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.

Sock dolls/puppets

Through our skills academy we have been developing our fine motor skills and creativity through sewing and making  sock dolls. We built on our previous experience creating animal soft toys and through discussion we were able to demonstrate the diverse background represented in our school and class. We  selected and used a range of materials to create our own unique designs. We are delighted with how they have turned out and have shared some photos of them below.

We had to use two socks and start by making a hood,mask or hat by cutting off the heel of the sock and a little bit of the sock. Then we cut off a large piece of sock where your toes go and  with that piece we created the legs. We had to stuff it and sow it and  use  a skin coloured sock  to create the face.

Maths

We have been developing our knowledge of compass points, directions and following routes. We came up with some top tips to help us rememeber the order of the compass points using a mnemonic  like Never Eat Soggy Waffles and discussed ways to help avoid confusion when making left and right turns.

Writing

In writing this week we have been continuing to learn how to use speech marks correctly  to show a conversation between two people or characters. We had to remember to take a new line each time a new/different charater spoke, use capital letters at the start of speech and punctuation at the end of speech and put speech marks around the words each person or character says. Here is an example we came up with below

“How was your day?” Said Samantha

“Good,” said Lewis ”How was yours?”

“Not so good, so far,” mumbled Samantha

“Why?”

“My cat’s sick.”

“Oh no.”

“I hope he’s alright.”

We also got a letter from the author Lindsay Littleson who has written  a childrens novel about Titanic called The Titanic Detective Agency. She shared with us information about how she came up with her ideas by researching some of the real children who were on board Titanic on it’s maiden voyage. We also compared life in 1912 to life today to get a better understanding of what it would of been like for passengers onboard the ship.

In art with P5A’S new teacher Miss Bishop we have been developing  our drawing skills, we drew detailed self potraits and looked at sketching and shading techniques.

P.E.

This week we  took part in the Daily Mile and played rounders in the muga. We tied 8-8 and it was a very fast paced exciting game! We had lots of full catches and home runs and it  was a lot of fun.

In art we have been creating icebergs . We needed to use a black piece of paper then we got a piece of white paper to draw the shape of the iceberg. Then you had to glue your iceberg half way down the page. We used skills of shading and highlighting with pastels to create three dimensional form and texture on the ice and in the sea.

We also created some fantastic portholes drawings using  paper plates, paint and pens.

We have  been looking at using speech marks within our writing, we shared examples and looked at editing and improving our work. We came up with some really great examples of alternative words we could use for said, such as murmured, screeched or bellowed, to give us a greater insight into characters feeling and emotions and make our writing more interesting.

In maths we have been learning about grid references and compass points, along with continuing to develop our skills in multiplication and division.

We have really enjoyed learning more about titanic and sharing our research to date through quizzes and presentations.  Our models have allowed us to look more closely at the ship’s design. We also looked at the different facilities on board for 1st, 2nd and 3rd class passengers. Here are some of the new things we have learned.

” I did not know that the ship split in half before it sank. ”

” I learnt that it might not only of been the iceberg that caused the ship to sink as there were reports that there was also a fire on board in one of the engine rooms..”

” I learnt it had 16 water tight compartments and that the engine was powered by coal.”

” I learnt about the night it sank and facts about what happened. ”

” I thought that the fourth funnel was only to make the ship look good and more powerful but it actually also provided ventatliation for the kitchens.”

” I learnt that Titanic was 883 feet long.”

Have a lovely holiday from all of us in P5A!

This week in Crookfur we have been enjoying taking part in activities for Maths Week Scotland

We have been looking at lots of different jobs that involve many different aspects of mathematics. Some of which surprised us such as the importance of mathematics in fashion design or how an athlete like Sir Chris Hoy would use maths within his training to improve his performance or how the engineers and manufacturers of his bike would use mathematical formulas and solve problems to help improve the speed of the bike and also to look at the cost of materials and the weight  of the bike.

 We used natural materials collected from the woodland to design a wide range of calculations and challenges for our partners. Each material was given a value and we had to solve the problems set out and work out the value of different items. We used a range of skills and operations including multiplication, addition, subtraction and division.

 In P.E we looked at division with remainders where we had to physically get into groups and see which numbers would divide evenly and which numbers would have remainders. We also came up with the calculation that would show what we were doing.

 Within our IDL topic titanic we used lots of maths skills designing and creating models of the ship. We looked at 3D shape, scale and measure.

 Here is some of the things we love learning about in Mathematics and Numeracy……

“ I love everything about maths.”

“ I like doing maths because I like the challenge of solving problems.”

“ I enjoyed it when we did P.E with maths.”

“ I use to find division hard but now it is easy.”

“ I liked using materials to make different calculations.”

 “I have enjoyed learning more about division and linking it to my times tables.”

” I am now able to divide thousands, hundreds, tens and units.”

Class Blog 14.9.20

Literacy – This week in literacy we were learning about inferential and literal questions. Literal is when the answer is in the text. Inferential is when you have to find clues in the text for your answer.

Numeracy – In mental maths we did the daily 10. We were learning how to add HTU to HTU by looking at each individual digit. We challenged ourselves to beat our speed and shared our approaches.  In maths we were learning about division relating to multiplication tables, division of tens and units and division of hundreds, tens and units. We used materials to look at exchanging and carrying and how to set out and record each part of the process.

Art – We were learning about pop art. We traced  an image then we printed the tracing paper onto a plain bit of paper. It was split into 4 squares. You had to pick four different colours and alternate them in the four boxes.

We enjoyed doing some sewing with Mrs Nasar. Each one of us had an animal to complete. We threaded the needle with wool. We used this to sew the animal together. We had to leave a gap to allow the stuffing to get inside. Sewing was quite difficult but we enjoyed it because it was a challenge.

We shared some excellent presentations on Titanic and enjoyed using the facts we had gathered from a variety of different sources to create quizzes for our class mates. We discussed some of the things that led to the tragic disaster and looked at how many things were changed as a result of the findings from the enquiry into how the ship sank.

Blog Editors JU and BL

P5a class blog 11/09/20

This week we were working on 3D shape, learning about their properties and investigating corners, edges and sides. We made 3D shapes out of small wooden sticks and blue tack. We were also learning more about symmetry.  We used 2D objects and faces, we were learning how to draw the exact copy of something and a half of something with a mirror. We also revised multiplication looking at how we set out multiplications of HTU and TU.

In writing we were writing a story about the magic escalator and we had to do VCOP and we were learning about adverbs. It was lots of fun! We learned about lots of things like onomatopoeia and different things we can do to improve our writing skills and our language along the way! We also learned more about things such as adjective,s verbs and a lot more! It was lots of fun!

In PE we were doing exercise where we were Scotty’s and hot stars, we were working on our muscles and looking at the effect exercise has on them. In the MUGA we were making our own games and we came up with some pretty good ideas, we had a great time trying out all the different games that we made up, we thought of some really exciting ideas. We loved doing all of this to build up our energy!

For our topic we are learning more about the titanic and how it sunk, we were also learning about how the titanic was made and all of the features  it had. We know that there was a fire raging downstairs which melted a bit of the ship, unluckily the bit that the fire melted is the same bit the iceberg hit, which unfortunately made the ship go down in pieces.

Here are some “quotes” by some of the people of p5a

“I have really enjoyed the new points system” (LFI)

“This week I have really enjoyed learning about the Titanic and how it sunk” (BL)

“I really like our topic (titanic) it is really interesting and fun to learn about. I have learned more about what happened to the Titanic and how it sunk”! (AS)

“I have enjoyed writing about the magic elevator and where it took us to and focusing on VCOP” (CM)

“I have really enjoyed learning about the titanic and what the ship looked like inside.” (LM)

“This week I have really enjoyed maths because we were doing shapes and it was fun” (BD)

“This week I have really enjoyed exercise, I also enjoyed art creating the other half of a face.” (JU)

“This week I really enjoyed making 3D shapes out of matchsticks, this helped me to focus on the edges and corners.” (EC)

“This week I have enjoyed learning about Titanic facts and how the ship was made. ” (LF)

Perseverance, resilience, team work, communication, cooperation, problem solving, investigating and creating and designing were some of the skills we used while at the woodland today………..

Thank you for reading CM and AS

Mathematics and Numeracy

In Maths we have been learning about symmetry. For an activity, we went outside and gathered things from the woodland area and used them to make a pattern with both a horizontal and vertical line of symmetry. We also worked on time looking at quarter past, quarter to and converting analogue to digital clock times and vice versa. We challenged our partners getting them to show us different times on small clock faces.  We discussed how we use time in our everyday lives and how it helps us to organize events and our day.

Literacy and English

For Literacy we continued a story where two characters had to escape from the tricky situation they found themselves in. We focused on our use of exciting and engaging vocabulary and how we can use punctuation to help create atmosphere and build tension. We also looked at examples on formal and informal writing using email and letters.

Art

For art this week we were doing abstract art. We had to express our emotions with hot colours and cold colours and look at pictures by famous abstract artists, Mark Rothko and Pablo Picasso for ideas and examples.

Topic IDL

For our new topic, we are working on the Titanic. We watched a video which told us about how the titanic sank and other facts. We took lots of notes about what we had learned. We are going to use our notes to create a text, game or presentation to share facts about this event in history with others.

P.E

In PE this week we played a game where we had to listen, concentrate and follow the instructions given. We also talked about the 4 key elements of fitness: speed, stamina, flexibility and strength and why they are important. In the MUGA we explained the rules of a range of different games to others to help us play them correctly. We realized it was important to give clear instructions and evaluated and changed some games as we played them.

One of our focuses on returning to school has been reconnection. We have been enjoying getting to know each other better, sharing our ideas, thoughts and opinions and working together to shape and develop our learning environments. Here are some photos to share with you……..