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!

This week was Hour of Code week on Code.org. Code.org is a website which introduces the children to simple coding and game making. It allows the children to take part in courses to develop skills in coding for games and animations. We have been working our way through one of the courses for primary aged children and have been loving it!

Today we took part in the Hour of Code which gave us the opportunity to develop our very own versions of games like Flappy Bird, Frozen, Minecraft and Star Wars!!!

Here are some photos of us working hard at our games:

Harry: Hour of Code was fun because we got to use what we have learned about coding to use them in different ways.

Abby: I thought it was fantastic because the games were really fun!

Kaytee-Lee: it was really fun and I liked it because there were lots of fun games.

Jenna: It helped me use skills that I have already learned to make my own games.

We have been writing newspaper reports on Charlie finding the 5th golden ticket. We have looked at features of a newspaper and are using this knowledge to help us write our own stories all about Charlie. First, we planned what we were going to write in each paragraph and planned our catchy headlines. Then, we used these plans to write our newspaper reports using a template. Miss Kerr is looking forward to reading these!

The class are doing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a novel study this term and are loving it! We have read half of the book so far and have just read about Augustus Gloop falling in Mr Wonka’s chocolate river. We are also watching the film as we go along and are comparing the book with the original film. Some things in the film are very similar but others are VERY different! For example, the Oompa Loompas in the book are pale skinned and have long golden hair and wear deerskins, whereas the Oompa Loompas in the film have green hair, orange skin and wear white dungarees!!!

Demi: I think it’s a great book and it shows us that we need to be grateful for everything we have and just because Charlie was poor didn’t mean his luck was any different to anyone else’s.

Ellah-Louise: It is a nice relaxing book because you can sit and imagine what’s happening in your head as you listen.

Adam: I think it is exciting because nearly every chapter has something new happening and it makes you want to read on!

On Friday 21st October, we had a ‘Wear It Pink Day’ to raise money for breast cancer awareness. October is breast cancer awareness month so we wanted to take part and support this great cause.

We loved getting to dress down for school and our class got really into the pink theme- some of us even dyed our hair pink for the day!