Our focus for our Scottish topic was Scottish artists and designers. One of the most famous Scottish artists is Charles Rennie Mackintosh and we spent lots of time learning about his life and his art. We learned interesting facts about him such as:

• He was one of 11 children!
• His art was inspired by shapes, Japanese symbols and European art of the time
• His work gained popularity in the years after his death
• He designed some buildings in Glasgow such as the school of art, Willow Tea Rooms and House of an Art Lover

We designed our own Charles Rennie Mackintosh stained glass window art using black paper and tissue paper. We drew out the design first using white colouring pencils. Then we cut out coloured tissue paper shapes to fill in the picture and glued them down. We think they look really good!

As part of our Scotland topic, we focussed on the well known Oor Wullie Scottish comics. We looked at the Scots language that is used in the comics and how effective they are at telling stories. We decided to make our own comics. We had to use our own names as the title for the comic and then use Scots language to tell our stories. We then illustrated our comics and left them black and white in the style of the Oor Wullie designs.

Here are some examples of our comics.

We have been learning different strategies to help us with large calculations. This term we have looked at the grid method and friendly numbers when trying multiplication calculations. We have been practising using these strategies during number talks and we have been talking about which strategy we have used.

Some of us prefer using the gird method, while others like to use friendly numbers. Here are some examples of how we use these strategies.

We had great fun at our Christmas parties playing games, dancing and getting all dressed up! Don’t you think we look great?!

We enjoyed making calendars to take home to our parents.

We split our pages into 4 sections and then painted different colours in each section to represent the four different seasons. Once the paint had dried we painted a tree into the middle of the page. We then glued on different buttons onto the branches of the trees to match the seasons. These looked really effective when they were finished and we hope our parents liked them!