Happy New Year! ✨️

We have been easing ourselves back into routine and enjoying the opportunity for a fresh start in the new year. We reflected over the goals we set in September and celebrated the many pupil successes! Many of us achieved goals such as learning our multiplication tables, improving our story writing and spelling, and drinking more water.

“I actually know my multiplication tables now. My 6, 7, 8 and 9. I just need to get better at dividing – I’m not as quick”

“I’m actually so proud of myself. I feel like my writing is a lot neater and my capital letters touch the top line.”

We can tell we have been successful through improvements in scores and personal confidence. Our new goals have been set for March and we’re motivated to work towards them! 💪

 

As we learn new concepts in Literacy and Maths, we are always revising previously taught concepts from P2 and P3 (First Level). In Maths, we realised that we would all like some more support on fractions, finding change from money, step division and reading time. Over the next few months we will be continually revising alongside our new learning to boost our confidence! We have already made a start through play, game boards, Chromebooks challenges and lesson starters.

In Literacy, we have been continuing to improve our comprehension skills by scanning through the text for keywords and highlighting them. We have been doing this in both English and French! We can now use highlighting (text marking) to accurately sequence events in a story.

[Highlighting text photo coming soon]

P4 have also started a month of Mandarin lessons. So far we have learned greetings, tones and numbers through playing lots of games. We have also tried writing Chinese characters – something which has been very popular with pupils.

January brings Burns Night on the 25th. We have been getting cosy and listening to lots of stories in front of our fireplace in January with many of these stories being in Scots. We already knew the meaning of quite a few Scots words and we explored more using the Oor Wullie Glossary! We made these fantastic speech bubbles which show the meaning of the Scots words through lettering, colour and illustrations.

We have also started a fantastic new class novel, 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! We are keeping a notebook full of clues and evidence whilst we read! We are asking lots of questions to try to make connections between the clues in the book. Who will be the first in the class to crack the case?

In Topical Science, we have been keeping an eye on the night sky as it has been very active in January, with planet alignments, meteor showers and the Northern Lights on display. We have been watching footage of all the action on Newsround and TWIG Reporter and learning the science behind it.

One educational video was all about how the Northern Lights occur and we 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.

With 2024 being one of the most solar active years, we explored the Northern Lights in Art. We have been learning about watercour technqiues and creating depth in artwork by adding detail in the foreground, midground and background.

“If something is far away, it looks smaller”

We then moved on to creating our beautiful artwork on cartridge paper. We tried a new watercolour paint technique called wet-on-wet which starts with clear water on the paper and then a wash of paint 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.

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! It will be on display at Open Afternoon.

This term we are studying history and the pupils have chosen to learn all about The Vikings. We explored many key eras in history and made a human timeline. After discussion, we took a vote between The Egyptians and The Vikings.

We’re also continuing to improve our knowledge of the countries in Europe and beyond by studying maps and learning flags.

We are staying fit and healthy by completing our Daily Mile outside in the fresh air!