Monthly Archives: November 2023

31 Playful Minutes

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We are on our second week of our 31 Playful Minutes journey in P4/5.  It’s certainly a much looked forward to part of the week.  Please ask your children to explain to you why we are doing this each week, and why it is for31 minutes!

We plan to stick with our chosen ‘play’ choices for at least another week before deciding if we’d like to try one of the activities some of the others have been choosing or picking a different interest.

Below are some of the things we’ve enjoyed so far….

Always a hit!  Staff like to join in too!

A lovely, quiet area for building a Minecraft world.

Role play in the grocery shop.  They had some
tricky customers this week!

Crafts….from clay to stuffed pigs and paper bag people!

Following our own topical interests and presenting our findings however we choose.

Farms, trucks and tractors!  We even had a friend stop by who couldn’t resist a play!

We have already seen wonderful examples of sharing and cooperating together during these sessions.  Sometimes compromising can be hard at times but a playful environment is a wonderful way to work through these challenges.

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Fun with speech marks!

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Thank you to all our families who donated used magazines for our grammar lesson!  It fairly cheered up learning about the correct use of speech marks!   Character images were chosen and cut out from the magazines and we had to decide on what each would be saying before adding in all the necessary punctuation marks.  There is so much to remember!  Some pupils created short conversations, making sure they took a new line for a new speaker.  Some pupils worked on sentences where the speech comes first and then showed different examples using the speech at the end of their sentence.  Others wrote inside speech bubbles and will work on punctuating this with inverted commas next week.

Great focus and careful work P4/5!
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AI – Mission 2

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We recently completed our latest Mission from the Children’s Parliament.  It was based around Safety and Security.  We revised what ‘data’ is, the different ‘types’ of data there can be and how it is used in AI systems.

We then thought about our rights and how this relates to safety and security with AI.  We talked about online gaming and the importance of keeping data safe to protect their right to play and privacy.  We discussed sharing locations online and talked about safety in relation to this too.

Our next task was to try to guess the identity of a mystery YouTube channel user based on their recommendation homepage.  They had to consider what this person may like, where they might live, how old they are etc…  For this activity, we needed to think like AI and to have respectful and fair ideas about this person.  We are hoping to hear more about the mystery user when our Investigators have their online call next week!

Our final task was a craft based one.  We each got a wooden house to decorate.  The outside needed to reflect information they’d be happy to share with the world!  Within the inside of the house, they were to write, draw or symbolise pieces of information that should only be shared with family and friends.

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Busy making our houses. The Children’s Parliament provide all the wonderful resources we use.

Friendship

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During Health and Wellbeing lessons, we’ve been thinking about the topic Friendship.   In groups, we talked about what qualities we think are vital, preferable or not necessary in a good friendship.  We had different ideas about this but there were many qualities that we all agreed on.  We decided to turn these words into a display for the hall and a ‘Tom Gates’ style display was chosen to reflect the interests of many members in the class.

We looked at books in the Library and from home and talked about the style of lettering and drawings used by Liz Pichon.  We then created our friendship words and black pen drawings of us with our friends.  This proved an enjoyable activity for many and the end result looks very charming!

We will now move on to think about different aspects of friendships and getting along with others.

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Adding the final ‘doodles’ to our display!

 

Spooky Houses

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Our spooky house paintings are complete and we are so proud of them!  Everyone listened carefully to the instructions and put in 100% effort.  Fantastic!

Last week we focused on creating a spooky beginning to a story, linked to our paintings.  We talked about how to draw the reader in and how to use different punctuation to add suspense and excitement.  We then spent time reading each other’s work and editing what we had written, looking for capital letters and correct punctuation.  We also had to check that it made sense.

Here is a sneak preview of some story beginnings…

One cold, dark night I found a haunted house. It was dark so I couldn’t see much but I could see enough to make me shiver. A tree fell making me jump but I kept on going, intrigued by it’s spooky silhouette. Lightning struck and in the flash of light, I saw a cloak swish past the window, but it was too late to turn back now. As I opened the door I heard an evil cackle, was it a witch? Or a ghost? My heart skipped a beat as I walked into the unknown.

 

One night, I was walking through a dark, gloomy forest. I noticed a haunting house. It was old and dusty and the garden was covered in fungus and parasites! As I walked to the door I heard some spooky sounds. the noises continued. I tried to ignore it and moved on. Inside things were even worse!  The furniture was broken and the hallways were putrid. I went into the basement and the lights started to flicker.

 

One dark and stormy night I found myself in a giant corn maze.  I could smell the horrible smell of still lifeless decaying bodies of animals and even humans. After what felt like hours of walking, I found the way out. Then I had found a house. I thought “Finally! I found somewhere to sleep!”