We have been learning about characterisation in Literacy, and thinking about a character’s speech, thoughts, actions, effect on others and looks. This spells out STEAL to help us remember! This week, we chose characters from our reading books and found examples of STEAL, then used this to choose adjectives to describe our characters.   

 In Maths, we have now finished our work on fractions, so did a reflection sheet all about fractions to think about what we had learnt, what helped us to learn, and what challenged us. 

 We have continued our coding work on Scratch, and have started to use wait and say to make two sprites have a conversation.  

This week  we all took part in the House Quiz. Everyone tried their best and it was very close but in the end it was Stevenson that won and they will get an extra 10 minutes playtime next week! 

Book Week

As part of book week Scotland this week, we watched an Authors Live event from Pamela Butchart.  She discussed her book where pupils at a school suspect that one of their teachers is a werewolf. We read excerpts from the book which gave us clues that the teacher might be a werewolf, considering the character’s speech, thought, effect on others, actions and looks we then drew our own characters, – aliens, werewolves and other creature that were pretending to be a human.

We had to label the drawing to show the features that might give us some clues as to what they actually were like abnormally sharp teeth or fingernails. We had great fun guessing each other’s.

We also looked at the importance of a good blurb and how they are used to hook the reader in and encourage them to want to read the story. We had a go at creating our own blurbs for books we had read or stories we would like to write and looked at effective language and how humor or tension can be used to engage a reader.

We also enjoyed reading for enjoyment, listening to stories over the tannoy and taking part in the Mad Hatter’s Tea party.

Writing

In writing we used the pirate characters we had created the previous week to write a story about 3 pirates that were shipwrecked on a desert island. We looked at what problems they might encounter such as lack of food or dangerous animals living on the island and how they would overcome these problems. We explored the 5 elements of character within our writing looking at speech, thought, effect on others, actions and looks.

Our Planet

We have started our new topic called Our Planet and came up with a list of things we would like to find out more about. We have been looking at the effect of humans on the planet and some of the problems that have been created such as pollution, waste and endangered species. We have undertaken some independent research and shared some of our findings in class. We have also been looking into the problem with plastic and what we can do to reduce our use of plastics and recycle more. We designed posters to encourage others to do the same.

P.E

In P.E we have been developing our tennis skills further looking at small games, marking out small courts and looking at how to score points.

Well done to everyone who took part in our mini mudder challenge today and thank you for all the money you have raised.

Woodland

We had fun programming our “Human Robots” down at the woodland using the commands and directions we have been learning in maths. We had to lead our robots to the treasure using commands such as FD 4, LT 90, F6, RT 90, FD 10. We had to edit our directions after trying them out and looked at how this is similar to the skills programmers use. This linked to the work we did in ICT this week using Kudo to program our digital robots.

Music with Mrs Hutchison. This week we discussed the music we like to listen to at home and took part in games and activities to help us identify  pitch, pulse, tempo, rhythm and timbre. We were able to identify and create long and short rhythms and had to listen carefully  to work out different timbres.

In Maths we have been working on fractions, we created our own fraction walls and looked at fractions of different shapes. We explored equivalent fractions and how we can identify any fraction by looking at the denominator and the numerator. We enjoyed games where we had to match fractions and  sort and shade different parts of shapes.

In literacy we have further developed our knowledge of how to use inverted commas and speech marks. We also looked at inference and how to use clues within a text to find answers. We enjoyed sharing the Halloween and Bonfire Night  poems we created with each other. We used a range of vocabulary to create atmosphere and mood and a variety of different sentence openers. We also further explored the use of onomatepia, simile and rhyme within our poems.

In P.E we have been working on Tennis and looking at rallies and different tpyse of shots such as backhand and forehand shots.