✏️ 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.

Pictures from our amazing Children in Need talent show ⭐️

Science – Food Chains

We have been learning to use google slides (adding a new slide, inserting pictures and shapes, changing the background colour, font size and more). We created a google slide to showcase everything we have learned about food chains.

Over the past couple of weeks we have been working hard to complete our Google slide so that we were ready to share with our peers. We gave each other feedback on our work by saying things that we liked and things our peer could do better next time. It is important that we know our next steps and use them in our next piece of work so that we are always improving.

Art – Colour and value – slot canyons

We wanted to learn about animals that live in the desert so we watched Planet Earth. It allowed us to virtually explore South America and we were very impressed by the slot canyons. This led us to try and make our own slot canyon art using crayons to create warmth and value.

Writing – Instruction Writing

We brought our instruction writing topic to an end and have already started our new topic of persuasive writing.  During writing lessons we always make time to share our writing with peers, give peer feedback and also set our own writing targets. Our targets are always discussed with Miss McIver so we know what we need to do to progress.

Outdoor Learning – Litter picking, muddy movers and autumn nature hunt. 

Linking to our mini plastic pollution topic we went on a litter pick to and took a note of what litter we could find in our playground. We found lots of plastic bottles, crisp packets, sweet wrappers, yoghurt pots and more. This led us to finding out about the word ‘biodegrade’ and how long different materials will take to completely break down to nothing. We were shocked to learn that plastic bottles can take up to 450 years to biodegrade!

We had fun with our peers exploring at muddy movers again and we will be going out the first Thursday of each month. A gentle reminder that it is our responsibility to look after our own water proofs and welly boots.

We went on an autumn nature hunt to find different types of leaves, birds, bugs, flowers, etc that we could find in our playground.

Scottish Farming Topic

We have been learning about arable, pastoral and dairy farming. We started by learning about arable farming and potatoes. We discovered that in the past the October Break was so that children could be off school to help pick all the potatoes from the farm! After that we found out about pastoral farming and the journey of an egg. We created a comic to showcase what we had learned about the journey of a potato or egg.

Then we spoke about dairy farming and worked in groups to name different dairy products. We already knew products like milk, cheese, cream, butter and ice cream. We watched a video on how we could make butter easily in the class – it was the perfect time to show off our note taking skills.

Once we were happy we knew the steps to successfully make butter we thought we would give it a go! Here we are having a dance party to motivate us to keep shaking the cream until it turned into butter:

After a quick look and a lot of shaking – we could see it had started to look like butter!

P.E – Basketball

In P.E we have been practising our dribbling, bounce pass, chest pass and shooting skills.

Team work

Some pictures of us working as a team to complete a jigsaw, drawing pictures or making origami foxes.

P3 have been learning about nutrition, and his lead us into food and how hygiene is importnat when making/ eating food.
we learnt about germs and washing our hands.