In Term 1, P5 built their confidence in the core curriculum areas. Between August and October, we focused on:

 

Topic (Science): The whole school theme for Term 1 was sustainability and we learned that this means keeping the world the same for a long time. We focused on trees, learning to identify them, how to measure their trunks and calculate the age, understanding why plants are important for humans and carrying out an experiment to show what affects plant growth. We talked about the way trees are used to symbolise other things and drew our own family trees. We also had a go at making our own recycled paper!

 

 

Reading: Each morning from 9:15-9:45am, we work on reading skills. We work in 5 groups. Each morning, Mrs Brightman works with a different group so that she hears us read aloud to work on expression and using punctuation. On the other days, we complete short reading related tasks in our jotters. This could be comprehension questions, summarising a chapter, finding verbs in the text, predicting what will happen next or examining a particular character. As a class we enjoyed reading Awful Auntie by David Walliams.

 

Writing: Twice weekly, we have handwriting practice lessons. We are developing a fluid, joined style and Mrs Brightman expects us to join our writing at all times. This will help us to write more quickly and to write longer pieces of work. We have worked on spelling strategies and grammar rules regarding the use of capitals for proper nouns (names, places, brands and landmarks). On National Poetry Day, we learned about poem structure and wrote our own poems using similes.

 

Talking and Listening: Mrs Brightman expects all the children in the class to contribute to class and group discussions. We talk to a partner first to prepare their ideas and then share with the class. This helps us to feel confident that we have something to say. We are working on expressing opinions and giving reasons for why we have those opinions.

 

Mathematics: Since August, Mrs Brightman has focused on number skills. We have done lots of counting – counting in 6s, 9s, 1/2s, chunks of 15 minutes, 100mls,1000s, 10 000s and even 0.1s. The number systems underpin all areas of maths including time, measure and being able to work with decimals and fractions. We have also practised the four operations: addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. Almost all the children now know their times tables to 10 x 10 are working on speed through weekly time challenges. We have revised time, measure and money and will focus more on these next term.

 

Health and Wellbeing: This term, we focused on making positive change in our communities. We talked about how our actions can contribute to making the world a nicer place and investigated volunteering and career options that we might like to choose later in life. The children were quick to identify ways in which they can help at school and home.

 

We have also enjoyed music lessons on the ABBA song Mama Mia as well as a visit from Pakistani musicians; in P.E. we recorded our performance in circuit training and drew graphs; we learned about the artist Andy Goldsworthy and made artwork like he does with natural materials. We also enjoyed two class trips out of school: to Maxwell Park and to the Glasgow Botanic Gardens.