Literacy

In Literacy this week, we are revising how to punctuate direct speech.  Copy these sentences neatly into your jotter, remember put in “ around the first word spoken and ” around the last word spoken.  If you need to, highlight the words spoken first.

1. What’s for dinner dad? Jacinda asked her dad.
2. The witch looked at her sisters and asked, When will we three meet again?
3. The mouse looked at the fox and quivered, Please don’t eat me.
4. I’m stuck! declared Sam as he held up his hand. Can you help me please?
5. Goal! shouted the boy as the ball went to the back of the net.
6. John, can you hold this? asked Joanne.
7. Off with her head! shouted the Queen of Hearts.
8. The policeman asked, Can I see your licence please?

Spelling

‘qu’ words – learn for test on Friday.  Choose 5 and write in sentences or a paragraph containing all 5.  find out the meanings of any unknown words.

Maths

Active Learn activities which focus on Negative numbers.  Log into your Active Learn account to access the new activities.

In the house and out and about, look out for anywhere that you may see negative numbers.  Record the places and reasons for the use of negative numbers, in your jotter.

5th November Activity

Choose one of the following:

• Research and write about the life and times of Guy Fawkes.  You could draw a picture of him and label the picture.
• Design a safety poster to help children (and adults) stay safe on Bonfire Night.
• Research and write a timeline of the events of the gunpowder plot and failure on the 5th November 1605.

Today we were visited by officers from the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SSPCA).

We had chosen to take part in a workshop to find out more about wild animals and how to protect them.  We learned a lot about wildlife in Scotland and the work the SSPCA does.  Then we played a special wildlife snakes and ladders game, which helped us to explore wild animals in more detail.  It was also lots of fun!

After the workshop, we had a quiz to see how much we could remember.  The quiz questions are below.  Can you remember the answers to some of these questions?

• What can you tell about a seal if it has white fur?
• Bats are protected in Scotland.  TRUE or FALSE?
• What do bats eat lots of?
• Where do seals sleep?
• Why do hedgehogs curl up in a ball?
• What is a baby hedgehog called?  (There are 2 answers to this)
• What is a baby seal called?
• Where is a dolphin’s nose positioned?
• What is the type of snake that can be found in Scotland?
• How would you describe what a slow worm is? (Hint – it’s not a snake and it’s not a worm).
• What does an otter live near?
• What is the number for the SSPCA?

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Today we started a 4 week football course with Clyde FC specialist football coach.

Today, we learned the skills ‘inside cut’, ‘outside cut’, ‘drag back’ and ‘dribbling then passing’.

Then we played mini team games, using the skills we had learned, to try and score goals in the mini goals!

We have to complete written class work and activities to support our physical work and earn rewards!  Some of these activities may be given out as homework in the future too, so look out for them.

We are all currently working towards our Bronze Award!

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Literacy

Character Profile

We have been learning how to do character visualisation profiles on characters from our group and class reading books.

For homework, complete a character profile on a character from a book of your choice.  It can be another character from your school reading book, or a character from a book you are reading at home.

Remember what to include:

• detailed illustration of the character.
• key words and phrases to label the character.
• quotes from the text which describe the character’s appearance and personality – remembering to use quotation marks  ” ” and the page number, where you found the quote.
• a sentence to analyse (describe) the quote in your own words.

You can create this in your jotter or on a piece of A4 paper for display in the classroom.  You can get paper from school for this task.

Maths

Practise your Number Bonds, Doubles and Halves on ‘Hit the Button’ on the Top Marks website!

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button

You need to know these off by heart, to help with number work and calculations.

Remember to keep practising your maths using your your SumDog and Active Learn accounts too!

Health and Wellbeing

We have been learning about the negative effects of smoking, and the fairly recent change of law on cigarette packaging, which displays quite graphic images of the negative effects.

Your task is to design a poster to put young people off starting smoking and to help them to avoid peer pressure to smoke.

It should include:

• Reasons why smoking is a bad idea (FACTS)
• An eye-catching design
• A slogan

You can look online for examples of good anti-smoking posters for ideas.

Here is an update on the work we have been doing on the subject of peer pressure and how to handle it.

We took part in some role play scenarios and discussed strategies that could be used to avoid peer pressure.  We then designed posters to help others who are suffering from peer pressure!

Here are a few more photos of us making our paper mache planets.  We need to leave them all to dry and will finish painting them after the October holiday!

On Tuesday, we were very lucky to have a visit from one of our parents, Hina Khan, who works for the Scottish Centre of Excellence in Satellite Applications, based at Strathclyde University.  This helped to support our Space topic and World Space week (4th- 10th October).

She came in and worked with us to teach us all about satellites space exploration and the development of this over time; in particular, that satellites are getting smaller!  She also told us about the important work being done in Scotland to support space exploration, through’ Clyde Space’ and Prestwick Airport.

We spent time researching information on 3 satellites – ROSETTA, INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION AND UKUBE-1.

We also got to make a model of a CubeSat, which is the actual size of a real satellite!

Thank you to Hina Khan for the fabulous afternoon.

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As next week is the October week, and we won’t be at school, you do not have to take your homework jotters home to complete any formal written homework.

However, here are a few ideas and activities that you could be doing over the holiday which will help you to progress:

• reading – books, recipes, newspapers, magazines, catalogues – anything, as long as you are reading at home, with or without an adult.
• choose a recipe to follow and make a delicious meal, cakes or biscuits, with an adult.  This will help your reading, maths and organisational skills.
• go shopping with an adult.  Add up what is going in the shopping basket as it goes in.  You may need a notepad to help you jot calculations down.  Can you get your estimation close to the final total at the till?
• Alternatively, ask for an adult’s shopping receipt, with the total amount scored out – can you calculate the correct total?
• watch the news and read the newspaper! Can you find any current developments or news about space and space exploration? If you find any articles, cut them out and bring them in for our topic!

Finally, just have a wonderful holiday and stay safe!

Miss Donald.

Today, we joined the Primary 7 class to take part in a beeswax filtering experiment.  We had to melt the beeswax down and then filter or sieve it to produce a purer and cleaner wax, which in commercial terms, could be used to make candles, furniture polish, lip salve etc.

The variable that we chose to change was the material used to filter the wax.  The rest we kept exactly the same.  The 4 different filtering material were:

• coffee filter
• kitchen roll
• muslin cloth
• dish cloth

First, we predicted which one would act as the best filter.  Most people predicted the coffee filter or kitchen roll because the holes were smaller so less dirt would filter through the material.

Here is a slideshow of our scientific experiment.  We hope you enjoy!  The results of the experiment are on the last slide, although we also discovered that next time we would use only the cleanest, newest wax and discard the more blackened old wax as this did not melt as well and had to be double filtered.

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Today, we had maths expert Lynda Keith in school.  She spent time in our class on strategies for mental addition.

We found lots of different strategies for solving the same calculation.  Some of the strategies we used were:

• Counting on and Back (CO)
• Partitioning (splitting) a number (P)
• Rounding and Adjusting (RA) or Bridging and Adjusting (BA) – Looking for numbers that are close to a multiple of 10, so that you can round to a multiple of 10
  and then add or subtract a small number (adjusting). For example:
  64 + 79 = 143 Work this out as 64 + 80 − 1 = 143
  138 − 47 = 91 Work this out as 138 − 50 + 3 = 91

We practised using empty number lines and partition grids.

We know that we don’t always have to go straight to the column method to work out calculations.  There may be a quicker and easier mental strategy, so we should always look at the numbers first to see if we can spot any number bonds we know, any doubles, near doubles or connections.

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