Here are our spelling words

Eden thought up this sentence to include all of the words!
‘I wish I had the skill to sing lyrics to my song while eating pancakes and syrup in the cygnet infested water while not missing the finish of the swimming race.’ Brilliant!

We are looking at maps of Scotland to locate towns, cities and power stations.

Others highlights include

• designing a gingerbread house Christmas card
• adding doubles
• adding several small numbers
• writing a description of a castle
• recognising 3D shapes in the world
• problem solving strategy ‘draw a picture’
• voting for Rosie as Pupil Council rep and Vivienne for Sustainable Squad rep

…and our forced perspective photographs!

P5a learned about a trick photography technique today and took some unbelievable shots!

In our novel study ‘Max and the Millions’ Max and Mr Darrow made tiny models and an entire miniature civilisation, called ‘millions’.

Today we learned about ‘forced perspective’ where you make things appear bigger or smaller depending on perspective.

We had a lot of fun and improved our photos as we went along.

We started this week watching assembly which included a clip of Olympic climbing. Our task was to recognise which ‘building resilience’ strategies the climbers used.
We said

• get active as you need strength to climb
• have a goal to aim for the top to win
• keep connected, talking to each other about the route up
• challenge your mindset by telling yourself you can do it
• Look on the bright side as you might be feeling a bit worried
• respect yourself by telling yourself to have a go
• make a difference as you can go high then even higher

We completed making our miniature castles based on our class novel Max and the Millions. We then looked at the work of artist Willard Wigan who makes microscopic models. We made a person using pipe cleaners and are beginning to imagine a scene from a story around our castle and person.

In writing we wrote a description of our school, after we had decided on paragraph subheadings as a class.

In maths we wrote numbers in words and numerals and placed numbers on a number line which can be challenging if we need to work out what each mark stands for.

We are going elect a class rep for both the Pupil Council and the Sustainable Squad so we are busy thinking about what it takes to do a good job.

In health and well-being we are learning about the effects on our health of too much or too little and we are relating this to the effects of alcohol.

Here we are together enjoying the good weather.

Here are our spelling lists this week, focussing on the short e sound.

We are enjoying the novel ‘Max and the Millions’ and we used a thesaurus to find different words for small. As part of 2D and 3D shape in maths we made a cuboid from a net and are designing our own miniature castles like the one Max made. Photos to follow!

One of the famous artists we know is Charles Rennie  Mackintosh and we drew and coloured a rose in his iconic style.

Today we watched Abi Elphinstone at the online Edinburgh Book Festival. She is an author and told us all about the exciting ideas she uses for her adventures. We sent in questions and she answered a few.
Here are some of the things she told us…

Her husband is Norwegian and his great, great, great grandfather invented the fish finger!

Her favourite colour is blue.

It takes about a year to write a book; 6 months planning then 6 months drafting and writing.

If you want to be a writer then always carry a notebook with you.

She has dyslexia.

She was brought up in Scotland then lived in London where she had two sons and an ideas box in her writing hut. Now she lives in Scotland again.

Her favourite crisps are Wotsits and Twiglets.

Her first books were the Dream Snatcher series.

When she was little she wanted to be a unicorn!

Everdark is based on dark forests near where she grew up.

Here is her website

https://www.abielphinstone.com/

Hello, we have enjoyed our first full week in P5a and here are some of the things we have learned.

Last week we worked with p5b to create a playground game using any of the four operations; add, subtract, multiply or divide. We were very creative!

Our writing is learning about the features of descriptions so that we can plan and write our own piece. We also wrote a reflective poem about being in P5a.

In numeracy we are learning about numbers in 10000s and their place value. We worked in pairs to say, write and sequence large numbers.

We are listening to the class novel ‘Max and the Millions’ by Ross Montgomery and are about to discover the miniature kingdom that Mr Darrow, the janitor, created.

In art we learned about perspective and painted a scene showing the vanishing point. We looked at Paul Klee buildings too, and drew a similar scene.

Here are the spelling patterns we learned this week.