A very busy week!

It’s been a week full of active learning and creativity this week!

In Art with Ms Burr, the children have been painting butterflies from the rainforest.  They have been thinking about the colours they see in nature and recreating this in their work.  They have been working with concentration and care.  We have also created beautiful Christmas card designs which you’ll be able to see when you visit for your parent appointment shortly!

In Topic work this week, Mrs Henderson found an active way to help illustrate how food webs work.

We had another visit from Gregory and Frances from the Children’s Parliament who came to meet our new P4/5 pupils who have joined our class and introduce them to the work they do and to begin talking about AI.  There were, as always, some great ‘Getting To Know You’ games and we spoke some more about the UNCRC.

Group work is at the centre of all that we do in the Children’s Parliament.  In groups, we had to choose an animal and think of statements about it that would allow the rest of the class to guess our creature.  We had to agree on the animal and statements before ordering these from most difficult to easiest.

In groups, we drew around a life-size body and wrote inside it about the kind of person we’d like to be and our hopes and dreams and how we’d get there in the future.  Again, team work, discussion, listening and sharing was needed to make this task a success.

Then we started to think more about AI and where it can be found in daily life.  We also recapped on how data is collected for AI and introduced our new pupils to the ‘Cleaning Up The Ocean’ online game.

On Thursday, Gregory returned to help us think more about fairness in AI.  He gave us a challenge!  A school has over 300 pupils and for the upcoming day trip to the Golf Course, there can only be 100 children chosen!  Who gets to go?  We were introduced to coding using ‘Python’ which uses simple words and numbers to instantly sort and analyse data.

The challenge was to build an algorithm that decides who gets to go on the trip by using a points system.  Points had to be allocated under certain headings – pupils who are always late, those with best behaviour, age of pupil, those performing best in a test etc.  When the numbers were input, the computer made the decision for each pupil as to how many points they were rewarded.

After a list of names was produced and we found out who the 100 tickets would go to, we then heard about some of the personal stories behind the pupils.  This made us realise that selecting pupils in this way was unfair and sometimes, you need to know more information.  Our investigators will pass on our thoughts at their next online meeting.

Thursday afternoon saw us drumming with Joy again and I was so impressed with how quickly the class have built up some complicated rhythms and combining these together.  I love watching the concentration on the faces as the pupils follow Joy’s lead!

Friday saw us learning about the Spanish Armada and the wreck of the El Gran Grifon which sank off Fair Isle in 1588.  This gave us some background knowledge before listening to music from this period of time from the Chroma Music Group.

The afternoon saw Nora and her violin and Rory with his accordion, creating music with others pupils while we learned a dance in the hall.  It was a war dance between the Spaniards and Elizabethans.  It was a very different and enjoyable Friday afternoon!

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Class Charter

Over the past few weeks, P4/5 have been working together to create our class charter.  We looked together at the Articles listed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and picked out four that we felt were important for our class.  We chose Non Discrimination…Be Ourselves, Be Respectful, Be Safe and Be Healthy.

Our next job was to identify our responsible behaviours under each heading.  Once agreed,  we voted on a theme to display our charter and the most popular idea was a Rainforest theme!

It would be really great if you could spend time talking through the responsible behaviours we have decided on at home too.

Be Ourselves

  • We understand that we all have similarities and we will respect our differences too.
  • Be ourselves…don’t change being you for other people!
  • Take interest in everyone and what they like to do.
  • Include everyone!

Be Respectful

  • Be kind and fair to everyone.
  • Listen to all ideas, even if different from your own.
  • Talk in a polite way to everyone.
  • Treat others how you would like to be treated.

Be Healthy

  • Keep our brains active and our ideas healthy.
  • Let staff know how we are feeling.
  • We will notice if our classmates are struggling and help.
  • Be active!

Be Safe

  • Use equipment at school sensibly.
  • Wear a seat belt on the bus.
  • Follow all the school rules.
  • Treat others with care.

The Duty Bearers were also given a set of responsibilities too.  The children felt these were important to include.

  • Encourage us.
  • Help us to sort out any problems we have.
  • Help us in a small group if we find something tricky.
  • Take us to new places and let us try fun activities indoors and outside.
  • Just be yourselves!
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Week 3

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Week 3 was another busy one with lots of opportunity to work with others and be creative.

We played a variety of word building games and revised some common high frequency words.  These words are used regularly in our writing, so we will work hard to learn them in many different ways.

Thank you for sending in resources to help with our Rainforest in  a Box project.  We started building them this week and it has been lovely to see so many creative ideas being shared amongst the class.  We plan to have them ready to show parents towards the end of term.

In Maths this week we have been looking at Place Value and how to construct larger numbers.  The class had fun using the Place Value blocks to build models and then work out the value of each model.  It was great to hear the children sharing their thinking and supporting each other to understand.  We will be moving on to comparing numbers and ordering them too.   I’m sure everyone will be keen to challenge themselves with even larger numbers!

We love to hear about any achievements outside of school and this week enjoyed hearing about one P4’s success at a recent athletics competition.  Well done!