Primary 3a loved taking part in the ZooLab workshop last Thursday. We learnt all about different African animals. The children had the opportunity to meet and hold some exotic animals including a Giant African Snail, a Hissing cockroach, a Corn Snake and a Tree Frog. Everybody was fascinated with these wonderful creatures.

This week we have been focused on our Ancient Egypt topic. The children worked in groups to create these 3 dimensional maps of Egypt using salt dough and paint.

In our play area we had a go at making papyrus paper, created our own Tutankhamun portraits, and followed rhythm patters with instruments.

Last week we celebrated Scots Language week, the children took part in a wide range of learning experiences which celebrated the Scottish language.

As a class we read ‘Neeps and Tatties’ a wonderful book written by Carey Morning and Anna York. The children discussed all of the different Scots words from the text we translated these and discussed their meanings. The class then created their own tartans to display our new learned Scots vocabulary. What a bonnie display they have made.

As a class we discussed the meaning behind the text and used our after reading skills to summarise the story. The children then took on the role of illustrators and designed and created their own front cover for the book.

Finally we ended the week learning about traditional Waulking Songs. The children used their imagination to simulate waulking (working) the fabric as they sang the tradition Gaelic song ‘Hè Mo Leannan’.

This week we have been working very hard in all areas of our learning. The children were building their phonological awareness of the ‘wa’ sound using Elkonin boxes, games on the iPads, and active spelling strategies.

The whole class worked so hard in both numeracy and maths this week. We had a 2D shape treasure hut to solidify our learning, and we explored multiplication by creating equal groups and using repeated addition, we loved spotting the links between the different strategies.

In our literacy lessons we read Chapter 2 of Flat Stanley together, the children then answered reading comprehension questions about the chapter using an interactive quiz on the iPads. They loved being able to see the live scoreboard.

What a wonderful first week back P3a have had. It was so lovely to see all the children together again. This week the children have really enjoyed P.E where we played games and completed different fitness stations.

For HWB we discussed the importance of team work, then created freeze frames of different scenarios where team work and collaborating are very important.

The children worked together on a STEM project to build towers with Miss McNeill, I was very impressed with the finished products.

We also started reading ‘Flat Stanley’ as a class. Prior to reading the children used their learned reading strategies to make predictions about the text. They wrote their predictions on post-it notes then visualised their idea and drew beautiful pictures which will be used to create a new reading display in our classroom.

We rounded off the week with some ICT learning. The children were very engaged working in pairs learning to code with ‘Angry Birds’. They worked so well together and demonstrated their collaborating skills which we had talked about at the beginning of the week.

What a way to start the year, well done P3a!

We had a great week of festive filled learning to bring term 2 to a close. As always I am incredibly proud of what the children have achieved throughout this term. This week we began with P3’s Christmas party the children had lots of fun and were especially thankful to our parent council for the lovely selection boxes.

During the rest of the week the children enjoyed lots of different learning including; Christmas French phrases; designing tree decorations; using glitter to create beautiful celebration cards; the children worked in groups for a maths ‘snowball fight’ where we consolidated all our addition and subtraction learning; we finally finished the week creating festive bakes! Well done everyone for another successful term.

Take a look at our WOW wall, displaying all of the children’s beautiful wave paintings from our Oceans IDL topic.

For our health and well-being lessons we have been focusing on anti-bullying. The children discussed what bullying meant to them and we explored different bullying scenarios and ways to resolve these. The children worked in small groups using drama to improvise the different scenarios. We then created freeze frames for each of our scenes to explore the story and resolutions. The children did a fantastic job using drama to explore this issue.

We had a whale of a time becoming illustrators last week during our live lesson with Benji Davies, take a look at some of our work.