Hello!

I’m excited to be teaching Primary 5 this year!  Hope everyone has had a nice Summer break.

Just thought I’d let you know when our specialist teachers visit P5:

P.E. – Mondays

Music – Wednesdays

Art – Thursdays

Teacher Led P.E. – Tuesdays

Curriculum Information will be available by the end of the week.

Miss Smith

This term in music, P4 have been learning about how music can tell a story and the important role it plays in enhancing a story by driving the plot, revealing characters or expressing a theme. We listened and appraised four different songs from four different Disney animations and we concluded that music was an essential element in each film. Without music, there would be no story!

In the clip below, you can see the class reading and performing the rhythms of crotchets (ta), quavers (ti-ti), crotchet rests (shh) and whole rests (shh-shh-shh-shh). They not only had to understand and play the rhythms, they also had to read and perform drum notation.

Here is a link to the play along that we used:

And here is our class performance:

We got the chance to use the MTA kits again and this time we built towers. We have been learning about castles as part of our IDL project. We learned that castles had to be strong to defend against attacks. We also learned that they had to be tall, so that you can see for a long distance from the top. We all came up with such different ideas!

We were very lucky to have Eleanor from the UHI visit us with her MTA kits. These are large engineering kits. We used them to make lots of different shapes. We discovered that triangles are the most structurally strong shape. We adapted other shapes we had made to include triangles to stop them collapsing. We worked in groups and used our team work skills.

P4 made candles in hot colours using oil pastels and have contrasting background landscape creations using cold colours.

P4 have been learning how to draw a face. They have made self portraits and used collage to make the facial features, hair and clothes. Can you recognise who is who?

They made  beautiful collages of poppies featured to the side of the display.

P4 have been working in small groups to make castle structures. They have drawn their creations.

This morning P4 took part in the Youth Music Festival 2024 for primary schools across Shetland. They did a fantastic job of singing their medley of songs and it was noted by the adjudicator, just how well they performed without a conductor and only the piano to follow!

They all did so well and I am incredibly proud of each and every one of them!

Thank you to Siobhan Pirie for the photo above and to Jen Williamson for the video recording below.

This week in music we have been learning about note values as shown in the graphic below.

We practised clapping each note and vocalising the length using the words ‘ta-a-a-a’ for a 4 beat note (whole note), ‘ta-a’ for a 2 beat note (half note), ‘ta’ for a 1 beat note (quarter note) and ‘te-te’ for a half beat note (eighth note). We also discussed the importance of rests in music and how to read them.

We then used our knowledge to help us follow musical notation in the form of a rhythm play along which was created for lunar new year which begins on the 10th of February this year.

Here is a clip of the class in action!