Class of 2023a

P5a have had a busy time getting ready for Christmas. We learned a little about how Christmas is celebrated around the world. Did you know there are some countries where people leave their shoes out for Santa to fill with sweets? Hope they still taste good after being in some smelly shoes! We were very interested to learn that in Australia, people will often have barbecues and go camping as Christmas happens in the middle of their summer holidays which seemed a bit strange.

We then had a science lesson that explained that the seasons happen because of the way the Earth is tilted and how it moves through space. When we (the Northern Hemisphere) are having our winter, the sunlight here is less intense since we are tilted away from the sun so that means that Australia and the rest of the Southern Hemisphere is tilted towards the sun and it is their summer.  Then we switch around the other side of the year. Getting hands on with a globe and torch really helped us to see how this happens. Do you know the Earth is tilted so much that in the summer the sun doesn’t set at the North Pole? It just goes around the sky in one gigantic circle.

Christmas also inspired some of our writing this month. We learned how to wrap presents and had a go ourselves before writing a set of instructions that other people could follow to make a nice, neatly wrapped present. We have also written Christmas shape poems too!

We practised hard to memorise our lines for our Christmas performance and hope that you enjoyed watching the video on Google Classroom.

All that’s left for this year is to say, “Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!”

This month we began learning about the Romans. We’ve been learning all about the Colosseum and we are making tourist information leaflets to show what we know about the Colosseum. We’ve also enjoyed learning about the Roman gods. We learned that most gods carry weapons and have animals that represent them. The planets in our solar system were named after Roman gods. There was a Roman god for just about anything, there was even a god of sewers! Then we had a go at designing our own gods. We also learned about what the soldiers wear and practiced our note taking skills too. We’ve also learned about Roman art and are creating our own Roman pots. 

We’ve been exploring the upper forest in our outdoor learning this month and have been learning about ways that animals protect themselves from predators. We have pretended to be predators and birds in a few different games, to practice being still and silent and even try to keep ourselves camouflaged. We even made a nest for eggs and some of us had the extra challenge of having to use pegs just like birds can only use their beaks. We have learned to think about shine, shape and shadow when hiding, this includes prey hiding from predators and us hiding from each other in hide and seek!

We have been continuing to use Chromebooks to help us with our numeracy work by completing activities on Education City and playing games on Sumdog and practice typing too. We have also started learning about coding through playing a fun little game called Lightbot. We have to put in commands to make the little robot light up all the blue squares. It’s good fun but challenging too, we need to work together and use problem solving skills to figure out the right pattern of commands to make the code work. 

This month we have been creating imaginative stories in our writing. One of our favourite tasks was ‘The Mysterious Box’ where we had to write ourselves into a story we knew well and imagine what we might have done then how that might have changed the story. We also wrote a book review during Scottish book week too. 

At the beginning of the month we completed our Hinduism topic in RE by learning about the story of Rama and Sita and why Hindus celebrate Diwali, we created comic strips to show our understanding of the story. More recently we’ve been learning about St Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland. His feast day is on the 30th of November and is celebrated all across Scotland. We have created fact files to demonstrate our knowledge of St Andrew. Happy St Andrew’s Day everyone!

This month started with a big event, our first communion. We listened to mass, then went up to get our Holy Communion with our parents and family. After that we got a picture as a class then with our families. We had a party at school on Monday to celebrate. We played circle and dancing games then we ate some sweets and cakes that the PSA gave to our class.  Thank you, they were very yummy!

At the beginning of October completed the Den Building focus of our Outdoor Learning lessons in the woods. We started by building a shelter large enough for a teddy with found materials, then we learned how to tie a few different knots to help us create a shelter large enough for a person. In our final lesson, we built a sukkah which is a temporary booth or tent that Jewish people build to celebrate their harvest festival, Sukkot. Jewish people will eat all their meals and sometimes even sleep in this tent during the week of Sukkot. 

In another Outdoor Learning lesson, we focused our senses to describe the wood. We read part of the Lord of the Rings in the forest and looked for parts of our wood that matched the descriptions in the story. This really helped us when we had to write an imaginative story about a character who had to spend a night camping in a spooky forest.

Our health and well-being lessons have moved on to a new topic, ‘Celebrating Differences’. We are learning to recognise any assumptions we make of people and what might influence those assumptions. So far we’ve learned that it’s important to question our assumptions and make up our own minds about people and things. 

As Diwali is in a few weeks, we are spending some of our time in RE learning about Hinduism. Many of us were astounded to learn that there are 33 MILLION Gods in Hinduism and are all looking forward to learning more. 

Just now though, we are all really excited about Halloween and our class party this afternoon. Thank you again to the PSA for their tasty contributions to help us celebrate today. Happy Halloween everyone!

What a wonderful and busy start to our new school year! We have all settled in well into our new classroom and school routine. As part of that routine, we spend a lot of our time outside doing all sorts of interesting and fun things to challenge us in different ways and keep us active. 

We have enjoyed having classes outside in Cadoc Wood and the muddy mover space. In the woods, we have been learning to make dens, starting with a den big enough for a teddy bear then progressing to building a den big enough for a member of our team using canes, ropes and plastic sheets. We also did some artwork outside by making mud faces on trees. In the muddy movers area we made obstacle courses which needed a lot of teamwork and challenged our balance and jumping skills. 

The school will be receiving a donation of over 400 trees to improve our outdoor space further. We have used this as an opportunity to apply our measuring and design skills. We used metre sticks to measure the playground and then created a plan for the tree planting so that each tree has enough space to grow.

We have also spent a lot of time outdoors doing PE. At the start of the year we did a bleep test to find out our base fitness level, many people surprised themselves by reaching level 10! We learned a new game called Salt and Pepper which challenged our listening skills, tested our speed and worked on our ability to dodge. We then used this game to test our knowledge of 2D and 3D shapes. We really enjoy playing team games too, Kickball Rounders and Capture the Flag both need teamwork and communication to create and use different strategies to try and outsmart the other team. We are hoping that all these games will improve our stamina and endurance for another bleep test later in the year. 

In Health and Wellbeing we have started a new program called Jigsaw. So far we have thought about what it feels like to be excluded and what we can do to help people feel included and identified the different jobs people have that work in our school and how they help us. Most recently, we have discussed the rights of every child around the world and learned about some of the responsibilities we each have to make sure that we don’t affect the rights of others. In every lesson we do some meditation to settle our minds and bodies, we have to listen for the end of the chime and it seems to go on and on. 

We always finish off our week with art. At the beginning of the year we created self portraits that celebrate how we are all unique. Recently, we have been following step-by-step instructions to draw realistic animals. It’s a fun way to practice our listening skills and improve our art skills too. Each day we also try to complete some mindfulness colouring which helps us work on our concentration and get focused for learning.

February has flown by and it has been non-stop in P4a. We have been incredibly busy in all areas of our learning but some of our highlights include starting our class novel ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ and linking it into our Social Studies topic on the Vikings. We have been learning all about the fictional viking called Hiccup and his adventures whilst learning about the history of the famous Vikings and the history of their life and invasions. We have created viking shields and brooches as part of our art lessons and are looking forward to trying to build a viking ship in the middle of our class too!

We decided, as a class, to enter the BBC 500 Words story writing competition, an annual competition set to encourage children to write creatively. We have all written our own imaginative stories, typed them up and sent them off to be judged. Simply by entering, we have all been entered into a prize draw to win books for our school and a trip to Buckingham palace. We have our fingers and toes crossed!

We are also looking forward to inviting our parents into our class on Tuesday 10th of March to see all the amazing things we have been learning. More details to follow on that soon.

We will be back with an update at the end of March. 🙂

We have a had such a whirlwind start to 2020. It’s been jam packed full of fantastic learning in all areas of the curriculum and has been a really positive start to a New Year.

We started back with a focus on New Year Resolutions. We have promised to try our hardest to play with, and interact with children in our class that we might not normally. We are trying to get to know each other better and not always rely on the same people. This links in with our new Building Resilience topic ‘Keep Connected’ where we are learning to identify the important people in our Back Up Team.

We have also started our new PE topic on Football which we are loving, even though the weather hasn’t been too kind to us.

We have also been researching the sad news of the Australian Bush Fires and are getting ready to write newspaper articles on this topic. We have also connected with Notre Dame Primary school in Glasgow and look forward to developing pen pal friendships with the children in p4/5 there. Writing with a purpose makes our writing so much more meaningful and we love getting letters in the post.

Finally, we have started our new novel study. Our novel study is ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ by Cressida Cowell. We have only read two chapters but we are loving the adventures of Hiccup and his fellow Vikings.

We will be back in a few weeks with our next update.

Miss Stephen and P4a.

It has been a busy few weeks counting down to Christmas. We have been rehearsing lots in preparation for our Advent Assembly and successfully performed our show in front some of the classes in the school and then again in front of our parents. From the huge round of applause that we got, we think our audience enjoyed our performance.

In class, we have been enjoying writing and receiving letters from our pen pals at Miss Stephen’s previous school in Edinburgh. The children in P4 at Abbeyhill Primary have become our pen pals and we are loving finding out about our new friends and having a real life purpose to our writing. We look forward to writing to them again in the New Year.

We have been finishing up our ‘Where in the World Shall we Go?’ topic by looking at India and have enjoyed learning about Hindu God and Goddesses, learning about the world famous Taj Mahal (and doing some amazing art work of the Taj Mahal) and finding out about Indian cuisine. We even got to sample some homemade Chapatis made by a Mum of the class. They were delicious.

We are looking forward to having a well earned holiday but we are also looking forward to finding out what 2020 will bring for us.

Happy Christmas!

It’s been an incredibly busy first couple of months in P4a. We have really settled well into our class routines and established a really nice classroom ethos.

We have embraced our ‘Where in the world shall we go?’ social studies topic. As a class, we voted for our top three countries to learn about – Italy, Japan and India. Italy was a huge success with us learning about famous landmarks, famous artists and sampling some pizzas that we made in class too. They were delicious. We then moved on to learning about Japan. We enjoyed having Mr Barry, a P4a parent, come in to talk to the class about his time spent in Japan. It was really informative and we learned lots of new things. Miss Stephen made some vegetarian sushi for the class to try. Some of us loved it, some of us not so much but it was great that we tried it. We are ready to move on to learning about India and we have already requested that we learn about food, culture, clothing, music and dance and the Taj Mahal.

We have also been enjoying learning about ‘dissolving’ in Science. We have enjoyed conducting different experiments about dissolving and making observations about what we see. So far, the skittle experiment and the ‘Naked egg’ experiment which involves placing an egg in vinegar and watching the hard eggshell dissolve, have been popular.

On top of all of that, we have been learning and progressing so much in reading, writing, spelling and maths. There’s just too much to mention.

We are looking forward to seeing what the rest of this term has in store.

We had a special visit from Ms Sannino’s brother who is studying architecture. He came to evaluate our model cardboard houses. He was very impressed with all our hard work!

We have invited our family and friends to share our knowledge and learning experiences about the Ancient Egyptians. We had a blast!