Welcome back to the P5b blog! We hope you enjoy reading about what we have be exploring with Mr Atkinson in his Learning Journeys.

Last term we finished our cost of tourism Learning Journey which has helped us to learn about different parts of the world.  As we become more confident with how to read and write different directions in French we then created maps of towns and wrote key locations in French. Working with partners, we provided instructions for our friends to see if they could navigate around our drawings and list the places they could visit. Afterwards we investigated which areas and countries around the world speak French and through applying our knowledge of time we calculated the time differences between these locations. We also solved Maths questions about time to find out durations of flights and how to convert 12 and 24 hour time. Equipped with all of this knowledge we then considered how you would organise a trip to Paris. In groups we discussed the different travel options,  researched famous places tourists would want to see, reflected on how long it may take to reach each place and how much time would be needed to eat at locations. Finally we compared the cultural differences between Scotland and France.

After returning from the holidays we have started our new Learning Journey, Earth’s Resources. In class we have been learning about the properties of different types of rocks and we have been pretending to be geologists by going outside and looking for unusual stones. We also used clay, which is a material that you can find in the ground, to create faces of creatures which we placed onto trees in the woodland. P5B have also begun to investigate how materials are extracted from underground which has led to them learning about mining and they attempted to construct their own models on Tinkercad. To help see how this industry has changed over the years, the class all worked together to build a timeline of all the major events that impacted mining.

Today we were learning about algebra and we created our own equations using loose parts from outside. We then had the chance to move round and solve the equations. We had to use our problem solving skills to help us.

We have been learning first aid this week and what we would do in an emergency situation. We know how to put people into the recovery position.

We also started to light fires using flint and steel!

This week we started our Scottish Junior Forester Award. It is split into different sections such as Tree & Plant ID, Woodland Management, Habitats and Risk. We discussed ideas of what we could do under each section and we created a piece of art using natural materials. We will be outside on a Thursday afternoon. We are very excited about outdoor learning.

Today we also had the chance to prefect at lunchtime! Everyone was so excited and eager to put on prefect bibs!

We have been learning about advertising through our work on nutrition. We had to create an advert to persuade children to eat brussel sprouts! We have very creative ideas and enjoyed presenting them to the class.

We have been making pop up Eid cards this week to give to our friends and neighbours. We also watched a video of  the Cricketer Abtaha Maqsood reading a book called ‘Under the Hijab’ . We had great discussions about the book and hijabs.

The theme of British Science Week this year has been curiosity. We took part in investigations to explore questions such as ‘Does buttered toast always land the same way? Does changing the height make a difference? How can you tell different black inks apart?’. We had lots of fun trying to work these questions out. We always took part in the poster competition which was based on the idea of what a positive childhood would look like in the future. We also used Tinkercad to create a new Moon Rover. We took part in the SmartSTEM Quiz which we enjoyed.

We have had lots of fun during Book Week. Some pupils showed us their ‘stories in a box’, they were fantastic! We took part in the ‘Footy and Booky’ Quiz, we got into teams and had fun trying to answer questions about football and books. We created inspirational posters/quotes for our library area in our classroom.

We have been learning about Ramadan – what it is and how it is celebrated. We created some artwork,  researched the traditions of Ramadan and designed our own henna hands.

We have also been learning about food allergies and how to keep people safe if they have an allergic reaction.  Each team researched an allergy and created a poster to share with the class.

We have been learning about volume and capacity. We have been estimating and measuring water using different measuring jugs. We worked in pairs to compare our estimates and then measure with accuracy. We also worked on converting mls and l, ordering amounts from largest to smallest and applied our knowledge to solve word problems.

This week we have been learning about Chinese New Year. We created dragon bookmarks,  Chinese New Year cards, fortune tellers, learned how to write Happy New Year and Year of the Horse in Mandarin and created information booklets about how Chinese New Year is celebrated. We loved learning about Chinese New Year! Gong Hei Fat Choy!