🌟 Primary 3/4 Weekly Round-Up – Term 3, Week Ten

✏️ Literacy & Writing

Our spelling sound this week was ‘ai’. Our writing was inspired by The Scarecrow’s Wedding by Julia Donaldson. We zoomed in on the crows in the story, imagining what they might have been up to and using adjectives, adverbs, and punctuation to make our writing more descriptive.

We also looked at a non-fiction fact file about scarecrows, learning about the difference between fiction and non-fiction texts.

On Friday we used Play-Doh to explore sentence structure and punctuation in a hands-on way. The children created punctuation marks and used them to build sentences while listening to a short story about a Viking who liked icing, which made the activity both creative and memorable.

🔢 Maths

In maths we continued developing our understanding of the jump strategy, this time applying it to subtraction. The children practised moving along number lines and explaining their thinking as they solved problems.

We also continued exploring ordinal numbers and introduced fractions, using Play-Doh to model and divide shapes into equal parts. This practical approach helped the children visualise halves and quarters more clearly.

🌍 Topic – People Who Help Us

Our topic work continued this week with a focus on emergency services. The children learned about how to make a 999 call and took part in role play activities where they practised being both the caller and the call handler. This helped them understand what information is important in an emergency situation.

🎭 Assembly Preparation

We are nearly ready for our Maths Spectacular Assembly next week. This week we finished creating our props, tried on costumes, and continued rehearsing our lines and drama scenes. The children are working very hard and are excited to perform.

🐉 Wider Learning

On Friday we had a special visit from the SMUHA Vikings, who were in great voice and brought lots of energy and excitement to the morning. In the afternoon we held our own galley burning ceremony, linking to the local traditions.

🎨 Play Provision

This week’s play included;

• Large construction play using giant Lego blocks

• Viking-themed play with the galley returning to the classroom

• Creative craft activities where the children made kindness cards and Mother’s Day cards to share with others and take home

These activities encouraged creativity, collaboration, and kindness.

🌟 Primary 3/4 Weekly Round-Up – Term 3, Week Nine

✏️ Literacy & Spelling

This week in spelling we focused on the suffix “able.” We continued building our understanding of prefixes and suffixes and how they can change both the structure of a word and its meaning. The children have really enjoyed exploring new vocabulary and thinking carefully about how words are formed.

Our new traffic light spelling system has also been introduced. This allows children to identify words they feel confident with, words they are still practising, and words they want to research further. It has been fantastic to see the children taking ownership of their learning by investigating unfamiliar words and expanding their vocabulary.

In writing, our work was inspired by The Highway Rat by Julia Donaldson. The children wrote news reports about the capture of the Highway Rat, creating exciting alliterative headlines to hook the reader.

We also completed a joint ICT and writing activity, where the children worked in pairs to design comic strips retelling the story in sequence. This task helped develop their understanding of narrative structure while building digital creativity and teamwork skills.

🔢 Maths

In maths this week we continued developing our understanding of the jump strategy for addition, helping the children strengthen their confidence when solving addition problems using number lines and mental strategies.

We also consolidated our understanding of odd and even numbers, as well as greater than and less than, reinforcing number sense and comparison skills.

This week we also explored ordinal numbers. To help make this concept practical and engaging, the children held races using wind-up toys, observing which toy came first, second, third, and so on. This helped them understand that ordinal numbers describe position in a sequence rather than quantity.

💻 ICT

We continued developing our ICT skills this week. As part of our writing work, the children created comic strips on the computer retelling The Highway Rat.

We also used Story Blast to work on comprehension activities such as word sorting and sentence building, helping to strengthen reading and grammar skills.

🌍 Topic – People Who Help Us

This week we began our new topic: People Who Help Us, focusing particularly on emergency services.

The class worked together to create a large roadmap display for our classroom wall. Each child created:

• A building where a helper might work (for example, a police station, fire station or hospital)

• A picture of the person who works there

• A short explanation describing what they do and how they help others

We will continue adding to this roadmap over the coming weeks as we learn more about different roles in our community.

🎭 Assembly Preparation

We are continuing to work hard preparing for our upcoming Maths Spectacular Assembly. Scripts have now gone home so the children can practise their lines, and we have begun creating some fantastic props for the performance.

So far the class has created:

• Number cards

• Angle cards

• A large opening display sign

The children also have some exciting ideas for a large prop, which we hope to begin creating next week.

🐶 Visitors and Wider Learning

On Friday we had a visit from Dogs Against Drugs, where the children learned about the important work these dogs do and how they help support communities. It was a very interesting session and the children asked some excellent questions.

Our Primary 4 pupils also took part in a STEM activity day, where they explored coding and robotics. They worked with small programmable robots, learning how to code them to move and complete tasks while thinking about accuracy, measurement, and problem-solving.

🎨 Play Provision

This week’s play provision included Barbies, dolls and doll’s houses, which were voted for by the class. The children engaged in imaginative role play, storytelling and collaborative play.

There has also been a big interest in jigsaws and board games, with children working together to solve puzzles and play cooperatively, developing patience, teamwork and problem-solving skills.

Alongside this, we continued exploring construction activities and times tables challenges, allowing the children to practise both creativity and numeracy skills during play.

🌟 Primary 3/4 Weekly Round-Up – Term 3, Week Eight

✏️ Literacy & Spelling

This week our literacy focus was inspired by Stick Man by Julia Donaldson. The children imagined that Stick Man was something special — perhaps a magic wand, a sword, or another powerful object — and wrote creatively about what it could become. It was fantastic to see their imagination and descriptive writing skills shine.

Our grammar focus this week was on capital letters and full stops. We even learned a little dance to help us remember when and how to use them correctly! The children then applied this knowledge carefully in their writing.

We also wrote our own newspaper reports, focusing on using alliteration in our headlines. The task was to create catchy titles using repeated initial sounds, and the children produced some fantastic, eye-catching examples.

In spelling, all of our spelling words this week contained the suffixes “less” and “ness.” We explored how these suffixes change the meaning of root words and practised using them accurately in our writing.

🔢 Maths

In maths, we introduced the jump strategy for addition, using practical and visual approaches to help us understand how numbers move along a number line. The children showed growing confidence in applying this strategy independently.

We continued consolidating our understanding of place value with another lively round of Place Value Bingo, and we extended our shape work with Mrs Smith.

This week we also explored odd and even numbers, learning how to look at the last digit of a number to decide whether it is odd or even. We read a fun story about Monster Odd and Fairy Even, and played games to help embed our understanding.

💻 ICT

We continued developing our coding skills using Code.org, building on our sequencing and problem-solving skills. The children are becoming increasingly confident at debugging when something doesn’t work the first time and understanding the importance of giving clear and precise instructions.

🏊 Wider Learning

We enjoyed another visit to Sandwick Library before heading to swimming. The children continue to show great enthusiasm and responsibility during these outings.

🎭 Assembly Preparation

We have begun preparing for our upcoming Maths Spectacular Assembly. The children will be sharing their maths learning with the rest of the school through drama. This week we enjoyed drama sessions to begin rehearsing, developing ideas, and working collaboratively on our performance.

We also attended the P1-2 assembly, where we listened respectfully and enjoyed learning about what they have been working on in their class.

🧠 Dough Discovery Session

We ended our week with a busy and creative Dough Discovery session, which included a range of mini challenges linked to our recent learning. The children:

• Measured and compared lengths

• Created 3D shapes to consolidate our shape work

• Formed punctuation marks out of dough

• Built a bridge strong enough to hold counters

• Designed an animal habitat

The session ended with a lively Dough Disco, where children took turns leading dance moves using their dough along to music — a brilliant mix of creativity, teamwork and fun.

🎨 Play Provision

Our play provision this week was inspired by Chinese New Year. The children explored:

• Noodles and tongs for sorting and fine motor challenges

• Chinese New Year crafts

• Large traffic light signs

Our Play Project focus this week was vehicles, which linked perfectly with the traffic lights and cones. The children created detailed digital vehicle pictures using Paint, built vehicles with blocks, designed car washes, and tested imaginative transport creations. It was fantastic to see such creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving in action.

🌟 Primary 3/4 Weekly Round-Up – Term 3, Week Seven

🔢 Maths

This week we became Angle Detectives! As trainee detectives, the children completed three case files, each exploring angles in a different way. They investigated angles hidden within letters, linked angles to their knowledge of compass points, and identified angles on a clock face. The class showed excellent reasoning skills and attention to detail while solving their cases.

We also continued developing our mental maths skills through our One Minute Whizzers and introduced a new Speedy Multiplication booklet. The children timed themselves completing times tables questions, aiming to improve both their accuracy and speed, and showing great determination to beat their previous scores.

We also created place value monsters, using different digits to build and represent numbers, helping us to continue strengthening our understanding of place value and how the position of a digit changes its value.

✏️ Literacy & Spelling

Our spelling sound this week was ‘ze’.

We began a new focus on punctuation, reading The Full Stop That Got Away. This helped us think carefully about the importance of full stops and capital letters in making our writing clear and meaningful. The children then wrote imaginative pieces exploring what would happen if all the full stops disappeared, leading to some wonderfully creative ideas.

As part of our IDL learning, we enjoyed a fun pancake-themed afternoon. The children absolutely loved the imaginative role play, wearing chef hats and aprons as they created their own recipes. They worked collaboratively to design, discuss, and write clear instructional recipes, developing important writing, sequencing, and organisational skills.

We also read a story about a pancake thief who stole Mrs Teale’s pancakes. The children created detailed Wanted posters and designed digital images of the thief using Paint software. It was fantastic to see their creativity and engagement throughout the afternoon.

💻 ICT

This week we began learning to code using Code.org. The children worked through a series of modules, starting with an Angry Birds coding challenge.

Through this, they developed skills in:

• Sequencing instructions

• Logical thinking

• Problem-solving

• Debugging (finding and correcting mistakes)

• Perseverance when tasks became more challenging

They showed great resilience and focus as they worked through each stage.

🏊 Wider Learning

Swimming started this week, and the children were very excited about their journey to the pool. They also enjoyed visiting Sandwick Library, showing responsibility and maturity while out in the community.

🌍 Topic – Vikings

We concluded our Vikings topic this week. The children learned about Viking gods and created their own imaginative Viking god characters. We also explored Viking settlement maps, helping us understand where Vikings travelled and lived.

It has been wonderful to see the creativity and depth of understanding the class has developed throughout this topic.

🧘 PE – Teacher Led

In PE this week, we played games such as Traffic Lights, Corners, and Islands. These activities developed listening skills, quick reactions, spatial awareness, cooperation, and teamwork, all while keeping the children active and engaged.

🎨 Play Provision – Pancake Day Focus

Our play provision this week centred around Pancake Day. The children explored:

• A pancake role-play station with flour, fake eggs, measuring spoons, scales, aprons, and chef hats

• A pancake shape station, adding shapes they have been learning about as creative “toppings”

• A rice weighing challenge, comparing and measuring weights using scales

These activities supported learning in measurement, shape recognition, comparison, collaboration, communication, and imaginative play, while reinforcing literacy and maths skills in a hands-on way.

🌟 Primary 3 Week 6

🔢 Maths

In maths this week, we have been developing our mental maths strategies, continuing our work on adding in tens and then applying that knowledge to help us add 9 and 11 efficiently. The children worked hard to explain how they could adjust numbers using what they already knew about place value and number patterns.

We also revisited place value, consolidating our understanding in a fun and engaging way through a lively game of Place Value Bingo, which proved to be a big hit with the class!

Throughout our play we used Mrs Teale’s valentines petals to explore measurement in a fun and hands-on way, setting ourselves challenges like how many petals long the room is, a metre stick, or even a person — all discovered naturally through our play.

✏️ Writing & Health and Wellbeing

This week, we took a short break from our usual writing focus and centred our learning around the theme of love and kindness. The children wrote thoughtful pieces about:

• Things they love about themselves

• Things they appreciate about their classmates

This led to meaningful discussions about what it feels like to be kind, to say positive things about others, and also how important it is to receive kindness and value ourselves.

The children created a beautiful piece of artwork to take home, celebrating positivity and self-worth. We also read Love Monster, which linked beautifully with our discussions, and designed colourful Love Monster posters to brighten our classroom door.

🌍 Topic – Vikings

We continued and completed our Vikings topic this week. The children finished writing their Viking sagas and completed their accompanying Viking artwork.

As part of our final topic assessment, we also learned how to write our Viking names in runes, bringing together creativity and historical learning in a fun and memorable way.

💻 ICT

In ICT, we continued developing our mouse control skills and worked on Story Blast, a comprehension platform where the children practised word sorting and sentence building. This supported both reading and grammar skills in an interactive way.

🎨 Play Projects

Our play project theme this week was Under the Sea, and the classroom was filled with creativity. The children designed and built impressive underwater settings, created fact files, and even incorporated imaginative ideas such as underwater vehicles and structures. It was fantastic to see such creativity and teamwork on display.

🌟 Primary 3/4 Weekly Round-Up – Term 3, Week Five

✏️ Literacy & Writing

Our spelling sound this week was ‘dge’.

Our literacy learning was inspired by another Julia Donaldson story, The Snail and the Whale. We continued developing our use of adjectives and adverbs, while also introducing similes and encouraging the children to use their senses to add detail to their writing.

The children wrote a beautiful sensory description of the sea, using sight, sound, smell, and movement to bring their writing to life. They also created rainbow simile poems, which were imaginative and expressive. We loved them so much we got them up on our WOW wall.

🔢 Maths

In maths, we worked on adding 1, 10, and 100 to numbers, building confidence with place value. We continued our work on number bonds to 100 and practised quick recall through our One Minute Whizzers, helping to improve mental maths speed and accuracy.

We also explored right angles, using a right-angle fish to find and identify right angles around the classroom and school environment.

📖 Comprehension

Due to its success previously, we revisited I’ll Read to You, You Read to Me. Working in pairs, the children took turns reading parts of the script aloud to each other before answering questions, building fluency, confidence, and comprehension skills.

💻 ICT

This week we continued developing our typing skills and completed a Sumdog assessment, allowing the children to demonstrate their maths knowledge using digital tools.

🌍 Topic – Vikings

As part of our Vikings topic, the children followed a drawing tutorial to create a Viking, which will form part of a final piece of work when we create our own Viking sagas.

We were very lucky to welcome a visit from Dougie and Neil Grant, who shared his knowledge of sagas and explained how he creates them for Up Helly Aa. This visit gave the children lots of inspiration and ideas for creating their own sagas, which we will be working on next week to accompany our Viking artwork.

🧘 PE – Teacher Led

In PE, the children took part in a session using Lummi sticks, learning about rhythm and beat through movement. The session encouraged coordination, timing, and teamwork in a fun and energetic way.

🎨 Play

This week we have enjoyed the knitting needles and wool, learning to knit and be creative with the wool in other ways. We also had the dinosaurs back out with the sand as they are a big favourite. Other play opportunities that arose this week came when some of the children wanted to create catapults and targets which was great fun with lots of measuring, distance and meta skills(adapting, collaboration and communication) coming into play.

🌟 Primary 3/4 Weekly Round-Up – Term 3, Week Four

✏️ Literacy & Writing

Our spelling sound this week was ‘tch’. Alongside this, we also explored when to use ‘tch’ and when to use ‘ch’, thinking carefully about short and long vowel sounds. The children became very confident with this and even spotted it independently in words such as witch when reading The Baddies.

Our literacy focus this week was another Julia Donaldson story, The Baddies. We had some excellent discussions about what makes a character good or bad, looking closely at characters’ actions and choices. The children then created character profiles for the witch, the ghost, and the troll, using mind maps to plan and organise their ideas before writing.

For comprehension, we tried a brand-new approach called I’ll Read to You, You Read to Me. Working in pairs, the children took turns reading parts of the script aloud before answering questions together. This supported fluency, confidence, and collaboration, and was really well received by the class.

🔢 Maths

In maths, our focus this week was rounding to the nearest 10 , 100 and 1000. We began with clear teaching input, giving the children time to practise and explain their thinking.

To help remember the rules for rounding, we learned a rounding rhyme with actions:

• “5 to 9, we climb the vine” 🐒

• “0 to 4, we slide to the floor”

These actions really helped the children remember when to round numbers up or down. We also continued our regular mental maths practice on Friday, helping to build speed and confidence.

💻 ICT

During ICT, the children worked on developing their mouse control skills, using a Dragon drop (drag-and-drop) website to practise accuracy and control. We also used ICT time to consolidate our rounding work through interactive games, reinforcing our maths learning in a fun and engaging way.

🌍 Topic – Vikings

Our Vikings learning continued this week with a focus on longships. Building on the drawings we started last week, the children learned about what longships were used for and began labelling the different parts. This helped them understand why longships were so important to Viking life, travel, and exploration.

On Monday, the class took part in a new play project supported  by Miss Farmer our play support worker. As part of this project, the children generated their own ideas linked to our Vikings topic, including:

• Building Viking galleys using a range of materials

• Creating snap card games featuring Viking facts

• Designing and performing Viking puppet shows

The children showed fantastic creativity, teamwork, and independence. They also began learning how to assess their work against skills, discussing which skills they were using and how well they felt they had demonstrated them.

🎭 Assembly

This week we attended a whole-school assembly led by Primary 5/6/7, where the class listened respectfully and represented Primary 3/4 brilliantly as part of our school community. The assembly was fantastic – well done to P5/6/7 and Mrs Adamson.

🧘 PE – Teacher Led

This week’s PE session took place in the classroom, where we enjoyed a calming Cosmic Kids Yoga session. The children showed excellent focus, balance, and control, and enjoyed the opportunity to relax and move mindfully together.

🎨 Play & Wider Learning

Our play provision continued to be very busy and creative. Alongside our Viking-themed resources, the children explored woodworking with hammers and nails, built structures using a range of materials, and created Viking ruin-style stones. These were turned into messages, with children writing and sharing rune-inspired messages with one another, linking play, writing, and topic learning beautifully.

Primary 4 also got a chance to head into Lerwick to see the Up Helly As parade on Tuesday and attend an informative session at the Shetland Museum on Vikings, they were then able to share all their new knowledge with the class in our topic session.

🌟 Primary 3/4 Weekly Round-Up – Term 3, Week Three

✏️ Literacy & Writing

Our spelling sound this week was ‘ie’. We found lots of creative ways to practise our sound and spot it in books and in other places around the school.

Our writing was inspired by another Julia Donaldson story, The Smartest Giant in Town. The children explored the text in lots of creative and thoughtful ways.

They wrote thank-you letters from the animals to the Giant, showing empathy and understanding of how the Giant had helped each character. We also created detailed character descriptions of the Giant and designed animal profile cards for the animals in the story.

To support our writing, we took part in a fun giant drawing and painting activity, working together to create life-sized giants. This helped us develop our use of adjectives and adverbs and supported our collaboration, communication, and creativity (Meta Skills), which we then used to improve our descriptive writing.

We also continued to encourage a love of reading through our QR code reading wall, which links to a range of books, as well as our book review and recommendation area, where children can share and recommend texts to others. Our weekly Flashlight Friday continues to be a favourite, giving children time to enjoy reading for pleasure and talk about books they love.

🔢 Maths

In maths, the children worked on shape with Mrs Smith, exploring and identifying different shapes and their properties. We also continued our work on compass points, linking direction and movement, and spent time exploring number sequencing and patterns, looking for rules and explaining how sequences change.

💻 ICT

During ICT this week, the children focused on developing their mouse control skills. They also completed a Story Blast comprehension activity, which was very popular and helped build reading comprehension in a fun and engaging way.

🌍 Topic – Vikings

We continued our Vikings mini-topic, focusing on Viking life and homes. The children explored what everyday life may have been like for Viking families and how their homes were designed and used.

As part of our topic learning, we took part in a draw-along activity to create Viking longships, and the children have begun painting them. We’re looking forward to finishing these next week, in time to explore Viking longships in more detail and learn all about how they were used by the Vikings for travel, trade, and raids.

🧘 PE – Teacher Led

In PE, we warmed up by recapping compass points through movement, helping to reinforce our learning in an active way. We then took part in a yoga session inspired by The Smartest Giant in Town, using movement and balance to represent different characters and moments from the story. The children showed excellent focus, control, and creativity throughout the session.

🌟 Primary 3/4 Weekly Round-Up – Term 3 (Weeks 1 & 2)

We’ve had a slightly unusual start to Term 3 with three snow days in Week 1, meaning we were only in school for two days that week. Despite this, the children settled back into school routines brilliantly and packed lots of learning into the time we had together. Here’s a look at what we’ve been working on across Weeks 1 and 2.

✏️ Literacy & Writing

This term, our new writing focus is Julia Donaldson texts, with a different book inspiring our learning each week.

In Week 1, we focused on Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book. The children enjoyed watching a special video created by Mrs Teale for Shetland Arts during the Covid period, which brought the story to life and sparked lots of discussion about books, storytelling, and imagination.

In Week 2, our focus text was Room on the Broom. The children:

• Took part in hot-seating, questioning one of the animals from the broom

• Wrote from the animal’s perspective

• Invented and illustrated a new passenger for the broom

• Practised sequencing the story, developing important organisational skills

We ended the week with an exciting literacy activity — creating exploding potions in mini cauldrons, linking perfectly to the magical theme of the story!

Across both weeks, we also:

• Continued learning about prefixes and suffixes

• Practised independent reading and comprehension tasks

• Learned our spelling focus, the ‘ore’ sound

🔢 Maths

In maths, we revisited and developed our understanding of comparing two-digit numbers, using:

• Greater than (>)

• Less than (<)

• Equal to (=)

The children worked hard to explain their thinking and justify their answers. This learning will continue to be reinforced through games, particularly during our ICT sessions.

💻 ICT

We introduced a new ICT slot on Thursdays, which will be used across the curriculum. During these sessions, we will:

• Develop typing skills

• Improve mouse control

• Use ICT to support maths games and literacy activities

We have also been learning about QR codes and how they can be used to access information quickly and safely. As part of this, we introduced a new classroom reading wall display, featuring weekly QR codes that link directly to books and reading material. This has been a brilliant way to encourage independent reading and build confidence in navigating digital texts.

Alongside this, we launched our new book review and recommendation area. The children have been sharing their thoughts about books they’ve read and recommending them to others, helping to develop important evaluation, communication, and recommendation skills — and inspiring each other to try new texts.

💖 Health & Wellbeing

In Health and Wellbeing, we read The Magical Yet, exploring goal setting, perseverance, and the importance of believing in ourselves. The children created thoughtful goal-setting artwork, thinking about things they would like to work towards in 2026.

We also read The Sour Grape, which led to some lovely discussions about being “grapeful”. The children reflected on the people, experiences, and things they feel grapeful for, sharing positive thoughts and showing great kindness towards one another.

🌍 Topic – Vikings

We kicked off our exciting new topic on the Vikings by:

• Exploring who the Vikings were

• Locating Viking lands on a map

• Beginning a timeline to understand when the Vikings lived

To help bring our learning to life, the children also worked together to create a Viking longship (galley) and Viking figures for our classroom wall display. These have really helped us visualise Viking life and have brightened up our learning space.

🧭 Cross-Curricular Learning

We also explored compass points using a fun Harry Potter theme, helping the children practise direction skills in an engaging way that linked nicely with literacy and topic learning. We also enjoyed a fun class teacher PE session playing compass games to consolidate our learning.

Despite the snowy start to the term, it’s been a fantastic first two weeks, full of creativity, discussion, and enthusiasm. We’re really looking forward to what the rest of Term 3 brings!