What a busy week!

We started the week by taking a walk outside to be nature detectives and look for signs of autumn. We looked at the colour of the leaves, talked about which trees were changing colour first and even spotted a squirrel jumping from tree to tree! Photos by Isabella, Amber and Macaulay.

On Tuesday we had a virtual assembly which we watched from our classroom. We found out more about the school values and looked more closely at the Kingsland badge.

In health and wellbeing we’re continuing to talk lots about being a good friend. We drew around Isabelle, coloured our person in and then labelled it with what we think a good friend does.

We’re also continuing to talk about whether different scenarios are a big deal or a little deal. We agreed that losing our pencil is a little deal, but falling off our bike and banging our head is a bigger deal!

In literacy, we’ve learned the ‘g’ and ‘o’ sounds this week, making a ‘g’ goat and an ‘o’ octopus, and are continuing to put the sounds together to blend words. We’re continuing to develop our fine motor skills with lots of cutting, threading pasta and being creative with playdough. We also told stories about a time we were scared and made plasticine faces to show our emotions.

In numeracy, this week we’ve been focusing on the number ten. We’ve been counting out 10 items and then investigating what we can make with ten straws, cubes or blocks. We made a unicorn fairy, some of our names, houses and from Brooke a bench, two side tables and a gate!

We’re also reading lots of picturebooks for our very special role – more to follow next week.

We had a great time using straw to make skeletons of the 3D shapes that we have been learning about in class. They really helped us to explore the shape and talk about the edges, vertices and faces.

Check out some of our excellent shapes below…

This week we explored our final sense which was about touch. We found out about what your skin does and took part in a paperclip experiment where your partner had to close their eyes and you had to touch different areas of your partners skin with ends of a paperclip and see if they could feel one or two of the ends. We got a mixture of results with some areas feeling one and others feeling two. That is because different parts of your body have more or fewer touch receptors and sometimes you can’t feel everything that’s in contact with your skin.

We also went on a scavenger hunt after brunch to find different textures and discuss how they felt on our skin.

Yesterday we took part in a live lesson which was linked to our maths topic on 3D shape  and their properties. The ladies who were running the session talked to us about our maths fitness and how this is very like P.E. fitness and that we have to practise (exercise) lots of times to build up new skills. If we are stuck at something then our friends can give us tips/ advice but shouldn’t just tell us the answer as just like at P.E. if you were learning to do sit ups and someone just did it for you it wouldn’t increase your fitness or help you in anyway.

We were shown how to make origami cubes using 6 different parts. It was very tricky at first but our class origami enthusiast John managed to figure it out first and then gave tips to other people who were then able to help others. It demonstrated great team and perseverance among the class. Well done everyone. Maybe you could teach someone at home how to make these.

See Mrs Brown’s links below for videos of more origami to try at home.

Here are a few of the games we have been using to help us learn about money.

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/money/toy-shop-money

https://natwest.mymoneysense.com/students/students-5-8/coin-cruncher/

https://www.mathplayground.com/number_bonds_10.html

This week we finished our alternative front covers for Max and the Millions. We had great fun completing this task and the 2 winning designs voted for by the class are above. Well done Coco and Rudi.

We have also enjoyed:
-writing a description about a fantasy setting. We learned about similes and how to use them to up-level our descriptions.
-learning origami and making cubes. It was a challenging lesson and some of us were stuck in the learning pit for a while. We all make it out though. This was part of an online, live lesson.

If you would like to watch the lesson again, here is the link:

You can only watch until Thursday.

-making skeletons of 3D shapes using straws and Plasticine
-P.E. where we watched a video clip of an athlete to help us with our jumping and relay skills.
-Handwriting
-learning about the sense of touch. We explored the playground on a touch scavenger hunt.
-Art. We have been learning to draw bugs. We hope to have a display up with these next week. Look out for photos.

This week we finished our alternative front covers for Max and the Millions. We had great fun completing this task and the 2 winning designs voted for by the class are above. Well done Coco and Rudi.

We have also enjoyed:

-writing a description about a fantasy setting. We learned about similes and how to use them to up-level our descriptions.

-learning origami and making cubes. It was a challenging lesson and some of us were stuck in the learning pit for a while. We all make it out though. This was part of an online, live lesson.

If you would like to watch the lesson again, here is the link:

You can only watch until Thursday.

-making skeletons of 3D shapes using straws and Plasticine

-P.E. where we watched a video clip of an athlete to help us with our jumping and relay skills.

-Handwriting

-learning about the sense of touch. We explored the playground on a touch scavenger hunt.

-Art. We have been learning to draw bugs. We hope to have a display up with these next week. Look out for photos.

We have been working hard again this week.

In science we finished learning about how the eye works and studied the sense of smell.  We took part in a ‘smelling experiment’ and

• Niamh didn’t like the smell of vinegar
• Anna would never have guessed the shower gel carton
• Maisie liked the smell of vinegar
• Annabelle liked the smell of soap
• Jamie not only identified soap but he even identified the brand of soap
• Lewis liked the smell of cinamin
• Olly hated the smell of garlic.
• Adam liked the smell of curry powder

Our descriptive writing was about a mystical, mysterious scene and a lake and Annabelle enjoyed it as it was imaginative as well as descriptive.

In PE we ran laps around the school and also did long distance relay with the laps around the school.  It was quite hard going.

For Numeracy we have now started subtraction and for a warm up we used different dice to see who could reach zero first.

We’ve been working really hard this week and recovering from our fantastic Dalguise at Home week last week.

Some of the highlights from this week include –

• Testing electrostatic forces on balloons and rulers
• Creating thank you cards
• Descriptive writing about refugees
• Testing magnets and making a compass
• Trying some Maths Week Scotland activities
• Collaborating for problem solving using our whiteboard apps

What piece of learning stuck in your head the most this week?

What would you like to learn more about?

What do you need to do more of before we start assessments next week?

Can you believe it is October already? It has certainly felt a lot chillier today – please remember to wear layers from now on and always bring a coat!

Our fantastic week last week is featured in this week’s Peeblesshire News – check it out!

This week we have been reflecting on our “Residential at Home” week In our Writing and creating thank you cards for All the adults who made it possible.  We’ve been learning a little about decimals in Numeracy and have continued developing our spelling of the long /e/ sound.  Grammar focused on Singular and Plural and we also write descriptions of the Main Character from our Novel Study ‘Wonder’.

In Science we explored friction, tension and weight distribution when we designed and made our own mini Zip wires.

How successful was your zip wire? What worked/did not work and why? How did you fix any issues found while testing?