Mr Atkinson’s comment:
I hope everyone had a great festive holiday! This week homework will be resuming and we would also be very grateful if you voted for our entry in the STEM the Flow competition which can be found here: https://www.keepscotlandbeautiful.org/climate-action-schools/upstream-battle/stem-the-flow/2023-24/crookfur-ps/
Literacy and English
We started the year with learning our new spelling sounds and words and reading our new books with Mr Atkinson.
We have now started our poetry writing block with a focus this week on learning how to rhyme using the ABAB structure in our stanzas and onomatopoeia linked to the theme of our winter holidays.
Numeracy and Maths
There was a lot of practical Maths this week involving using jugs to measure in ML and L and comparing how much water was in each container by looking at the scales. Using our knowledge of kilograms and grams, some of us estimated the weight of objects and then checked our estimations by using weighing scales. We had to read the intervals very carefully to ensure we got an accurate measurement. In another lesson we used the Chromebooks to explore calendars and solved questions based on the months. A challenging topic we learned about was what square and triangular numbers are and then we applied our understanding to create some of these patterns.
Health and Wellbeing
For our indoor P.E. session we have started our new Gymnastics series and this week we focused on honing the different types of rolls and group balances by discussing techniques. On Thursday for P.E. we are going to be developing our tennis skills. We have begun by making sure that we had the correct grip and hold of the tennis racket and then we started to work on improving our forehand by aiming and hitting balls at targets.
In our Growth Mindset lesson this week we discussed that failure and success can take many shapes and we all agreed that failure helps us to eventually succeed. Then we worked with our partner to help create a child-friendly definition of what being successful means. We then explored some famous failures such as J.K. Rowling and Walt Disney.
Science
With Mr Atkinson we created energy themed Top Trump cards by writing key facts about the type of energy and then we drew what they look like. We later used these in a game whereby one person was the judge who decided which person out of the two competitors had the better argument or stance for their energy source.
We also formed debating groups are defended our energy type by applying our knowledge of non-renewable and renewable energy to help counterargue points made by the other team.
After these activities we then wrote a balanced report pretending to be a scientist employed to champion and persuade the increased usage of renewable energy.
