We had a special Carnival day in p4 today.  We have been researching the Rio Carnival which is the known as the biggest party in the world and takes place on the 4 days and nights leading up to Lent.  Our special carnival day involved making and tasting brigadeiros (a Rio Carnival food), trying a mock Carnival cocktail, dancing, music, making and playing Ganga ( samba shaker ), making masks, designing Carnival costumes and creating a display of what we know about the Rio Carnival.  Phew!  What a lot of fun!

We made a biscuity version of brigadeiros using –

1 tin of condensed milk

2 tablespoons cocoa

18 digestive biscuits (crushed)

We mixed them all together in a bowl and chilled the mixture for 30 minutes.  Then we took out a teaspoon of mixture at a time, rolled it into a ball and rolled in cocoa.  We chilled them again for an hour or two before eating them.  They were delicious! Why not try them at home?

This afternoon we have been thinking about how we use water in our daily lives and in our jobs in Cleanstream. We have also decided on the words for our  Drama Charter so that everyone can feel respected , valued and confident when we practise different drama conventions.

This afternoon we were learning all about Lent.  Ask us about it when we get home to find out more!!

We found out some facts about the biggest party in the world – the Rio Carnival. It’s a big celebration in Brazil that takes place before the period of Lent starts.  We are working in groups to present our findings.  Watch this space for the final products…

This afternoon we worked in our “family groups” to design and draw our places of work in the community.

Doesn’t Cleanstream look lovely? We have a farm with orchard, a Vets, a hotel, a supermarket, school, medical centre , police and fire stations. We have a bridge across the river joining the community together. We have decided on our jobs in our places of work and have begun to discuss the jobs we will have looking after our water. If you can, please look at the Scottish Water site. It has sections which give more information about jobs looking after our clean and waste water supplies.

Here we are using features of non- fiction texts to discover facts about water.

Have a lovely weekend!

Thank you for coming to join us this morning, it was great to see you. Here are a few photos to show our learning experiences:

Exploring internet sites, showing how reservoirs and dams are controlled

We were deciding which water uses are necessary for life and which ones are luxuries. We transferred the information onto Venn diagrams.

We had a great time getting messy making our dams and reservoirs. Some of the dams collapsed, which was exciting for us, but in real life it would be a major disaster.

As a craft activity, we made our water wheels which show how we use water in our daily lives. Lots of us are making small changes to help save water and not waste it.

This morning we had a visit from Mrs Keith. She has worked with us before and she complimented us on our maths thinking. We were set a challenge:

We used tens squares and counters, then used number lines to look for the patterns.

We had fun using and talking about the different strategies we use.

This afternoon we made some very important decisions in our topic. We now have a name for our community- CLEANSTREAM and we have decided which parts of the community each small group will look after. Most groups worked well together, but co-operation needs to be practised.

Tomorrow we have our Open Morning between 9.15 and 10.20. We are looking forward to welcoming you to Primary 4 and sharing some of our learning activities with you.

To show people how many times we use water in the house, we took the information from our Water Use Tally and transferred the information into a Bar Graph. We had to look carefully at the scales to make sure that we could fit the information onto the sheet. Our title had to explain what the graph was showing and the axes had to be clear. These examples demonstrate super learning.

This afternoon we were treated to some excellent acts for Woodlands’ Got Talent. Two of our pupils were through to the final and performed really well- we are very proud of you!

Have a lovely long weekend and we will see you next Thursday.

Today we started to extend our knowledge of fractions. We learnt the words numerator and denominator. Will you hear fractions tonight in real life?

This afternoon we were thinking about our most precious possession- water. There were lots of great observations and ideas generated in our discussion. We decided that we have a responsibility to the global community to use water wisely and not waste it.

Here are some facts:

We will be looking in more depth at how the needs of some communities can affect the needs of others.

A huge thank you to everyone who told me how I could get the accents over the letters on the I-pad. As you can see, February is now correct in French- yippee!!

In ICT we tried our activities on Activelearn. Everyone managed to access the site at school and complete some addition/ subtraction and sequencing games. You will need a Flash player to play the games on a lap top at home.

This afternoon we were thinking more about communities and what is most important for them to be successful. We worked more co-operatively than last time and there was more discussion in the groups.

We used the cards to create a diamond showing how important things were to communities. Most groups thought that a healthy environment with clean fresh water would be the most important.