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.