Yesterday, we left school for a piratical adventure. Dressed in all our pirate finery, we boarded a bus (but we pretended it was a pirate ship!) and headed to the Hunterian Art Gallery to meet illustrator Kasia Matyjaszek. She illustrated a book called, Molly Rogers Pirate Girl, that we have been using to help us learn about describing characters.

When we arrived, Kasia was there and she was also dressed as a pirate! She had dressed as the main character, Molly Rogers. She read the book to us, while showing us lots of little details in the illustrations she had done. She was really funny and she loved that we were all dressed as pirates.

We learned some interesting things to use when we try illustrations. The most important one was that it doesn’t have to be perfect. Don’t even bother having a rubber because when you make a mistake, you should just keep going. If you do this, you invent your own style and that is a very cool thing, according to Kasia.

We used a sheet of paper as a background, with coloured paper to tear into shapes. Our imaginations helped us to decide what to make, once we’d looked at our paper shapes. We added detail with pens or pencils.

At school, we have already written our own pirate books, with character and setting descriptions inspired from Molly Rogers and another book, The Wild Girl. Next week, we will make front and back covers for our books, with illustrations inspired by Kasia.

Recently we started to learn about basic fractions, like halves and quarters. We know that when we split one whole thing into bits, they are fractions. It’s just like dividing! In the class we have broken food into halves and quarters and also numbers.

We made sandwiches, where we had to make 2 halves with the bread and cheese and then cut them again to make quarters.

With cubes, we made a big number and then either split it into 2 to half it, or split it into 4 to quarter it.

While we made our sandwiches, we also remembered all our good hygiene rules so we washed our hands carefully and kept them away from our faces, the desks etc until we had finished our food preparation.

Yesterday we used our Reading Strategies and our partner skills to find out pirate facts. There were 12 facts hidden around the classroom, which we had to find and summarise. We recorded them on a sheet and at the end, we took part in a quiz to see how much we’d learned. We had to decide if something was a myth or the truth. If it was the truth, we shouted, “Aye, Jim lad!” and if it was a myth, we shouted, “Never me hearties!” in our best pirate voices.

After our topic work, we had some time at Play to Learn where some of the boys had us all in stitches, when they became 4 grannies who were off to the bingo!

We worked in groups this morning to use Metres  to make drawings. We had a Metre stick and a Metre long piece of string. Our Success Criteria were that each drawing had to be 1M long. We had to make sure we started at the start of the stick and finished at the end. It was important to make sure that the stick didn’t move while we worked so we helped each other.

Once we came inside, we had a close look at our school rulers to check which side showed Centimetres. Our Success Criteria were to draw lines of certain lengths. We had to start at Zero; stop at the correct length and label our lines with the correct size in Centimetres.

Yesterday, we had a chat about measuring and all the things that we could measure. Mrs Cameron was very impressed that we remembered that you can measure temperature and wind from when we did our weather topic. We also knew that you could measure the size of something and we decided to investigate lots of ways of doing that.

We used cubes to measure different parts of our classroom. First we estimated to get a good idea of what our answer should be, then we actually measured. We knew that we should all get the same answers, because we all used cubes of the same size.

Later, we used our feet and hands to measure things. This time, we realised that we would not all get the same answers, because we all have different sizes of hands and feet!

We talked about how big furniture shops do their measurements and Sophia knew that beds were measured in centimetres because she had got a new bed. We talked about why they wouldn’t use hands or feet to measure furniture and Laith knew that that wouldn’t work because everyone needs to know exact sizes and if we all have different sizes of hands and feet, that would be too confusing.

The last thing we did, was to use rulers to measure things in centimetres. We definitely need more practise with this but we got the general idea of looking for zero on the ruler and placing it at the edge of what we were measuring.

We got some photos of us, lined up from tallest to smallest and then lined up from oldest to youngest. Some of the youngest of us, are quite tall and some of the oldest of us are quite small! We went on to have a good chat about healthy eating, getting enough sleep and genes, all contributing to how much we grow. What a lot we packed in!

Before the Spring Break holiday, we had started to learn about Multiplying. This week, we’ve had a wee try at dividing. We now know that dividing is just the Maths word for sharing. We also realised that it is quite closely related to Multiplying. Over the next few weeks, we’ll learn a bit more about that. So far, we have been using cubes to share; drawn a picture of our sharing; written sums using the divide sign and made sure the groups were all equal. Because we are awesome at listening and working well with our partners, we are being very successful in our new learning.

In Science we have been learning about forces. During Science Week, we looked at push and pull forces.

This week, we learned that Gravity is a force that pulls things to the ground. To explore Gravity, some of us made gravity art by dropping paint onto paper. We tried to defy gravity by trying to keep balloons in the air and we played with parachutes. We tried the parachutes in the class, outside in the playground and most fun of all, we dropped them off the balcony, up beside the office.

After our gravity investigations, we learned about what makes things move fast or slow. We had to design an experiment to make a toy car move fast and another to make it go slow. We were not allowed to put a push or pull force on the car.

In groups, we worked out that using a cardboard ramp would make the car move. A steep ramp made it go fast and a shallow ramp made it move slowly. We were then asked what we could change about the car only, to make it go faster. We were not allowed to change the ramp.

We worked out that if the car came from higher up, gravity would give it a help. Some of us thought about friction and said that if the wheels were wet, the car would go faster because there would be less friction. At the end, just before we finished, some us realised that if we made the car heavier, that would also make it go faster.

Over the course of this term, we have used the engineers planning routine of: Ask, Imagine, Plan, Create, Improve, Present, Reflect, to make the set for a Stop Motion animation film and then to actually make the film.

We used cardboard attachment techniques to create the set for the film. The ones we used were: flange; hole punch & string; slot and slot & tab.

One of the P2 skills we’ve been working on, involves working well in a group and taking account of the needs and strengths of others. Last week, in Science Week, we spent a whole day shooting our films. (we’d practised lots of little Stop Motion skills over the weeks and done a lot of planning, leading up to this.) This week, we watched all our films and reflected on what went well and what we’d do differently next time. Mrs Cameron is bursting with pride over how well we worked together and what we managed to achieve. Once we’d watched the films, we were all really proud of ourselves too!

Using the cardboard attachment techniques, we had a little follow-up challenge where we had to try and build a tower that was taller than a school ruler, could stand alone and could hold a bowl of pennies on the top. We didn’t actually have much time for that bit, but 2 groups did manage. Next week, we’ll do more of that.

Well, it’s only Tuesday but already we have been finding out some interesting Science facts.

What makes things move? We found out that forces make things move. We played with different toys, thinking about whether we needed to use a push force, a pull force or both, to make them move. That was on Monday.

On Tuesday, we thought about what makes things stop? We asked the question, which surface would let a toy car go faster? The choices were, a normal table; a piece of velvet; a piece of carpet; corrugated cardboard or bubble wrap. Everyone made a prediction and then we carried out an experiment, where we pushed cars on the different surfaces. We tried to keep the push force the same each time. It turned out the smoothest surface let the car go fastest and the bumpiest surface slowed the car down and made it stop. We learned the word for the force that stopped the cars is called, ‘friction’. We also had a good look at the bottom of our shoes and realised that the ‘grips’ on shoes are just there to create friction to keep us safe from slipping over. Some of us have suffered from a lack of friction when we have slipped on water, soap or ice.

Tomorrow, we’re going to learn about the force that makes things fall to the ground.

This year everyone brought in their favourite book. They retold the story in their book to a friend and then drew out a Storymap of the book, a short summary with pictures. The Storymaps were swapped around and people got to read a little of other people’s. Now more people have ideas of books they’d like to read themselves.

We all wrote our own little book about Shaun the Sheep and Bitzer and illustrated it too?

In the little bits of time that we had between other things, we did some drama about books and a quiz where we had to guess the book from a description of the story.

At the end of the day, Iyla read us all a story. Now more than half the class has brought in a book of their choice and read it to their friends. Our reading is really coming along brilliantly.

All in all we had an excellent day, celebrating how amazing books are and how they enrich our lives!