Today P2 and Erland had the chance to visit the Aith shop to put what they’ve been learning about money into practice. Miss Murray gave them all post-it notes with a price on it, and they had to match this to a price they found in the shop. Miss Murray took our toy money with them to practice finding the right amount too. They even had the chance to use real money when they bought sugar and bananas for the school! Well done guys!
Primary 4/5/6 really enjoyed learning about the art of Chinese calligraphy with Wenting today.
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We found out that some very famous Western artists like Matisse and Picasso said aspects of their work had been influenced by Chinese calligraphy. Â Picasso was also reputed to say that if he had been born in China he would have been a calligrapher rather than a painter.
We used special paper which needed only water on the brush to write – we had to take the pictures quickly though before the writing disappeared!
We have been experimenting with a new way of doing homework where the pupils have more choice in deciding which homework tasks would be most beneficial to them.  Some of the options are best done little but often whilst other tasks take a bit longer so you might just choose one of this type to do during the week to fit around the other clubs and activities you enjoy doing.  Here is a sample of some of our ‘weekly treat’ tasks the pupils have chosen so far, I am very impressed with the time and effort they have put  into these tasks. Well done P4/5/6!
 
We have seen some ‘Brilliant Baking’, Terrific ‘Travel Bug’ journey planning, Smashing Roman shields, Magnificent Maths posters, Fantastic play-scripts and a Roman letter translated into Latin – wowzers!
Karen Macelvie from RSPB came in again as part of the ‘Nature Friendly Schools’ project. She showed us a video about a school in Berlin where they had a ton of awesome equipment, like a splash pool or a huge trail. They said that it was better for kids and their behaviour if at break they were allowed to adventure out of adults supervision.
Inspired by this, we came up with a lot of good ideas. She showed us some pictures of recent projects that she had done. I really liked one of the ideas, which was a bamboo water wall. We narrowed all our ideas down to ones that we all wanted to do. On the 6th of May, Karen will come back in again for action day, where adults and children can bring in materials and make all the things we had planned.
By Ishbel
It was a day for celebration in Primary 1 and 2 today!
After our ‘spotty’ term, this was the first day we have had all 25 children in class.
We were able to sort ourselves into alphabetical order with Mrs Nicolson making sure she included herself to make all 26 letters of the alphabet.
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Roman soldier’s sandals were called caligae (cal-igg-eye). They were designed to bend easily so soldiers could fight, march and run.  Primary four made their own versions with Ms Fraser.  
They are very eye catching  and rather stylish but we decided perhaps ours are best suited for indoor wear!
Today P7 came through to our classroom to help the P2/3s do some topic work. Our class split into 9 groups, and with the help of a P7, each group researched a different Viking God. We spent 20 minutes looking for interesting facts, and for the second 20 minutes, P7 showed P2/3 how to make a PowerPoint. By the end of topic time we managed to get all 9 PowerPoints saved for the P2/3s to present in class next week. It was great to see everyone working so well together. Thanks a lot to the very helpful Primary 7s!
Over the past couple of weeks Primary 2 have been learning about money. They have learned what all the different coins are, and even made posters to show to the P3s. Today they had the chance to play shop with Miss Murray, and try to complete money dominoes as a group. They managed to complete 14 dominoes in 5 minutes. They’re going to try and beat their score next week!
Throughout our topic, we have been keeping Viking diaries to demonstrate our learning. At the start of the term, we all created Viking characters, and every time we learn something new about Vikings, we write a diary entry about it! So far we have discussed leaving home, travelling in a long ship, living in a longhouse and today we wrote about our Viking jobs! We have been following our writing targets, and when we finish, we self-assess our writing using traffic lights. We have also been drawing pictures to go with our writing, and decorated the covers to make them look like Viking diaries!
Last week P2/3 learned about Viking Runes and figured out how to write their names like Vikings! This week we have been learning about Viking Gods, and we found out some of their names by deciphering Runes.
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