Month: October 2023

Mr Atkinson’s comment:

I hope everyone enjoyed the October holiday! It has been a very busy week in P5B including the pupils getting their individual and sibling photographs.

Literacy and English

Working in groups we created a story mountain for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. First we drew a mountain, as it represents the story because just like a story climbing a mountain has a starting point, peak and an end. We organised information about settings and characters as well as main events into different categories such as the build-up events, problem, resolution and conclusion.

For our final class novel task Mr Atkinson challenged us to write a new ending to the story. We illustrated some of the events that we had changed and many of us added new thrilling plot twists!

We also created a VCOP wall display that we will use in our writing lessons. Each of us wrote either helpful vocabulary, connectives and openers and drew the different types of punctuation we can use in our sentences. Then we stuck them to our display.

Numeracy and Maths

We have been learning to divide and multiply by 10 and 100, created and checked our very own square and triangle numbers and we made timestables posters for our Maths display that we can use if we are unsure.

Health and Wellbeing

Our final Bounce Back lesson involved discussing what is perfection and how being perfect can sometimes lead to us worrying and experiencing problems. Instead we all agreed that trying our best and having a go at something is a better method of learning and living.

French

In French with Miss Campbell we finished drawing our Harry Potter characters and then we labelled parts of their appearance by writing what they were in French such as the type of clothing being worn or the colour of them.

IDL – Scotland and Japan

We have been continuing to learn about Japan and make comparisons with Scotland. Using the Chromebooks we researched facts and took notes on famous people from both countries and further explored landmarks by learning about what some of them are made from, where they are located, why they were built, how much it is to visit them and how old they are.

Expressive Art

After leaving our clay models of characters from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to dry we then painted them and most of us have taken them home this week.

With Miss Campbell we made butterflies by using origami which is a Japanese art of folding paper and then we decorated them.

 

Mr Atkinson’s comment:

Thank you to all the parents and guardians for providing a plastic container for the pupils to take home their sushi rolls that they made on Monday with the catering team as part of their Japan topic. I hope you got a chance to taste and enjoy them! Have a great October holiday everyone and I look forward to hearing how you spent it.

Literacy and English

This week we finished our Harry Potter class novel and created who, what, where, when, why and how questions for a friend to answer! We really enjoyed it and some of us are going to read the next book in the series called Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

We summarised the book by choosing main events that happened to help us retell the story in our own words.

On Wednesday we spent the morning researching more facts about our chosen Scottish inventor that we had been investigating at home as part of our Talk Homework. When we felt we had enough facts we then organised them into groups using different titles and headings. We then created a fact file about the inventors and drew pictures of their inventions.

Numeracy and Maths

This week in Maths we looked at the rules and strategies for making square and triangle numbers, finishing our work on the timetables and dividing and continuing to solve vertical calculations.

Mr Fleeson visited our class and told us how he uses Maths in his job.  We got to see how a microscope works and were fascinated when he used it to explore some of our hair, shrimp eggs, a t-shirt and even Mr Atkinson’s beard!

Health and Wellbeing

This week in hockey we played matches and combined all the skills we have been learning this term such as passing, dribbling, shooting and our knowledge of the rules. In our next lesson we are going to evaluate our performances by discussing what we would like to improve and think about how we could use attacking and defensive strategies.

IDL – Scotland and Japan

We compared the life of a Japanese pupil with our own experiences of school in Scotland. First, we watched a video of a child going to a Japanese school and then we did some research on the Chromebooks and made some notes. Afterwards, we drew a table and separated sections into different time slots throughout the day. Then we wrote down what a Japanese student would be doing at those times and on the other side we wrote what we do.

Expressive Art

With Miss Campbell we finished designing, sketching and colouring our kimonos for our Japan topic. The shapes and lines on some of them are so interesting!

Outdoor Learning

This week Mr Atkinson had P5A and P4/5 in his class and he explained what we will be doing for outdoor learning this year.  We were told that we are all going to be participating in the LEAF programme which stands for Learning About Forests. First we shared our experiences of the outdoors, then we took part in a survey about nature and we discussed some lessons ideas and activities we could do to improve nearby ecosystems and outdoor areas on the school grounds. Our P5 stage is going to be forming a forest committee and to become a member we had to present three reasons as to why we think we should be on it. We also have started to create an action plan for the year.

 

 

Mr Atkinson’s comment:

P5B has had a brilliant time participating in Maths Weeks Scotland activities and we hope that you enjoy viewing what the pupils have been up to both in the blog and on the schools Twitter account.  Next week the class, with help from the catering team, will be creating sushi balls as part of their study into Japan. An email has been sent by the office kindly requesting for pupils to please bring some sort of container for Monday to allow them to bring home what they create.  In addition, any cardboard donations would be appreciated for our upcoming Science lessons.

Maths Week Scotland

This week in Maths we were learning about function machines and the strategies needed to work them out. We have also been improving our knowledge of divisions involving two digit numbers and remainders.

For Maths Week Scotland we created our very own step counters by coding and programming the Microbits.  We programmed them to recognise movement such as as shake or step.  We then tested them out by walking around the school a checking who got the most steps. Mr Atkinson also took part as he was doing the staff steps challenge!

Literacy and English

This week we read the second last chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. We also looked through the book and wrote down some WOW words that we did not know the meanings of. Afterwards, we used the strategy of reading the sentences around the words to make sensible guesses and then we used dictionaries to get the exact definitions of them.

In our Spelling lesson this some of us were looking at how to make words plural.

We each created a fact file about ourselves for our Writing lesson. We were challenged to organise our information and draw pictures that matched some of our facts.

French

During French with Miss Campbell we learned how to say what we are wearing.

IDL

Over a couple of lessons we worked in groups and pretended to be travel agents! We created information posters on Japan which had key facts that linked to Maths Week Scotland, such as the time difference between Tokyo and Glasgow, how many kilometres it takes to get from Scotland to Japan, we used holiday booking websites to find the cheapest and most expensive flights to Tokyo from Glasgow and we determined the difference in price between them. We then presented our travel posters to the upper school assembly!