P3/4 Blog –  April 2024

Literacy

During reading lessons, we have been developing our understanding and application of different reading strategies. To do this, we used our class novel, Flat Stanley. We were able to make connections between the book and our own personal experiences.

“I went to Spain on a plane just like Stanley did. I think Stanley would have been as bored on the plane as I was.” – Lucy

Our non-fiction text, An Encyclopedia of Tudor Medicine, provided us with lots of information about diseases, injuries, medical tools and medicines from long ago. The encyclopedias contained contents pages, index pages, diagrams and glossaries.

   

“An encyclopedia is a book (usually heavy!) that gives you lots of information about something.” – Eva S

“I found out that the Tudors used swords to amputate legs and herbs to cure illnesses.” – Leo

“The index page told us what page the thing we were looking for was on. The words are in alphabetical order. When you found the page, you saw lots of information and diagrams.” – Chester

Our new novel for term 4, Emily’s Surprising Voyage, looks at adventure and friendship. We have used the title, front cover and blurb to make predictions on what might happen. Once we have finished the book, we will revisit our predictions and see how close we were.

“I’m excited to find out what happens when she gets to Australia. I think she might go on an adventure, or the ship might sink and she will be stranded.” – Enja

“They might get halfway to Australia and something happens. The blurb gave me a clue because it mentions adventures.” – Morris

During term 3, we focused on procedural and exposition writing.

“We’ve been learning how to write instructions. Instructions are important because you need to know how to build and make things in real life.” – Ava

   

Instructions need to include a title, a goal, a list of materials and steps written in chronological order. We enjoyed writing instructions on how to plant strawberry and tomato seeds, how to make the best hot chocolate and how to make a magical potion. To make our steps clear, we began each one with an imperative verb. Some of our favourite examples of imperative verbs included stir, mix, sprinkle, scatter, plop and dunk.

“Instead of saying ‘Please put something into the container’, you have to be as bossy as you can be.” – Daniel

“My group planted tomato seeds. It was fun.” – Eva E

   

During our exposition writing lessons, we argued whether we should have homework, why everyone should visit the David Livingstone Centre and something that would improve the school. We used lots of persuasive language to make our writing effective.

“’As you can see’, ‘I am certain that’ and ‘I am sure that’ are good examples because they make you sound confident with your idea and then the reader will be persuaded to listen.” – Sophia

To make our writing even better, we have been learning about onomatopoeia, which are words that sound like the word they are describing. We discussed our favourites and made posters to help us remember them. We even found some examples in our class library books!

   

Maths

Last term, we worked on developing our addition and subtraction strategies. Our Number Talks strategies have helped us become quicker with our mental maths. We have also been practising carrying and exchanging digits when adding and subtracting big numbers. Once we had a good understanding of the strategies, we were able to apply them to even trickier numbers!

   

“I did some 5-digit adding challenges. If your column goes over 9, you have to carry it to the next column.” – Ollie

     

Rulers, metre sticks, trundle wheels, scales and jugs were some of the tools we used when looking at measurement. We estimated and compared the weight and length of different objects in our classroom.

“I liked using the scales best because you can put lots of different things on the tray and see which one is the heaviest.” – Sionainn

     

Another one of our maths topics last term was data handling with Mrs Marnie. We looked at lots of different ways to display data. We even managed to gather some of our own data and analyse the results.

“With our graphs we found out P3/4s favourite fruit and type of Easter egg. We had to come up with our own questions to find information from the graph.” – Sophia

Equations were one of our favourite maths topics last term. We now know that each equation has an equals sign in the middle and the expressions on either side have to be exactly the same.

“We solved equations where we had a shape instead of a number. We used adding, subtracting, dividing and our times tables to work out how much the shape was worth.” – Max

HWB

Badminton has proved to be one of our favourite sports. Every Monday afternoon, we went to the gym hall and warmed up before our session. Mrs Lafferty put out the nets and we began!

“We used a badminton racquet and a shuttlecock.” – Isla

“If you keep hitting the shuttlecock back and forward to your opponent it’s called a rally.” – Ava

Our whole class has continued to show great sportsmanship and enthusiasm during outdoor PE. We have been able to follow instructions, work as a team and demonstrate how to be both a good winner and loser.

“It’s important we know how to be a good loser because it’s not the end of the world if we don’t win a game.” – Joy

“It’s more important that you have fun and try your best in gym.” – Sophia

Every Monday afternoon, we learned about food safety. We know how important it is to use clean hands when preparing food and taking steps to avoid cross-contamination.

“Mrs Lafferty has been teaching us how to prepare food safely. You need to keep raw chicken and cooked chicken off the same chopping board.” – Calum

“If you mix raw and cooked chicken you might get a bug.” – Leah

STEM

“We worked together in our teams to make a protector for a teacake. We dropped our inventions off the stage and checked which ones broke and which ones stayed whole.” – Courtney

     

Every group showed excellent collaborative teamwork and problem-solving skills. Lots of our teacakes managed to survive the drop – our favourite part was eating them afterwards!

     

We have enjoyed becoming mini scientists during our lessons with Mrs Marnie. Our topic was electricity and forces, and we managed to build our own circuits successfully using switches, wires, batteries, lightbulbs and crocodile clips.

“When we attached our circuit together the lightbulb turned on.” – Holly

During term 4, we will begin our STEM skills-based workshops. We will have the chance to work with different materials, learn needlework skills and create our very own class Google Site.

“I’m excited to work together. I am excited to use lots of different materials to solve problems.” – Jai

IDL

Our David Livingstone topic was thoroughly enjoyed by everyone.

“We worked in partners to research lots of different things about David’s life. I learned that he was bitten by a lion and he had to fix it himself because he was the only medic in his team.” – Eva S

“I loved the David Livingstone Centre because we got to see lots of things in real life and not just on the laptop.” – Leo

“The lion was big and scary.” – Taku

     

During our class trip to the David Livingstone Centre, we saw lots of animal bones and skins, a life-size model of the lion that attacked him and visited his real house that he lived in when he was a child. We couldn’t believe the differences between his house and our own!

“There was only one room for the whole family. They had two irons that his mum would heat up on the fire.” – Daniel

We can’t wait to begin our last topic of Primary 3/4, The Romans!

Literacy

One thing we really improved on last term was using dictionaries. We know that as well as using them to check the spelling of words, they also tell us the definitions. This has helped us make more sense of trickier pieces of text we have been reading, and we have been practising reading around the tricky word to give us context clues before we check our dictionaries.

“We used our dictionary to find tricky words in our book. We guessed what they meant and then we found the actual meanings in our dictionaries.” – Ollie

  

Last term, we focused on informative, descriptive and narrative pieces of writing. We are becoming more used to continuously self- and peer-assessing our work to ensure we use interesting vocabulary and openers, paragraphs and correct punctuation. We also practised setting out letters by writing our letters to Santa. Look at this fantastic structure!

   

“A narrative has a title, an orientation, a problem and a resolution. We watched different clips and then we wrote about them.” – Mason

   

We showed responsibility and independence in our learning by each choosing an animal to research for our information reports. A large variety were chosen, ranging from huge killer whales to tiny caterpillars. We used the Chromebooks to help us find out what our animals looked like, what they did and where you could find them.

Another way we have been up-levelling our pieces of writing is by using similes. We can now confidently identify them in pieces of text as well as create our own. Everyone came up with some excellent examples, which included being as small as an ant, as sharp as a knife and even as noisy as Primary 3/4!

“A simile is where you compare two different things, like being as tall as a giraffe.” – Joy

“You can describe the temperature of someone by saying they are as hot as a desert or as cold as an iceberg.” – Leo

   

Not only are we growing in confidence and independence with our writing, our reading fluency and comprehension using a variety of texts has also continued to improve. As well as exploring different fictional texts, we also spent time learning about contents and index pages, bibliographies and sub-headings. Our non-fiction text last term, ‘Making the Past into Presents’ by Jo Brooker, was particularly interesting because we could relate it to our Egyptians topic last year – we remembered lots of facts!

Our next non-fiction focus text will be ‘An Encyclopedia of Tudor Medicine’ by Jane Penrose.

Maths

This term, we have been working with tricky fractions – some of us even moved on to comparing simple equivalent fractions! We all agreed that we would be happy that, if we had a chocolate bar, we could eat one half ourselves and share two quarters with a friend. Although they are different fractions, we would both end up with exactly the same amount of chocolate.

   

Our fraction knowledge came in very handy a couple of weeks later, as we were able to link it to telling the time. We know that an hour is made up of sixty minutes, so half an hour must be thirty minutes and a quarter of an hour must be fifteen minutes. Some of us have been looking at durations of time, converting between analogue and digital times, as well as our daily routines.

   

“We have been learning about quarter to and quarter past. Our lunchtime is half past twelve until quarter to one.” – Morris

   

We took our learning even further by using our knowledge of duration to create our own ‘Dream Day at School’ timetables. We picked some of our favourite curricular areas and organised them between 9am-3pm, being careful not to miss out break or lunchtime!

Health and Wellbeing

Every Monday afternoon, Mrs Lafferty takes us for Health and Wellbeing lessons. We have been learning the rules of hockey and enjoy competing against each other to try and get the puck through the goals. As well as PE, we are also looking at safe food preparation practice using healthy ingredients – we have turned into brilliant chefs!

“We made turkey salad wraps with Mrs Lafferty. We practised chopping carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes. We used a chopping board so we didn’t make a mess.” – Enja

“The wraps tasted fabulous.” – Eva E

“We washed our hands before and after we made our wraps so we didn’t get any germs.” – Jai

STEM

With Mrs Marnie, we have been learning how to keep safe around electrical items. Although electricity is amazing and facilitates our use of everyday items, there are some dangers that we must be aware of. We played a game on the CTouch where we explored a house and identified all of the possible hazards – now we know what to be careful of in our own houses.

“You need to keep glasses of water away from electrical things in case they spill and cause an electric shock.” – Sionainn

“Make sure you have dry hands before you touch light switches.” – Jai

IDL

Our weekly Chromebook slot has allowed us to develop our technology skills as well as practising safe and responsible internet use. We have used trusted sources to find out lots of information for our topics.

   

We are now beginning our new topic from this term, which is David Livingstone. We have already found out lots of interesting facts about him, including that his heart and body are buried separately, he was attacked by a lion and he discovered and named a waterfall in Africa. Our technology skills will be even further enhanced when we create PowerPoint presentations to support us during our solo talks.

Expressive Arts

As part of our Expressive Arts rotation workshops, we spent time with Mrs Gilroy developing our dance and drama skills. There were lots of opportunities for us to showcase our talents, including games, songs and performances.

“We did a game where we acted like different objects. The game was amazing because some of us got to be dinosaurs.” – Jacob

“I felt confident when we performed because it was only in front of the boys and girls in our class.” – Chester

As well as performing in front of the class during these sessions, we also had another very important performance – our Christmas shows! The Primary 3 children had very important narrator lines in the nativity, It’s a Party, whereas the Primary 4 pupils entertained everyone with ‘A Night at the Movies’. We practised our songs in class and loved showing off our beautiful voices to our parents and carers.

“Our Christmas show was about lots of different movies. My favourite one was ‘Home Alone’ but I had a speaking part in the ‘Love Actually’ scene.” – Isla

“I was in the choir that sang ‘Silent Night’. I felt happy because my mum saw me performing on the stage.” – Ollie

Outdoor Learning

Tuesday afternoons are one of our favourite times of the week, as we get to go ‘up the back bit’ to explore natural materials in relation to what we are learning about in maths. We work in team.

Each team was challenged to create a number line from 0-1 using natural materials – most of us picked long sticks! Miss May called out a fraction and, using stones, we had to estimate where the fractions would go on our number line.

As well as using this area for maths, we have also thoroughly enjoyed participating in orienteering and problem solving challenges.

“I feel very free because it’s very big and I get to explore places. I love how adventurous it feels when you go through the tunnels. It is amazing!” – Lucy

   

Although we can’t believe we are already halfway through the school year, we are very excited for our next term in Primary 3/4, especially to learn more about our new David Livingstone topic and to practise our food preparation skills. Some other aspects of learning we will be focusing on are procedural writing, data analysis and using technology to create PowerPoint presentations.

Literacy

Now that we are Primary 3/4, our phonemes and common words are becoming more complex. Miss May knows that we have been practising our words at home and in class because we get good dictation results every Friday. If there are any that we misspell, we make sure we spend extra time practising them afterwards.

“Primary 3/4 have been doing rainbow, robot and bubble writing when we are practising spelling words.” – Sionainn

   

In class, we are continuing to develop different styles of writing, including recounts, descriptions and information reports. We are learning to write in detailed paragraphs, use appropriate punctuation and always make sure we include the four components in each piece of writing. Descriptions are pieces of writing about a living or non-living thing.

“We have written descriptions on a family member, a friend and the main character from our class novel.” – Mason

“A description needs to have a title, an introduction, characteristics and an evaluation.” – Isla

   

Pupil assessment is very important when writing, so we have been engaging in lots of peer- and self-assessment activities and creating targets for ourselves. Developing our thesaurus skills has allowed us to find interesting synonyms to give more detailed descriptions.

“A synonym is a different word that means the same thing. For example, some synonyms for sad might be devastated, emotional, heartbroken or upset.” – Ava

     

Our class novel was ‘The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark’. Lots of time has been spent practising our reading strategies, such as scanning, predicting, visualising and summarising. Summarising is where we talk about the most important parts of a text.

“Our book was about a baby barn owl who lived with his parents. Even though he was a night bird, he was afraid of the dark. He met lots of characters who convinced him that dark is exciting, wonderful and kind.” – Ollie

“I enjoyed visualising the characters and the field where Plop lived.” – Holly

“We looked for descriptive words to help us visualise. There were lots of adjectives to help describe Plop, like cuddly, enormous, knackety and bright.” – Calum

“We have been doing scanning. You look for key words and numbers. You read round about the words and you can find out facts.” – Ava

     

We will be looking at a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts during Term 2. Our new class novel will be ‘Cliffhanger’ by Jacqueline Wilson, and our non-fiction text will be ‘Making the Past into Presents’.

“I am excited to be in a whole new world when we start our new book. I think Tim will get stuck on the cliff when he is abseiling and will need to get rescued.” – Lucy

 

Maths

Our classroom has been very busy during maths lessons, where we have been consolidating and expanding on Number Talks strategies, working with larger numbers and linking our learning to the world of work. Some good examples of this are measuring, money and fractions.

“You need to know about budgets because when you’re older you need to pay your bills and taxes.” – Eva S

“You need to know how to measure if you are fitting a carpet. If you measure it wrong, it might be too big or small for the room.” – Jai

Our use of mathematical language has extended, and we have been able to talk through the tricky strategies we have been using in class. Some of us have even been carrying and exchanging through columns when adding, subtracting and multiplying.

 

We have recently started looking at fractions, and know the correct terminology and notation when discussing and recording fractions. Some of us have started to compare simple equivalent fractions, and have lots of visual resources to help us do this.

   

Health and Wellbeing

During our HWB lessons, we have been learning about the dangers of smoking and vaping.

“People think that vaping is better because they don’t have as much nicotine as cigarettes, but it is still really dangerous and it still affects your brain, heart and lungs.” – Eva S

At the start of the year, we co-created our Class Charter with Miss May. We engaged in detailed discussion about our rights and responsibilities, and all signed our charter using our handprints.

“We have the right to be listened to and to reach our full potential. If we have a goal, we have the right to be supported in school to reach them.” – Evan

 

Expressive Arts

During our Expressive Arts workshops, we looked at a special artist from the 1800’s called Wessily Kandinsky, a pioneer of abstract painting. He was very different to other artists we looked at, and we enjoyed noting the similarities and differences in their work. We learned that Wessily Kandinsky believed that colours had a soul and could portray how the artist was feeling.

“He was from Russia and he did abstract art. Instead of painting people or objects, he used shapes and colours.” – Chester

“The colours he used were pretty. We did our own circle paintings.” – Holly

“I liked mixing the colours.” – Taku

 

STEM

With Miss Smail, we learned lots about the difference between living and non-living things. We went on a hunt outside for different things. Some of the living things we found were berries, twigs, leaves and grass. Stones, metal gates, the bike shed and bins went into the non-living category.

“I liked finding the living things because I love nature. Some of my favourite living things are squirrels, birds, hedgehogs and ants.” – Morris

 

 

Outdoor Learning

One of our favourite places to explore is ‘up the back bit’ – there are lots of exciting dens and insects to investigate. We sourced a range of natural materials to make a nest fit for Plop, the main character in our class novel. Look at our amazing designs!

   

 

We have had such a busy term and have developed our skills and knowledge across the whole curriculum – Miss May and Mrs Barnes are extremely proud of us all! We can’t wait for the exciting things coming up in term 2, particularly our Christmas show and Nativity.