme was dogs.

We loved taking part in a team STEM challenge on the first day. We worked so well together to build a big tower. We were only allowed to use elastic bands and string to touch the cups! We even added some extra cups sitting in different directions!

We have been enjoying lots of outdoor learning opportunities recently:

First we worked with a partner to create an apple and sunflower seed bird feeder.

Then we found a good spot to hang it on the tree to hopefully attract some birds. 

Secondly we worked as part of a team to build an interesting den. We spoke about what skills we used such as creativity, problem solving, communication and team work.

Lastly we took our learning outside for a science challenge. We have been learning about different types of energy. We learned about heat energy and that you can measure how hot something is using a thermometer. In groups we each had a bowl of water at 50 Degrees Celsius and were challenge to use ice and cold water to cool it down to a steady 25 Degrees Celsius. It had to stay at that temperature for at  least 1 minute so we had to be careful not to add in all of the ice at once.

Some action shots from sports day!

 

In science, we have been exploring how magnets work. First we went around the classroom to find objects that were magnetic: 

Then we made our own magnet maze and shared them with our peers:

After that we designed and made a game that uses magnets:

We also made posters and fact files to display all the information we have learned: