Where to start?….What an exciting week we have had!

Be assured there was a LOT of hard work going on in Maths and Literacy (the acrostic poems are amazing and will be coming home as a gift for you to enjoy next week) but what we all want to talk about is our visit from THE GRINCH!

Friday was quite an eventful day. Here is a video of how our messy our room was left and another showing the reaction of the class on arrival 🙂 A day to remember!

I hope you all enjoyed the lanterns that came home for Busby Shines Bright. We had a really nice afternoon creating them and the children were so excited to be taking part in something that involved the whole community 🙂

Over the past couple of weeks I have really enjoyed watching how well the class can work together and help each other to learn. Sometimes a shoulder partner or a group discussion just gives us a bit more confidence to explore new or tricky skills.

In Maths the Squares group have been learning about the properties of 3d objects. They enjoyed playing the “Who Am I?” game as a group to match up the objects with their correct description.

Some of these were particularly tricky because different objects can have similar properties but with some great teamwork the group were successful in their task. They actually enjoyed the game so much that they went on to make their very own version for others in the class!

Our Health and Wellbeing focus this week was to further explore what it means to be a good friend, what makes a good relationship and what kind of positive qualities  we look for in a friend.

We also discussed the fact that negative reactions can cause hurt in a relationship and the children created a variety of different examples to highlight these but also to show how these issues can be resolved. The children worked in pairs to create comic strips to share a story about two friends who encountered an issue in their friendship due to one person acting in a negative way. We met many interesting characters such as Angry Andy, Polly the Promise Breaker and Selfish Sammy.  These comics were of such a high standard we felt we could have published them!

But in the end we settled for displaying them on the wall 🙂

In French we have been continuing to learn about hobbies and sports, working together to widen our vocabulary in this area. The children were given a tricky task of matching new french phrases to a corresponding picture from a list.

The children had to first match up  the pairs they knew already and then work together to find clues in the new french phrases to work out the rest.

There was a lot of great discussion and many children were supporting each other with correct pronunciation and word order.

They did a great job and we now feel more confident to discuss our hobbies and interests in French.

After all this hard work and discussion we finished up the week listening to some relaxing piano music whilst we did some mindfulness colouring.

A lovely way to start the weekend!

The children have enjoyed a week featuring lots of activities and lessons that explore different areas of Health and Wellbeing.

We, of course, still enjoyed our PE time outside and this is very important to us to keep us fit and active. This term we are learning how to play Hockey and are making great progress with all the skills that are involved in it.

On Monday it was anti-bullying assemblies that promoted discussion and led to the children signing an agreement to treat each other with respect and kindness in class. On Tuesday the children enjoyed a focus on resilience and ask them about Eating Elephants on Wednesday!? On Thursday we enjoyed some mindfulness activities and Mrs Galt had a lot of knowledge to share in the afternoon and had prepared some lovely activities for the class.

On Friday we focused on the Busby school values and discussed how these should impact our learning and behaviour in class. The children worked well together to create a display to give us a daily reminder to uphold these important values. Ask your child if they can give you examples of when they have upheld or demonstrated any of these values…we had lots to discuss in class 🙂

We used some fantastic French dictionaries in class to help us learn more vocabulary for hobbies and sports. If you ask us what we like doing we will be able to give  a range of answers.

Qu’est ce que t’aime faire?

J’aime faire les devours!

Have a look at this gif for a sneak peak at what will be featured in the blog next week!

Primary 4 have been very creative this week and have made mood rocks and dreamcatchers.

In Health and Wellbeing the class have been thinking about feelings and empathy and how we can support each other and lift each other’s mood. Each child has made a positive mood rock that they will give away to another person to show kindness and spread joy 🙂 It was lovely to see the children complimenting each other’s creations, discussing who they would like to gift these to and talking about others ways that they could lift the mood of others.

The class have also created dreamcatchers and this was in preparation for a writing lesson. The children have been learning to write instructions using bossy verbs and sequencing the steps. In order to understand the steps of creating these decorations we decided to make them ourselves first and they look fantastic! The children then went on to write a set of instructions and found that this was easier to do following doing the actual task themselves. What do you think?

We have also been preparing a video for Health and Wellbeing week to give people top tips for boosting their mood. Watch this space…

This week the children have made paper pumpkins and we put them altogether to create a little pumpkin patch…it was very cute! Some other pupils and teachers were asking how these delightful little pumpkins were made so during our writing lesson we created a set of instructions titled ‘How to Make a Paper Pumpkin’.

There were between 7 and 9 steps in the process of making these pumpkins. The pupils worked together to break the process down and write clear actions points to be followed in a certain order. The children enjoyed using ‘bossy verbs’ and look forward to creating something else in art next week and writing instructions following that too.

How great are these?! 🙂

It was so lovely to see the children again after a week off for the October break. We enjoyed hearing about all the things they did during the holiday and they worked hard this week despite being tired from getting back into the school routine. The children wrote wonderful personal recounts of their best day in the October break and I hope that we are able to let you read them soon as you will be very proud!

The children have continued to really enjoy the skipping and playground games that have been introduced at break times in the MUGA. They have learned new skills and developed their social skills as they play together.

This afternoon we all had great fun outside as the class taught me some of their new skipping tricks and some clapping games.

We hope  to do this again next week 🙂

Earlier this week the children used the Chromebooks to develop their skills in handling data. The pupils learned to insert survey results into Excel and create a graph to show the results. The pupils learned about rows, columns and cells and gained an understanding of how we would use these  in real life contexts.

Mr McLaughlin was supporting our class during our ICT time and he was very impressed with how well the class followed instructions and with how quickly they picked up the concepts.

We will have another lesson to further develop our skills in using spreadsheets and showing data next week and we look forward to it.

We enjoyed another live music lesson today which focussed on a new rhythm called ‘ti re te’ and a new skill which was using stick notation. The children were able to repeat and identify a variety of different rhythms and they became more confident with noting the rhythms down using stick notation which is a shorthand way of writing musical phrases.

We are grateful to Mrs Carey who delivers these lessons to us on Google Meet.

This week the pupils in p4 have begun exploring Electricity in Science with Mrs Galt. The pupils discussed together what they already knew and what different things use electricity to work. There were many examples in the classroom and lots of suggestions about things at home.

Mrs Galt and the children learned about a tesla coil and how it transmits electricity wirelessly. The children worked together to plan the topic by noting down the questions that they have and would like to explore during the lessons.

The children each made a ‘wee me’ to be added to the whole school display at the entrance to the school building. What a lovely looking bunch they are!

The children worked together in Maths this week to learn how to find fractions of amounts- very tricky! They also used ‘test a friend’ games and ICT to practise their multiplication and division facts which will help with this work.

Keep it up p4 you are doing a great job 🙂

This week the children have been enjoying Maths Week Scotland and I hope you have enjoyed our twitter updates and hearing from the children about what we have been exploring.

As well as special Maths Week activities we have continued with our skills work in class and this week we have seen some really super team work.

The children have worked together to deepen their understanding of the link between multiplication and division. They used cubes to demonstrate how numbers are linked together and recorded what they found in their jotters. They have also enjoyed challenging each other to recall times table facts quickly.

Some children have been learning more about analogue clocks and have enjoyed discussing the different activities that are timetabled throughout a day.

We have been focusing on Kindness in Health and Wellbeing this week. We have had some great discussions in class and all children have been able to give examples of when they have shown kindness to others…they really are a lovely bunch! We wrote a personal recount titled ‘When I was Kind’ and the pupils recalled an event and described the details in order. It was their first attempt at a recount and they did very well.

We played Classroom Kindness Bingo which we all really enjoyed. The children worked in pairs and marked off each box after discussing ideas and most children had a full house! Any pair who had one or two remaining are going to work on achieving these in the near future.

The children got a chance to play some tunes from their playlist this afternoon as they created some lovely messages of kindness for a person of their choice. You might find a wee present coming your way this weekend and some pupils were even suggesting neighbours or wider family members that they could deliver a kind picture to.

   Best effort from everyone!

We enjoyed another great live music lesson today via Google Meet . The children have interacted really well with this and have not found an online lesson a challenge at all. The music teacher was very pleased with the way our class took part today and was very impressed with their understanding. The children are becoming really confident with their rhythms and we enjoyed learning a rhyme about bubble gum.

Maybe they will perform this little rhyme for you at home and get you to try out the actions…which are quite tricky!

There were many other things that the children got up to this week but one highlight that they wanted to mention was the video we watched to help us become more familiar with French numbers to 20.

The children particularly enjoyed dancing along with the characters and the catchy song was helpful in practising the pronunciation. Why not encourage your children to count in French at home where possible…or even get them to show your their moves to this song!

This week in P4a the children have been working very hard in our Maths and Numeracy lessons. Some children have been learning how to estimate the area of an irregular shape, others have been concentrating on number processes and  the Triangles group, who will feature in the blog this week, have been learning about multiplication.

They have carried out practical tasks using concrete materials to develop their understanding of their table facts. There was some excellent team work shown by the Triangles group, as seen in the photographs attached, when they worked together to display and record the 3 and then 4 times table.

      Team work!           

The children are becoming more confident with multiplication.

In Health and Wellbeing we have continued to explore strategies to develop resilience. We have looked at the positive impact that exercise can have on our bodies and minds and we also have explored how having FUN can have a positive impact on us too. The children have worked extremely hard this week in all areas of the curriculum so when we were discussing ‘fun’ on Wednesday we thought it would be a good idea to plan some Friday Fun to allow the children to build relationships and spend time doing things that they enjoy. The children came up with a good list. Some of the ideas included; listening to music, creating art, drawing, rehearsing a play, playing board games and using digital technologies to play Maths games. We had a wonderful afternoon!

We have really enjoyed the class discussions (blethers!) that we have had during our Health and Wellbeing time and the children have said how much they have enjoyed involving family at home in the discussions too…so thank you for joining in.

This week the pupils took some photographs of the wall displays in our classroom because they wanted to show family at home where they are learning during the day.

We use this wall to display work that pupils have been proud of and have put a lot of effort into. There will be work displayed from all areas of the curriculum and this wall takes pride of place at the front of the classroom.

Mrs Guy has been the first person to display a ‘favourite mistake’. This wall encourages us to recognise our mistakes as a chance to learn and do better next time…the positive

focus on my mistake took most of the frustration out of my Google Classroom error! The children have been very patient  and I hope that the next time someone makes a mistake they will choose to display it alongside the Mrs Guy entry.

 In our class we have a Maths wall and a Literacy wall that are working walls filled with prompts that help us with our learning.  We have display walls and walls to help us plan our learning and reflect on it. As a welcome, outside our class we have created a beautiful and uplifting display stating that we are all different but we grow together in P4a 🙂

                                     We have bunting around the class that has a contribution from each pupil with a piece of advice for when we feel worried or anxious. The pupils can refer to their own advice or can browse what others have to say.                                      The children have identified rights and responsibilities that they want to focus on this year and have agreed with each other to respect each others rights and help each other to be safe in class.

Do you like our homemade cacti? We have a bit of a nature/plant theme going on in P4a and this was a fun way to display our class birthdays. Can you spot a few real plants including “Wee Spiky”?

We had our first remote music lesson this week and it went really well. The technology worked for us (!) and the pupils engaged very well with the lesson which was exploring different rhythms.  

Some highlights!

Killer ten championship on Friday afternoon…

“Adapt” art activity. Showing we are able to adapt by completing tasks with our non-dominant hand. Some interesting results…

Beating PBs in Speed Tests…

Successful writing planning…

Using ICT to learn about multiplication…

Time for a well earned weekend!