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

Welcome to my world

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.

We had great fun last week designing and drawing some different flavours of ice cream for art. They looked so tasty that Mrs Stevenson got in touch with Seren at Flower of Milk and she has offered to choose one flavour and make it into ice cream that we can then all taste. Super exciting!!

We have each created one flavour which we had to name, draw and describe and Seren will pick a winner.

The first group of scientists entered the lab this week and had great fun carrying out colour experiments. Thankfully nothing was blown up during these investigations!

We had a lovely time playing games and eating our snacks during our picnic – and the sun even shone for us!

Today we had a brilliant session from the Inspire Learning team.  We were using the Sphero app to write some code.  Our aim was to get our Sphero Bolts (Mini robots) from one cone to another and back again as fast as we could.  P4 had great fun and were quite disappointed that it was just a taster session.  I think we could have stayed out there all morning.

We then finished the day with a class picnic.  We thoroughly enjoyed the cakes, sweets and bubbles; thank you Kingsland.

As this is my last day teaching P4a I would like to say a huge thank you to all the children and their families.  It has been a very strange year but it has been my absolute pleasure to teach this class.  I wish you all the best going forward.

I hope you all have a wonderful summer. 🙂

We are focusing on telling the time at the moment. We are revising o’clock, half past and quarter to/past and learning to tell the time on an analogue clock at 5 minute intervals.

We have been using the interactive clock in the link below and using 3 steps to identify the time: Is the minute hand on the past or to side of the clock? What hour has the hour hand has gone past or is coming up to? Finally we have been counting in 5’s to identify the minutes?

https://www.visnos.com/demos/clock

This Maths Frame game is a fun way of working on this at home too.

https://mathsframe.co.uk/en/resources/resource/116/telling_the_time#

This week’s spellings are:

Health and wellbeing:

We have been thinking and talking about disability. This was explained to the children: A disability is when a person finds it difficult (or maybe impossible) to walk, see, hear, speak, learn or do other important things. Some disabilities last forever, some just last for a while.  A disability can be something a person was born with, or it can be because the person has been ill or had an accident.

We are learning and talking about disability because we want our school and our class to be a place where every child is welcome and learning and has friends. We watched some short films to help us learn.  Here are the links.  Your child might be happy to watch them again with you.

• Winnie is 9 and has Cerebral Palsy https://attitudelive.com/watch/Kids-with-Disabilities-Winnie
• Luke is 9 and has Downs Syndrome https://attitudelive.com/watch/Kids-with-Disabilities-Luke
• What’s up with Nick? https://researchautism.org/resources/kit-for-kids/