Time has flown – it’s been a month now since we’ve been back. Well, at least, some of us have been back a month, Mr Burns decided that the seven weeks during summer wasn’t enough and took another week off – I suppose he’s not getting any younger and needs the rest. He’ll certainly need more of it by the time we’re finished with him, not to mention his domestic situation. Anyway, although we know each other pretty well already from over the last few years we spent a bit of time at the start making sure that everyone was comfortable with their new class through some games and activities. We’ve also been getting to know Mr Burns, Gabriel, Florence and Genevieve too, and his ways. (He keeps mentioning that his wife Mrs Burns works at the school too but we don’t remember her, someone had a vague recollection from over three years ago but that was it). We like the Peak of the Week treasure chest, which is now based on the presentation of our jotters (he goes on and on about that, but we know he just wants us to be proud of what we produce), his Friday raffle and his birthday routine especially. We’ve had quite a few birthdays already, including Our Lady’s, and it was especially interesting to hear from Mr Burns where he gets his £1 coins from………….
We’ve also spent a bit of time of setting up the classroom and routines. We have an Achievement Wall (which can be light-hearted) which is designed to celebrate achievements in school and at home. Our Class Charter has been made and agreed and our Google Classroom for homework is up and running.
In terms of work, we’re right back into the swing of things. We’ve written a couple of personal stories (favourite gift, best holiday), a friendship poem and now we’ve moved on to some imaginative writing. We’ve also been practising our reading strategies – understanding words, finding information and identifying the main idea. The focus in grammar has been nouns, adjectives and the different verb tenses and the different ways of saying these. In Maths we all spent some time at the start doing calculations surrounding the four operations. Then some of us focused a wee bit more on adding and subtracting (including thousands), some of us on multiplication calculations and others on basic equations and BODMAS. We all listen to everything and we all spend quite a lot of time practising our mention and problem solving strategies. Mr Burns has set a challenge for us all to improve our multiplication tables. In R.E. we’ve talked about being a Laudato Si school, the need for vocations, Our Lady’s birthday (as mentioned), learned Mr Burns’ morning prayer and listed the twelve apostles whilst talking about the difference between a disciple and an apostle. Our topic has been chosen based on Scottish history – we came up with a hit list on what we would like to learn about. We started with famous Scottish inventions, quite cool what Scotland has come up with, major inventions like the television and telephone – the first flushing toilet too! In P.E. our focus is Fitness for now, but we’ve managed to incorporate that into some games. Outdoor Learning has started too and on the very first day of that we headed to the Muddy Movers area which was great fun.
Lots of hard work to come now Mr Burns says, but in a fun way too we’re sure. He wants us to do our best, give the best account of ourselves. We will.
Speak soon.
P5b girls and boys
