What a busy week!

Christmas Concert

Christmas Lunch

Christmas Treat

Active Learning in Maths

This week we played Capture the Flag and Snowball Fight while doing our maths, everyone had a great time especially when they were allowed to throw their ‘snowballs’ at me!

Class Advent

Each day one child gets to open our class advent calendars. The little boxes are from me and are filled with a prize, a would you rather, a sticker and a sweet treat and the Dairy Milk one is, very kindly, from Kay with alternatives provided for those who can’t have dairy milk.

Painting the Backdrops

The kids had a fantastic afternoon painting the backdrops for their show. There was so much laughter and nonsense, it was so lovely (if a little noisy)!

Concert Practice

There has been lots of practicing the concert, we can’t wait for you to see it on Tuesday.

Writing Time

The past couple of weeks we have been looking at creating extended imaginative texts. The learners have created stories with 5 paragraphs; a sensational start, a build up, a problem, a resolution and an ending. I have been really impressed by their awesome ideas and brilliant work.

Electrical Circuits

We had a super afternoon on Tuesday exploring electrical circuits through a series of activities that the learners rotated through. One activity asked them to label and existing circuit diagram while another asked them to create their own circuit diagram. There was a practical activity making a circuit with a lightbulb and a switch. Finally, the most popular activity, was an investigative task; the learners got a battery, a lightbulb and some tin foil and had to try to light the bulb. There was lots of excitement when someone managed to get the circuit to work!

Table Tennis

On Monday afternoon the learners requested table tennis during their 31 for 31 time. It was great fun, many thanks to Mrs Bannister for facilitating this.

National Monopoly Day

On the 19th it was National Play Monopoly Day (who knew there was such a thing). This was our ‘Discover the World’ task for this week so on Wednesday afternoon (because it fitted in better with extra staffing) we all split in to groups and played all the various versions of Monopoly. I was so impressed by how well everyone participated and especially by the lack of any major fallings out.

Glasgow Science Centre

On Monday morning we started the week strong with a visit from the Glasgow Science Centre.  They held a workshop all about castles and the different scientific advancements that were used in the time that castles were built.

Printing

On Monday afternoon Carrie-Ann was in class and led on some fantastic print making.  Anyone who wanted to created a template on foam boards and were then able to use paint to print it on paper. Some people even attempted doing some writing which was very tricky as it had to be done backwards.

Judaism

Our big question this week focused on the key features of Judaism. I wonder if the kids can tell you 3 or more things about Judaism?

Triangular Sports

On Thursday P4/5 attended a Triangular Sports event at Sandwick Junior High School. It was a brilliant opportunity for the kids to try new things and meet new people. Many thanks to all who organised the event, including a super group of S3s from Sandwick. I have lots more pictures to share once we have permission from the associated schools.

5 Pages

As always we found time each day to read our 5 pages.  There is nothing that makes my teacher heart happier than seeing the kids sharing their current reads and recommendations.

All About Play

There are several different types of play and over the course of the day/ week we try to ensure that there is an age and stage appropriate balance between each type. Free or Child Led play is play that has no guidance from an adult; children decide the context, the resources and the outcome of the play for example creating a ball game with rules and scoring invented by the children.  Adult led play is play where the context, resources and outcome are decided by the adult, for example playing a maths game. This week I have observed lots of fantastic adult initiated play.  This is play where the adult has decided on one of either the context or the resources or the outcome but not all three. These examples are all from our Discover the Topic tasks where I give the learners a topic and they decide what to create.  These opportunities can provide excellent opportunities for deepening knowledge and understanding and always provide lots of opportunity to develop extremely important meta skills such as creativity, collaboration and problem solving.

Returning from the Holiday

It has been great to see the kids again after the October break, it sounds as if everyone has had a lovely time.  It was especially nice to see all the kids skipping (literally for some of them) in to school on Wednesday morning and a visitor in the class commented on how joyful it was.

Personally I had a fantastic break in Florida and brought the kids back Mickey and Minnie ears and a pen as a souvenir from my adventures.

Spelling

We have made a start with heart Word Ninja.  Spelling will start next week.  There is a physical copy, of the letter that was emailed out at the end of last term, attached to the homework booklet. As a staff teaching group we were on training during the in-service days which re-confirmed the need to re-visit learning regularly so if you are able to do 5 minutes of spelling each night it is much more beneficial than 20mins at once.

I cannot believe that it is the end of the term already.  Thank you all so much for your on-going support throughout the term.

Maths – Weighing 

This week in maths the green group have been doing some measuring using different types of scales.

Orchestra

The Shetland Youth Orchestra visited the school and amazed us all with their spooky tunes.

French 

We have been learning about the items in our pencil case in French.  The children have been practicing “Dans ma trousse j’ai …..” I am really impressed with how well they are all managing to construct a simple sentence.

HWB – How to Fill your Joyful Cup

As we have reached the end of term the kids have, understandably, been a little more fractious than usual.  We did a lesson all about our positive feelings cup and our negative feeling cup.  After that the kids made their own positive feeling cup filled with things that would make them feel happy if they were experiencing some more negative feelings.

Big Question – Science Fair

This week our big question was about planning and conducting a fair test.  The learners were split into groups and asked to plan a science experiment. They created a poster to show how they planned and carried out the experiment.  On Wednesday afternoon we held a science fair and P1/2 came to see what P4/5 had been doing.  It was great both to see the learners show and explain their experiments and to see the wonder in the faces of the P1/2 class.  Thank you Miss Hunter, Louise and P1/2 for coming to visit.

Maths Game – Suitable for Home Learning

Each day we start our maths lesson by doing a ‘Flashback Focus’ activity, this is an activity that revisits the learning from the previous week.  By repeatedly revisiting the learning we strengthen the neuro-pathways an encourage better recall of concepts and facts.  This week we were revisiting counting forwards and back in 10s and 100s.  The learners worked in groups.  Each group had a piece of paper with a number written on it and two dice, each learner had a different colour of pen.  The first person started writing the next numbers in the sequence while the others rolled the dice, whenever a double was rolled the piece of paper moved around the group.  At the end of the allocated time (in our case 7 mins) the learners counted up how many correct numbers they had added to the sequence. The winner was whoever had the most. It certainly brought out the competitive spirit of some learners! This is an ideal activity to use at home, with multiple children of different ages separate piece of paper could be used to work on different types of number sequences (for example 546, count on in 10s for a P4/5 pupil and 23 count on in 1s for a P2 pupil).

Discover the World 

This week it was National Rollercoaster Day and so the learners were set the challenge of building their own rollercoaster.  I have been so impressed not only by the designs but also but the resilience, problem solving and team work I have seen from the learners.

Maths

We have been counting in maths this week.  To practice counting in 3s the learners played ping pong, tossing the ball back and forth as they worked out the next number in the sequence.

Writing/ Big Question

The big question this week have been about states of matter; solids, liquids and gases.  As part of writing time the learners wrote sentences about each of the different states and created their own posters.  I was delighted by the level of effort and engagement in this task, everyone really strived to produce their best work.

Hello!

Welcome to our P4-5 Class Blog.  It has been a great, and very busy, first week.  I have been so impressed by how well the children have settled into the class and the routines.  I have seen so much determination, consideration and joy already.  I can’t wait to see that all developing over the course of the year.

Chemical Reaction Experiment

Writing with Flexible Seating