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! 💪
We read the book One Word for Kids to encourage us to think of a word that will motivate us towards a personal goal all year. Some of us chose to make our words into a bracelet at the tuff tray!
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 exploring inferential questions – these are questions where the answer is not obviously in the text and we have to ‘read between the lines’ We have been learning to look closely for clues and pair this information with our life experiences to make an ‘educated guess’. This can bs a tricky concept but we are doing incredibly well. To begin, we looked at pictures with no captions to guess what is happening. We have played along with the New York Times’ feature ‘What is Going on in the Picture?’
To further help with making inferences, 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?
P4 have also started a month of Mandarin lessons. So far we have learned about Chinese culture, greetings, tones and numbers through playing lots of games and watching videos. We have also tried writing Chinese characters – something which has been very popular with pupils. This reflects out school values of respect as we learn how other cultures communicate and celebrate festivals which are different to ours.
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 picked out the Scots words we found in the story ‘Neeps and Tatties’. We already knew the meaning of quite a few Scots words and we explored more using the Oor Wullie Glossary! We made fantastic speech bubbles which show the meaning of the Scots words through lettering, colour and illustrations.
In Science, we worked together with P7 pupils to build Scribblebots. These simple robots would revise our learning from our electricity topic where we built circuits. We have been working on various talking and listening strategies. P4 listened well to P7s instructions and followed them confidently.
