The start of December has arrived and the school is looking fantastic. We have been busy decorating our door which is almost finished so we will post a photo next week. We have been reading a new Christmas novel by Matt Haig called A Boy Called Christmas and it has been getting us in the Christmas mood. Here are some of the other things we have been doing –

• Fractions jigsaw
• Writing the 12 days of Covid-Christmas
• Spellavator Wars for the phoneme/graphemes c, k, ck, cc
• Decimals ladder battle
• Making Christmas cards for the Royal Voluntary Service to deliver to elderly people who might be alone at Christmas
• Using the spreadsheet app on our iPads to input data and create appropriate graphs
• Starting the 12 sketches of Christmas using the inspire learn tutorials on youtube

1. What have you enjoyed the most this week?

2. What are you most looking forward to before the end of term?

3. What global goal did your learning help you to address this week?

P7A really enjoyed this week’s assembly, especially the story about the robin told by Mrs Wilson and the animated Kindness story.  They really helped us reflect on our behaviour and how we can be kinder to others.

In the run up to Christmas we have two advent calendars in our classroom – both designed to put a smile on someone’s face (after sanitising your hands of course).  The first calendar contains a Festive joke to tell the class and the second contains a daily Kindness challenge.  Please comment on this post if someone has been kind to you recently.

We’ve been working hard again in P7A this week.  A big part of our time was taken up doing research into the charity Social Bite and then writing an Information Report on it.

In spelling, we have studied words with qu in them – and discovered that queueing has a lot of vowels in a row!

We have been doing a lot with fractions this week – adding them, subtracting them, simplifying them and finding equivalent fractions.

Having finished the novel Wonder we have been enjoying the bonus story told from Julian’s point of view – it has helped us see that there are two sides to every story.

We enjoyed the virtual assembly on Saint Andrew’s Day and especially liked the short film of the little bird.

We were asked to help create some Christmas decorations for the hall so created some lovely festive Christmas jumper designs to spell out a seasonal message for everyone at Kingsland.

Reflection:

1. On which task did you tried your hardest this week?
2. What do you need to work on for next week?
3. What theme do you think we should pick to decorate our classroom door?

This week our highlights have been –

• Information reports on Social Bite
• Creating bar models to help us with our fractions
• Doing our Christmas display for Mrs Ryalls
• Making heathy eating adverts using drama
• Testing ear protectors in science
• Creating line graphs for the average temperature in our favourite place in the world

Review your week using these questions –

1. What bit of learning was most valuable?

2. What learning do you want to do more of?

3. What did you most enjoy doing?

4. What global goals did you learn about this week?

Both classes have been creating Christmas display pictures for the dining hall.

P7B looked for inspiration online and decided on a silhouette landscape picture. We split into our table group bubbles and delegated tasks for the project. Here are the jobs we did –

• Drawing, painting and glittering stars
• Colour mixing and sponging the background
• Colour mixing and sponging the moon
• Drawing and cutting the tree silhouettes
• Drawing and cutting the reindeer silhouettes
• Drawing and painting Christmas lights (we decided not to use these in the end as we thought it looked better without)

We think you will agree that Oliver R did an amazing job drawing Santa’s sleigh – free hand!

P7A decided on a Christmas Jumper theme for our display board.  Each of us worked on a different jumper with a letter ‘stitched’ into the design so that together we could spell our a message.  We wanted to keep all the letters uniform so the message could be read when the display was completed and this was the trickiest part.  This is how we did it:

1. First we traced a pattern for each letter from squared paper onto tracing paper.
2. Then we drew the outline of our jumper on red, green or blue paper.
3. Next we transferred the letter design from the trace to the jumper.
4. After that we had to add the ‘stitches’ to the design using oil pastels.  We wanted the letters to look like they had been knitted so made each stitch in a V shape.
5. Finally we added other colourful designs before cutting them out.

We gave Mrs Ryalls some tiny gold pegs to hang up the jumpers so that they look like they are on a washing line.  We are really pleased with the overall result.

Another busy week – lots of hard work has been going on in P7A.  We’ve been working on:

• oo, ew, u_e and ue sounds in spelling
• decimal of the day
• morning challenges
• Point Evidence Analysis in Reading Comprehension
• TipTop method for paragraphing
• Revision of how/when to use capital letters correctly!
• Making an ‘oboe reed’ to learn about sound vibrations in Science
• Writing an information report about Covid-19
• Multiplying and dividing decimals
• Fractions – Equivalence and simplifying

1. What has challenged you this week?
2. What have you learned/improved?
3. What do you need to work on?

It has been a very hard working week this week! Some of our highlights are –

• Writing information reports about Malala Yousuf
• Using bar models and pictures to find fractions of an amount
• Reading The Graveyard Book
• Taking on the role of a dietician and providing advice for a fictional client
• Learning about volume by making lots of noise in science
• Spellavator Wars
• Starting to plan our science project

1. What has made this week enjoyable for you?
2. What Global Goals link with your learning this week?
3. What ideas do you have for December that could replace the usual activities we won’t be able to do because of Covid restrictions?

Well done to Alfie and his dad who played the pipes to mark the end of our two minute silence today. We are very proud of how respectful everyone was during our remembrance. The pipes and silence gave us time to reflect and appreciate what people have given, and continue to give, for peace in the world. Thank you to Alfie and his dad for making it more special for us.

Everyone in P7A made a poppy to bring home today.  Please display it in your house – you could tape it to a window or display it in a vase on a windowsill. We have also been finding out about the origins of Remembrance Day and the use of the poppy as a commemorative symbol.  We then used the information we found out to write super reports during our writing lessons.

P7A are so pleased with how our Wonder Wall turned out. We have been reading the novel Wonder by R.J. Palacio and used the Sketches App on our iPads to create our own self portraits like the ones in the book.  Do you recognise anyone?

We also linked the themes in the book to our work in class on Being Kind to Others from the Building Resilience programme. We each wrote a message about kindness which can be seen here and in our classroom.
Our thanks go to Mrs Ryalls for displaying our work so effectively.