By Wednesday, with the help of Mrs Allen, we had got down to the serious business of practising for the Christmas Concert. Lots of hard, but very enjoyable, work ahead of us over the next week!

We all individually decided which aspects of Victorian life we would like to look at as we compare a period of time in the past with our own. Fashion, houses, toys and games were a popular choice, with one of the class members wanting to look at a Victorian Christmas. The timing couldn’t be better!

We braved the elements on Friday and took part in the whole school tree plant in our playground.  Photos below:

The weather was against us this week for the Daily Mile with us only managing out twice. Our total now lies at 718.

On Tuesday we enjoyed a visit from Mr Curley and Miss Thomson who came into our classroom to watch a literacy lesson. In this lesson we were learning all about settings. We split into groups of three and visited ‘Blether Stations’ where we read about Victorian Children: School-life,  working in coal mines and working on the streets. We talked about the settings, read some very interesting (and horrible) facts and wrote our blethers down on Blether record sheets.

Our next visit was on Wednesday afternoon when we visited the Neilston Library. This was our first P6a visit. We were taken on a tour of the library by Mrs Clark and then we split into groups to answer some questions which tested how much we remembered from the tour. All the teams did really well!

Our current daily mile total is 680 miles: Callum has set us the target of reaching 1000 miles before we stop for Christmas. We think we can do it as long as the weather is good to us. This challenge has certainly got us very motivated!

The last visit of the week was on Friday when Molly went to visit P1. It was National Diabetes Day on Tuesday (14th) and Molly was asked if she would go to primary one, at a suitable time during the week, to explain all about type one diabetes.  She worked very hard to get ready for her talk and had a run through in front of our class beforehand. She did splendidly and we were very proud of her!

We have started training to be playzone leaders! Sophie likes learning all the new games. Ame knows that we are being play leaders to primary one and two to begin with and if we are successful we’ll include the primary threes later in the session.  Louise explains that Playzone is for when children are sitting alone, with nothing to do, then we’re supposed to get them to play our games with other children.  Arran loves the game ‘Hot Chocolate’ and he thinks the younger ones will like it because they’ll enjoy running about but they’ll need to listen carefully to the rules.  Stewart found it tricky being a play leader, during our practice, because in the ‘Cat and Mouse’ game the tails kept falling off and it was hard to explain and to get the children to listen. We’re all very excited about this leadership opportunity!

We’re now at 597 completed miles in our daily mile. Rosalin says it’s getting harder because it’s colder and it’s slippery- unfortunately she knows from experience!

We’re looking forward to really getting into our social studies topic- ‘The Victorians’, where we’ll be comparing our lives with that of children in the past.  Hazel thinks it’ll be fascinating learning about what their lives were like….. Watch this space!

On Monday wrote formal letters to our local MSP, Tom Arthur. We chose a topic and tried to persuade him to support us in our efforts. We are not sending the letters to him but it was a good exercise in writing formal letters and a suitable end to our Scottish Parliament and Democracy study.

Tuesday was our Hallowe’en dress up afternoon. We had a fantastic time in the hall seeing all the fabulous costumes and taking part in the parade.

Thursday was our RME group presentations (which we have been preparing throughout term one). Each group took responsibility for an other world religion and delivered a group talk to the class to teach them about the beliefs, places of worship, key figures and artefacts of that religion.  (They were peer assessed on their content and presentation skills.)  We enjoyed learning about Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity.  (See photos.)

On Friday, for our writing, we used Fireworks as our context for learning and practised using different literary techniques: Alliteration, onomatopoeia, similes and strong adjectives. We linked this to an art follow up where we used scratch art to create the fireworks which we had written about. Everyone was very engaged and we got wonderful results.