Everyone has enjoyed sharing stories and events from the Easter holidays. We were lucky enough to welcome four new pupils into our wonderful classroom last term. The pupils have demonstrated excellent kindness, caring attitudes and social skills to help our new children settle in. We have a very busy term coming up with lots more to learn and experience before our move to Primary 4 and are very excited to continue our learning.
Literacy
Everyone is continuing to make great progress with their spelling and phonics skills. We are continuing to see excellent dictation results each week and have now started including challenge words to further our skills. Now that the weather is improving, we have been spending more time outside practising our spelling words using chalk and our favourite strategies.
The boys and girls have been demonstrating a great understanding of different phonemes. Over the session, we have been looking at joined, single and split phonemes, and have recently introduced Elkonin boxes. “We put sounds in our Elkonin boxes. An example is ‘monkey’ – m l o l n l k l ey. ‘Ey’ goes in the same box because it is a joined phoneme” – Mason.
Our fluency and expression when reading has greatly improved throughout the year. We know that different punctuation marks give us a better understanding of what we are reading, and that sometimes we must change our intonation to help us. We also enjoyed a trip to Fairhill Library, where we had the chance to explore different genres of books, and participate in a Bookbug song session. Both librarians commented on the excellent behaviour and engagement skills shown by our boys and girls – they represented Neilsland extremely well!
Fantastic progress has been made within our writing lessons. We are confident at using WOW words to make our writing interesting, setting our work correctly using paragraphs and self-assessing our spelling. Last term we learned how to set out instructions clearly and correctly. “You definitely need to have a title, a goal, materials and steps” – Isla. We had lots of fun making jam sandwiches, growing cress and making hot chocolate. “We wrote them in our jotters and we used bossy verbs and made sure our instructions were in the right order” – Mason. We have also enjoyed looking at different types of poetry. Acrostic and Cinquain poems have been our favourites so far. “Acrostic poems have the letters spelling out the word you are writing about down the side” – Ryan. “We wrote lots of Easter poems and they were really fun to write” – Courtney.
Maths
During Term 3, we practised using different coins, telling the time, solving equations and plotting grid references. We are also getting quicker and quicker at recalling multiplication facts, especially the four times table. During Term 3, we spent lots of time learning about inverse operations, and used our multiplication facts to check our answers to division questions and vice versa. “I like using my multiplication facts to check my division work. I feel like I’ve improved with my times tables because I can do them faster now” – Kayden.
We have also been developing our data handling skills with Miss Hutton. Everyone has collected data and correctly displayed it in a variety of ways. Some of the data we have collected so far includes our eye colours, favourite animals and favourite chocolate bars. “We’ve learned about bar graphs, line graphs and tally charts” – Olivia. The sunnier weather has allowed us to make use of our playground space. “We counted sweeties and went outside to make our own frequency tables with chalk” – Devon.
Expressive Arts
The dance/drama, art and music workshops were very popular with the children. Each session provided opportunities for the children to explore colour mixing, musical instruments and different ways to use voice and expression. “I liked using the paint. We did finger painting” – Kyran. Ollie loved participating in the music sessions, and said, “We shook a tambourine and maracas and listened out for the beats”.
STEM
We have continued with our Forces topic investigating air friction and measuring force using a Newton Balance. Recently we have explored magnetism. The whole school also took part in a STEM Day where the children participated in many exciting activities! Alaina said, “I liked the bridge building because it was fun and we needed to use our imagination”. ‘I liked the chromatography because we got to find out all the colours in black” – Olivia.
IDL
We looked at lots of different famous Scots in great depth last term, using our ICT skills to undertake both independent and partner research to learn interesting facts. “I enjoyed when we researched the famous Scots on iPads. I found out that William Wallace died in 1305 in Smithfield in London” – James. “I learned that Alexander Fleming invented penicillin which is a medicine that helped people” – Alaina. All the information we learned will be shared with the class when we present our solo talks. “I have made a PowerPoint to show the class for my solo talk. My solo talk is on Chris Hoy because he is a champion cyclist” – Isla.
This term, we will begin our ‘Egyptians’ topic. We have discussed specific aspects that we would like to learn about. Allen “would like to learn about the pharaohs”, and Chester said, ““I would like to learn about pyramids and how they were built”. Some of the other things we will be learning about include hieroglyphic patterns, Egyptian jewellery and clothing, the River Nile and mummification. We are excited to invite all Primary 3 parents and carers to come and find out what we have learned at our Egyptians assembly on the 12th of May. We also have a very exciting school trip planned in June, when we will visit the Ancient Egypt exhibition within Kelvingrove Museum. “I’m quite excited about our trip because I would quite like to see what it’s like inside one of the coffins” – Evan. We will take lots of pictures for the school Twitter to show you what we get up to!
