We had fun on Monday, taking part in all of the fun activities that the Parent Council and Primary 7 had organised.  Thank you!

Shereen and everyone at Day Care invited us for another visit.  We made lovely lighthouses and created our own fish pictures for a display at Day Care.  We shared snack with the service users and they had also made us gorgeous fish magnets to take home too!  We used our communication and creative meta skills.  When we got back to class, we made ‘Thank You’ cards to send to the Service Users as well as Shereen and all of the team at Day Care.

Weeks 5-8 Skipping

We started by developing our individual performance from a basic skip to trying  different actions with our feet like jumping jacks, ski’s, twists, etc.  We could also try moving the rope differently by doing cross overs and a double rope with one jump.  In our second week we introduced partner work, where we both still had our own ropes but tried to skip in time, and skipping on a bench.  We finished the block with group skipping using the longer ropes.

Week 9-12

This week sees the start of our last 4 week block of the term and the year, which is Rounders.  Here are the first two games we are doing.

– Circle and line – In 2 halves, 1 half stand in a circle and pass the ball around circle.  The other half stand in a corner and 1 at a time run around edge of gym.  See how many passes the circle team can make in the time it takes the other team to all have 1 shot each.

– Passing rounders – 2 teams, 1 fielding and the other batting.  The batters throw the ball out and run once round all the stumps.  The fielders score by throwing the ball as many times as they can before the batter gets home.  The team with the most throws wins.

We have been learning about how music can help to tell a story and this week we focused on cartoons and Disney animated films.

We started by working in pairs to ‘write the room’ where we had to look for pictures of a range of cartoons and Disney animated films and copy the rhythms displayed onto our record pages.  Then we worked together to clap each of the rhythms which included quarter notes, quarter rests, eighth notes and minims.

Then we did a listen and appraise activity where we listened to four Disney songs and rated them on a scale of 1 to 3 stars. We had to consider how well the songs helped to tell the story and also what we thought about the songs. We all agreed that Disney songs are very powerful in telling stories.

As part of our STEM leadership, we invited Miss Hutchison’s class to join us to share our learning on Micro:bits so far.  We worked collaboratively sharing our learning and we learned from them too.

To continue our STEM learning, we’ve been discussing where our food comes from and we worked together to make some butter.  We enjoyed our butter spread on some gluten free bread.  Our follow up activity was to write instructions on how to make butter from shaking/agitating double cream/whipped cream.  It was so fun!   We used our collaborative and creative meta skills.

We’ve been monitoring the growth of our sunflowers as part of our learning on STEM.  We’ve been developing our knowledge of unit conversion – cm/mm.   We’re excited that our sunflowers are growing well! 

We have started a unit of work where we are learning about the connection between literacy and music and how music can help tell a story.

We have listened to a folk ballad, a traditional song from Shetland and two classical pieces, all of which tell very different stories.

The latest piece we listening to was ‘In The Hall Of The Mountain King’ by the Norwegian composer, Edvard Grieg. After hearing a summary of the story, we listened to the piece played by an orchestra and then on our whiteboards we drew a picture to show what the music made us think of.

Below are some photos of the class hard at work creating their drawings and also some of the final pictures they produced and shared with their classmates.

We’re developing our knowledge of what plants need to grow.  We all planted our own sunflowers and will monitor their growth over time, using our measuring skills.  We also created beautiful sunflower art using our creative meta skills.

We’ve been exploring new hardware in the form of Micro:bits and accessing BBC Make Code software, to develop our coding skills.   We created coded sequences to make a flashing heart and then extended our learning by inserting our own code to include letters or other pictures, within the flashing heart sequence.  We used our creativity and curiosity meta skills.  We will continue to extend our knowledge throughout Term 4.