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:

Thank you to the P6 and P7 pupils who organised some exciting Red Nose Day activities for us. We had great fun!

This term we have been learning lots about our environment and the impacts of plastic pollution.

We started off our topic by going on a plastic hunt in the playground. We recorded all the different types of plastic we found like yoghurt pots, crisps packets, plastic bags, plastic bottles and more:

We then wondered how long these items would stay in the playground if  no one picked them up. This led to us learning about the word ‘biodegradable’. We predicted how long different everyday items would take to biodegrade:

We were shocked to find out that plastic takes 100s of years to completely break down! Then we chose to make a poster or fact file to show off what we had learned so far:

Next we were learning about what happens to our rubbish after it goes into the bin. We identified different items that can be recycled and sequenced what happens to them at the recycling centre.

We were also surprised to learn that if we don’t recycle items then they go to landfill. Then we chose to create a comic book strip describing what happens to glass, paper, tin or plastic:

Then we started to learn about the impact of plastic pollution on animals. We read different books and watched some videos describing how plastic ends up in the ocean. We learned that animals think the plastic is food and get sick or get tangled and trapped in different plastic objects. This made us really sad. We wanted to create some artwork and our own stories about the animals that are affected:

Lastly we went on a litter pick in the playground to help make a change: