For health and wellbeing week we did:
- yoga
- mindfulness exercises
- zentangle colouring
- breathing techniques
- sensory play – spaghetti in the water tray!
- walks
- wellbeing webs
- playing outside with p3b
- baking bannocks
Birdwatching at the Sands of Sound
As part of our Shetland topic, we have been learning about birds that we might find in Shetland and their proper names and Shetland names.
We went to the beach and listened carefully for the tirricks. There were two that were swooping about, people were on the island and disturbing their peace. Some of us saw a duck on water as well.
The class are desperate to see and hear a puffin but there was none to be seen. We have looked on the puffin cam at Sumburgh head and saw ones there.
Meta-skills used today were: focusing and curiosity.
Leadership – Playground
Primary 3’s Leadership focus this term is playground. We have decided to learn some games to help encourage p1-3 to play games in the playground. We have Jennifer from Active Schools in to teach us some games. We are then going to teach it to the primary 1 and 2 pupils. We have learned Dragon Treasure and Aeroplane Catchie today.
Meta-skills we are covering are: focusing, adapting, initiative, communicating, collaborating, leading, sense-making and critical thinking.
Times Table Rockstars
We are working on our times tables at the moment. The class are loving the games on Times Table Rockstars. They all have logins in their diaries so can play this at home too. Here is the login link.
Athletics
This week in PE we started our athletics block, focusing on running events. We practiced the 2 different sports day running events and then finished with drills that help us develop our technique for sprinting.
Here we are doing our shuttle run.
Here we are doing our sprinting.
The pictures show the difference in running styles when jogging and sprinting
Da Magic Stane
We did some classwork on labelling key places on the Shetland map. We then listened to the Shetland dialect poem ‘Da Magic Stane’.
Da Magic Stane :: Shetland ForWirds
After that we went out into the playground to look at the map on the ground. Mrs Abernethy and some pupils wrote the names of the islands on the map. We took our stone we got from the beach last week and placed it on our chosen island. We then wrote an imaginative story about what our own magic stone would do and where it would go. Some went to Bressay, some went to Whalsay and some went to capybara island.
We had a Shetland map jigsaw to do when finished. There are only 9 pieces but it is surprisingly tricky.
Meta-skills included are: focusing, initiative, communicating, leading, collaborating, sense-making and critical thinking
Trip to the Beach
What a sunny day!
Off to the beach we went to skim some stones. We each took a stone back to class to be our magic stone for a lesson next week. We will be listening to ‘Da Magic Stane’ and using this as an idea for our writing focus.
Here is a link to the poem if anyone hasn’t heard of it.
Da Magic Stane :: Shetland ForWirds
Harry was our star skimmer today! He has an amazing technique.
Meta-skills included in this learning opportunity included: focusing, adapting, initiative, communicating, collaborating, leading and critical thinking.
Curriculum Information for Term 4
Here is our curriculum information for term 4.
Maps of Sound
We looked at our local area today and used a map to find various locations around the school. The children loved going out and about with the clipboards and finding the 9 locations. We then had to look on the map and find it there too, this was a lot trickier but the pupils were map experts by the end of the lesson.
Meta-skills used during the lesson were: focusing, communicating, sense-making and critical thinking.
We are going to move on to looking at maps of the whole of Lerwick later on in the week and then we will look at the map of Shetland next week.
Shetland is our topic for this term. If anyone has any skills or talents that they would like to share with us to support the class to learn about Shetland then please get in touch.
School Nurse Visit
In term 3 we had a visit from our school nurse, Gemma Bulter. She came in to help us with our project – healthy bodies.
She brought the hand hygiene unit so we could see the difference between dirty hands and clean hands. She demonstrated how far germs can be spread when people cough or sneeze. We discussed common diseases that can be spread. Gemma also showed us some items that nurses would use in their job such as a thermometer, stethoscope and pulse monitor.
The class had lots of questions for her and were really keen to share what we had been learning already.
We watched this hand washing video:
National Infection Prevention and Control Manual: Childrens pack
Time Project
We had a time focus for our numeracy project this term.
Our first target was for pupils to correctly recognise and record o’clock and half past on analogue and digital clocks.
Our second target was for pupils to correctly recognise and record o’clock, half past, quarter past and quarter to, on analogue and digital clocks.
100% of pupils said their confidence in telling time had gone up.
The pupils looked forward to their time lessons and often commented on it being their favourite time of the day. We got 10 questions to answer every day after doing 10-15 minutes of learning. The pupils were aiming to get 8/10 or higher to achieve their success criteria. On days that ALL pupils got 8/10 or above we would celebrate by playing musical statues and doing a conga around the school with the 100 club trophy.
Big Walk and Wheel Challenge
Our Leadership activity this term has been JRSO which stands for Junior Road Safety Officers. We decided to do the Sustrans ‘Big Walk and Wheel’ challenge for this. The pupils made posters, went around each of the classes to explain to them what we are doing, composed a letter to send out to parents and spoke out at assembly.
During the two weeks of the challenge the p3 classes collected the numbers of pupils that had walk/cycled/scooted to school. We then inputted the data into the website daily. The pupils loved doing this and looked forward to doing it each day.
The Shetland Islands Council Climate Team found out about our challenge and asked to come into the school to find out more about what we have been doing and the reasons behind it. They interviewed pupils and videoed us to use as part of their ‘Climate Yarns’ project.
Click on the link below to watch the episode featuring our amazing Primary 3 pupils!
Climate Yarns: Walk And Cycle Challenge
The Meta-skills the bairns highlighted that we were covering during this task were:
- sense-making
- leading
- communicating
- critical thinking
- collaborating
- adapting
- focusing
A big thank you to the parents for supporting the pupils to walk/wheel to school each day.
Art Lesson
In Art Primary 3 have been doing a design project learning about designing and creating their own hat/headdress.
Throughout this project, we have been learning how to research and come up with different designs, which we then evaluated to decide on the best idea.
We then got the basic structure made and decorated it with lots of different materials. Lots of fun was had exploring the materials and choosing the best ones to create our designs.
The final results were amazing!!! Well done P3
Skipping
In PE we have been doing skipping. We have learnt that skipping is a great form of exercise that is cheap to do and only requires a small space. We also learnt that it develops rhythm and timing, coordination, motivation, determination and resilience and focus and concentration.
Wider Achievement
We have a wall in the middle wing to share our wider achievements. It is quite bare at the moment. If any children have done something they are proud of, received any awards or certificates or worked really hard on something then they can share it with us and we will put it up on the wall.
Having fun outside!
We did our daily mile on Friday last week and got a shot of a ball so we could do some shooting in the netball hoop.
We were getting better by the end!
Human Body Rhythms
This term both P3 classes have been working together in music. We have used their Human Body project to help us with our rhythm work. We matched up three project related words ‘skeleton’, ‘muscles’ and ‘joints’ to the three rhythms ‘ti-ri-ti’, ‘ti-ti’ and ‘ta’ as shown here:
Then we used these words to help us read different rhythmic patterns. You can see that our patterns included one beat rests which means that we had to count a beat of silence in the rhythms.
We then worked together to suggest ways we could put these rhythmic words together to create our own composition which you can see below. We even added a repeat sign at the end of each bar to make our piece longer.
The next step was to add the musical notation under the images to create our piece of music.
General Games
P3 have been doing general games to develop the skills we need in lots of different games. These skills include decision making, spatial awareness, communication, dodging, weaving, changing direction and ball skills like throwing, catching and kicking.
Bressay Up Helly Aa
Zander was in the Bressay Up Helly Aa today. The squad came to visit us at school. We liked it when the band played Postman Pat. Zander looked amazing and presented the school with a mini shield.
Literacy Week
Literacy Week
We have enjoyed doing ERIC (Everyone Read in Class) time in class every day this week.
We had a visit from Bookbug. The pupils have a suspicion that they know who was under the costume.
We loved the Book Fair in the library and we have raised lots of money for our school. We will buy some books with that money.
We watched a couple of stories on the whiteboard. We liked that there was a capybara in Zagazoo. Here are the links if anyone wants to watch them again.
BBC One – The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
We made a door display – we chose George’s Marvellous Medicine.
We have had fun making our own medicines in the water tray and mixing them up.
We wrote our medicines for our class writing task. We had to chose what went in to our medicine and write out how to make our medicine. We also got to use our imagination to think about what the medicine might do to you if you took some. Some medicines made you grow, some made you explode, some made your hair fall off, some made you turn into a balloon and some made you turn into a different colour. It was very exciting!
We made a display for the canteen. We had to pick interesting vocabulary from our library books.
We learned about Braille with Mr Dally. It is a way of reading for people who are blind.
There has been a lunch time book club. Thank you to the parents who have helped out in the library.
We had fun dressing up for World Book Day!
It has been a very busy week.
