Since the beginning of Term 1 we have been focussing on improving our fitness during our PE lessons. We started by all taking part in the Beep test, where we had to gradually run faster and faster before the beep caught us out. We each recorded our level of achievement and will now take part in the test again to see if our PE lessons, along with our daily mile, have helped to improve our fitness levels. Josh feels he has got faster and healthier throughout this session of work. Some of us loved doing the beep test and some of us didn’t but we all found it challenging because we all tried our best to keep going until we couldn’t last any longer.
We are approaching our Social Studies project on Weather through Big Picture Planning. This is done through joint teacher and pupil planning. Mrs Backer gave us 2 Experiences and Outcomes about climate and weather and then we discussed in our groups what and how we want to learn. We have come up with questions we want answered during this work and identified other curricular areas that we can link with. We have come up with ideas of how to measure the weather in the playground and “we can see clear links to maths, literacy and talking and listening work,” said Millie. Logan A has been developing his own experiments at home and will be bringing these in to share the data with the class.
Rio would like to share that in Music we have been learning new rhythms and songs. We are learning and practising the hand signs on the stave by singing them. “We can identify and clap out the beats of different songs,” says Eleena. We enjoy using games to help us improve our understanding of the rhythm.
“In Art we have been drawing sunsets and mountain backgrounds using oil pastels,” says Ruadhan. “We have been improving our creativity skills through this,” adds Callum. We have been investigating the artistic style of MC Escher, whose artwork focusses on tiling patterns. We have begun to recreate this style in some of our own art patterns.
Amna tells us that so far in French we have been revising numbers to 39, months of the year, days of the week and revising what we learnt in Primary 3 such as being able to say how old we are and what our name is. We have been learning how to spell these too and recording this information in our jotters so we can refer back to it.
In Science we have been doing some work on classification keys, which helps us to sort and find types of animals, classifying by what animals eat or where they live. We are now extending this learning to find out about food chains. We now know carnivore, herbivore and omnivore and can identify what they eat and which animals are in that group. We learned a game about food chains to play at home to help us understand what a consumer and a producer is.
At the beginning of the year we focussed on Growth Mindset to follow on from our learning of this in Primary 3. We thought about the power of the word yet and came up with things that we can’t do yet but will work towards. We have learnt that our brain is similar to a muscle in that it can get stronger by challenging ourselves. Millie explains how we made our own brain hats and we add links each time we learn something new to show that new pathways have developed as we practise and improve our skills and learning. We made columns to show the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset shared Daniel.
We have shown a great deal of progress in physical abilities recently, with some of us developing skills in doing cartwheels, walkovers, crabs and handstands. Some have been practising riding their bike one-handed, developing dancing routines and improving within their swimming lessons. While others improved strength by doing one handed press-ups and swinging across the monkey bars. Many have shown determination in joining the ski club to learn a new skill or cycling all the way around Millport three times! In the expressive arts we have improved musically, learning how to play the accordion and learning new songs on the piano as well as getting better at drawing.
