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.