It’s been a busy but a fun month in P4.1! November has been packed with learning, new experiences and achieving goals. We have been working with a lot more independence and focus,  enjoying learning outside and in the classroom.

Social Studies

Our new topic is based on 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 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.

Writing

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. Here is an example of some notes about the four layers of the rainforest:

We used these notes to create some excellent pieces of writing (non-chronological reports, fact files, and poems). We continue to build longer sentences with a variety of openers and connectives. We are focussing on using word banks and rules to help with spelling.

Reading Comprehension & Drama 

To celebrate the release of The Twits on Netflix, we have been reading the book by Roald Dahl. Our class novel has helped us to develop our comprehension skills by answering different types of questions and looking for evidence in the text. We have had great fun using drama to explore the characters and scenarios through hot-seating, freeze framing, thought tapping, improvisation and even short scripted news reports!

Numeracy and Mathematics 

The Squares and Triangles have started learning their 6, 7, 8 and 9 multiplication tables after revising their 3 and 4.  We have been looking at patterns within each table to make them easier to learn and playing lots of games to familiarise ourselves with the multiplication and division facts. We have been very motivated to improve our fluency and speed when recalling facts in each table. After exploring lots of different ways of learning tables, P4.1 pupils can now identify ways that work for them individually and are starting to revise in their own time.

The Circles have also been exploring their 3 and 4 multiplication and division facts through games and songs with Mrs Denny and with extra support from Mrs Kane and Mrs McMillan. We continue to strengthen number bonds every day. 

Cross Arthurlie turns 60! 🎈🎵

P4.1 had a great time celebrating our school turning 60 with a silent disco, a whole school slosh and a look at what school may have looked like back in the 1960s. 

October has been busy in P4/1 

We have been revising our 3 and 4 multiplication tables and lots of us are ready to begin learning our 6. We have been looking at patterns within these tables to make them easier to learn and playing lots of games to familiarise ourselves with the facts. 

P4/1 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 and have taken inspiration from Tim Burtons illustrations to create spooky self-portraits! We used charcoal and have been practicing blending to create light and shade. We studied the characters from The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie to notice the similarities in their features and used these 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! 

In French we have been using our dictionary skills and building on our previous knowledge to find the translation for some spooky words, using 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. 

Welcome back, I hope everyone had a lovely September weekend despite the weather! We have had a very busy few weeks in P4/1, continuing to build upon and develop our skills through ICT and IDL as well as mathematics and literacy. 

 

Numeracy and Mathematics 

We have been very busy developing lots of maths skills! We have been working hard on our vertical calculations, using our place value knowledge to support this as we move onto more challenging calculations. We also had great fun for ‘Maths Week Scotland’ with lots of active maths challenges as discussions around the real world applications of all our maths skills and knowledge! 

 

Literacy and Class Novel 

We have been loving our class novel ‘The Legend of Spud Murphy’, it has been full of twists and turns we didn’t expect and has really taught us not to judge a book (or a librarian)  by it’s cover! We have had great fun reading together as a class, making predictions, summarising our previous reading and creating character descriptions for our main characters. We have also explore how characters may be thinking and feeling at different points at our novel using hot seating and creating short scenes to support this. 

 

In our writing lessons our focus has been on characterisation, and we have looked at some short clips and used this to form a short character description. We have compared Miss Honey and Miss Trunchbull from Matilda, looking at the different ways in which the characters move and interact with others to support our creative writing! We also linked our writing in with our maths for ‘Maths Week Scotland’, creating a short story about Finn Finity who is our maths mascot. Everyone in the class created some amazing tales using the brief that we must add in a number and a shape in some way, as well as linking into this years ‘Wild Maths’ theme.  

 

ICT 

The class have been busy developing their typing skills, focusing on ensuring accuracy as well as speed, and have had great fun attempting some touch typing. We have also been developing our research skills which will help us as we move up the school, looking at where to find reliable sources of information and how to ensure our search is an accurate one using key words to find the correct information. 

 

 

IDL 

We have been continuing with our human body topic, focusing on the respiratory and circulatory system as well as looking at the brain and the amazing way it communicates with our body! We have been busy exploring the journey of oxygen and blood around our body and labelling diagrams, creating posters and producing short paragraphs on the different processes. We have had great fun exploring the human body and can’t wait to get stuck into our new topic too! 

 

Well done to P4/1 for the hard work and consistent effort they have put into all areas of their learning this month!

✏️ Welcome to a brand new school year in Primary 4!📘

We are so excited to begin this learning journey together and are looking forward to sharing all the exciting things we’ll be discovering this year. From new topics and skills to fun activities and class projects — there’s so much to look forward to!

📸 As we are still waiting for all digital consent forms to be returned, the children’s faces have been blocked out in this post for privacy.

The children have settled into P4 and have already started to make their classroom look amazing with their work.  Here is a sneak peek to keep you going until our first open day on Tuesday the 16th of September.

The children made ‘all about me hearts’ with Mrs Denny on their taster days, which are now proudly displayed.

 

🕵 Literacy Learning: Grammar Detectives at Work!✏️

In Literacy, the children have been revisiting nouns, with a focus on proper nouns. To make learning fun and active, they became Grammar Detectives!

Working in groups, the children proofread a letter and carefully identified all the proper nouns hidden within the text. Once they spotted them, they made corrections by capitalising the proper nouns—just like real editors!  This activity helped strengthen their understanding of grammar rules while building teamwork and attention to detail. Great job, Primary 4!

The children have also enjoyed listening to Newsround and making notes about the important events happening!

 

 

🧠🦿🫁 IDL: Exploring the Human Body🧠💀

We’ve kicked off our first Interdisciplinary Learning (IDL) topic:            The Human Body and How to Keep It Healthy.

The children brought fantastic prior knowledge to our class discussions and impressed me with how much they already knew! They worked together to generate “big questions” that they will explore further as the topic progresses.

It’s been brilliant to see such strong pupil voice in action — helping to shape the direction of their learning and making the IDL more meaningful and engaging for everyone.

We can’t wait to discover more as we continue our journey through the human body! You can see from our photos below that we all had a great time trying to get  the bones in the correct place.

 

 

 

🧮 Numeracy: Multiplication in Bloom!

In Numeracy, the children have been showcasing their knowledge of multiplication in creative and colourful ways.

They created their very own multiplication flowers, carefully designing each petal to display different multiplication facts. This activity helped reinforce their times tables while allowing them to be artistic  in their learning.

The classroom is now blooming with these beautiful flowers — a fantastic way to celebrate their hard work and understanding of multiplication!

 

 

Outdoor learning

This month we made mini beast hotels and started our den building topic:

Sports Day

Pizza Day

We were set the challenge of encouraging children to eat more vegetables by designing a delicious pizza. First we carried out a survey to find out what vegetables children in the school like. Then we researched some different vegetable pizza ideas that we liked for inspiration. We also designed a pizza box cover at the computer suite for our pizza to go in.  After that, we demonstrated grating and cutting skills when preparing a variety of food. Finally, we wrote a persuasive advert for our pizza to encourage others to try it. Once the pizzas were cooked it was time for the taste test. First we tried our own pizza and rated look, smell and taste. Afterwards we got the chance to try a partners pizza and share some peer feedback.

Lots of our learning this month has linked to our Roman topic:

We have been looking at Roman mosaics and how they were made using lots of tiny tiles. We created our own design by drawing out our idea first before cutting lots of squares from the coloured paper.

Next, we were keen to learn about Roman numerals. We made a poster to help us remember some of the numerals up to 30. We then tea stained our poster to make it look ancient. After that, we used clay to make some Roman coins and carved a Roman numeral into it.

Lastly, one of our questions about the Romans was ‘do the Romans play games?’ So we did some research to find out what the Romans did for fun. So far we have learned about different board games like chess and tic tac toe, and gladiators fighting at the colosseum.

Thank you to the fire fighters at Barrhead Fire Station for coming to visit our school! Here is some action shots of us trying out the hose…

We are continuing to enjoy muddy movers now that the weather is much brighter and sunnier.

Here is us trying out all the fun activities set up for Red Nose Day.

We have been carrying out our own research about the Romans. On our own or with a partner we have chosen an aspect of daily life in Ancient Rome to create a poster about.

Currently in science we are exploring how germs are spread and how we can reduce the spread. We carried out an experiment using UV gel and UV torches to show how easy it is to spread germs and that they are everywhere. We were then challenged to use a good hand washing technique to see if we could remove all of the gel (germs) from our hands.

We presented our solo talks this month and it was so interesting to hear about everyone’s hobbies, holidays, favourite animals or toys. Well done everyone ⭐️

In science we have been observing our cress plants closely to identify the best conditions for plant growth. We had changed the conditions for each plant (no sunlight, no soil, no water, and then a plant that was given all three) so we were then able to compare and decide what cress plant had grown the best. We also discussed in our groups if anything  surprised us.

We concluded that the cress with no sunlight turned yellow and the cress with no soil did not grow at all. The cress that was given sunlight, water and soil grew the best. We wondered if we could do anything to help the unhealthy cress plant become healthy again. We started to give the yellow cress plant sunlight, and soil to the one without.

In outdoor learning this month we were on the hunt for different items we could find in winter.

A big well done to Aurora, Breagha, Nora and Esme who performed at the XA factor. Well done, we are all very proud of you!

Numeracy  – multiplication and division 

In numeracy we have been working very hard  to learn our multiplication and division facts for 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10. Maths time is always very busy so there is not always time to take pictures. We have made board games and posters to help us remember our multiplication facts:

Money 

Money is another topic we are currently working hard at. So far we have learned to make different amounts using coins and notes, record amounts in different ways and add amounts. We are currently setting up our ASDA  shop in class so we can practise these skills as part of our room targets.

Literacy 

To consolidate reading skills we have been taught, each morning we work on a choice task independently, with a partner, or with our group. Some of the activities include: identifying similarities and differences between ourselves and a character from our reading book, creating questions for a partner to answer, identifying parts of speech, tracking the emotion of a character from our book, writing a book review, or identifying cause and effect.

Writing 

In writing, we are currently learning how to write an effective journey story. We have learnt how to use time connectives, adverbs, commas and exclamation marks. Next week we will plan out our writing, and challenge ourselves by including the new vocabulary, grammar and punctuation.

Art – pop art

In art, we are learning about pop art. We have currently looked at the artists Andy Warhol and Keith Haring. We have taken inspiration from their bright, cartoon style art work to create our own.

Modern languages – Mandarin 

This month, we have started our mandarin lessons on a Thursday afternoon.

Science – Growing plants 

Our science topic has been growing plants. We have learned about different ways plants disperse their seeds, germination and what a seed needs to germinate. We are currently carrying out an experiment to find out the best growing conditions for cress.
(Pictures to follow)

Outdoor learning 

In outdoor learning, we have planted sunflower seeds and made bird feeders to put out into the playground.

In P.E we are continuing to develop our gymnastics skills: balancing, jumping and rolling on and off equipment. Here are some action shots:

We had a very busy December! The Christmas concert, making our craft for the school Christmas Fayre, our Christmas party and making bread just to name a few.