At the end of October, Room 8 enjoyed a wonderful visit to Stirling Castle. Our visit to the castle was brilliant and we learned so much more about our last topic, Knights and Castles. After arriving by bus, we explored the castle grounds before being taken on a tour by a real knight! He described all the different ways enemies were kept out of the castle and pretended we were all going to fall down into the dungeons! We then discovered a room where the knight showed us all the old fashioned weapons and clothes worn back when the castle was first built. We had a fantastic day and would love to go back to discover more.

This month in literacy the Terrific Tigers have nearly completed their latest reading book, The Boy Who Had (Nearly) Everything. They have absolutely loved learning about the Fries family and have made comparisons between Lucky Fries, Billy Humble and themselves. The Busy Bees and Clever Caterpillars have continued to read two books a week and are now self and peer assessing their work and beginning to set themselves targets. We have learned so much about our new topic, Amazing Africa, that we have written quite a few reports in taught writing, including describing famous African landmarks and African animals. Next month, we will continue to work on learning and using lots of new phonemes and common words in spelling and will be writing recounts in our taught writing.

Room 8 can now tell the time! Over the last few weeks we have been learning all about telling the time on both digital and analogue clocks. We have learned all about the minute and the hour hands and can use what we have learned to identify times on the hour, half past the hour and quarter to and quarter past the hour. We have had great fun using our new knowledge in and out of class and love challenging ourselves with the time game on the smartboard to gain the highest points at the hardest level. This month we have also learned to predict and work out the likelihood of an event happening and can use the correct language to do this. To make it easier and more fun, we have been using our chance scales to predict and relate chance and uncertainty to real life events and things we do every day. Next month in numeracy, we will be learning all about patterns and relationships and will be continuing to work on self and peer assessment and  daily target setting.

We have all become much more flexible, balanced, controlled and creative this month after learning gymnastics during P.E. Miss Telfer has been so impressed with our team working skills during this time and loves the way that we have all helped each other to learn new skills and develop our personal qualities. We all had great fun contributing to our class Talk, Talk board for Respect Me day earlier in the week, writing acrostic poems, discussing random acts of kindness and sharing our worries in the worry pocket. We are going to continue to act towards each other with kindness and respect and know that we should treat other people the way we wish to be treated ourselves. In the next few weeks, room 8 will be learning their Christmas concert dance routines and will be practising their Scottish dance for their upcoming Christmas party!