Hello everyone and welcome to the first P4-5 blog of the year. We’ll let you know a little bit about what we’ve been doing and what’s coming up in the near future.
Numeracy
We’ve been pushing on with our mental maths and learning new skills. Here’s some examples of what we’ve been up to:
“We’ve been learning about fractions – using pizzas has been really helpful” – Alaina
“In division we’ve been learning how to do bus stop sums. They’re really useful if you’re stuck on tricky division” – Jacob P
“With Ms Smail we did measurement – we used our rulers to measure different things around the classroom” – Lailah
“With Mrs Brock we learned about area – it’s all to do with counting squares” – Olivia
“Every Friday we do a times tables sheet – if you beat it in under 3 minutes you get to do an even more tricky sheet” – Noah
“We’ve been learning time with Mrs White – we went on the Chromebooks to play time games” – Alexa.
“We’ve also been learning chimney sums for adding, taking away and multiplying – there’s so much to do!” – Peyton
We’ve now pretty-much covered everything we’re set to do in this year (once). Our ethos in maths is revisiting, revising and reinforcing so that by the time the pupils hit June they’re really confident and ready to move on.
Literacy
Writing
Recently we’ve been writing Halloween stories. We worked really hard to add detail and make our stories atmospheric. Here’s a good example below from Heidi
We also had a visit from a Scottish author, Stuart Reid who presented a fun-filled assembly and encouraged us to get writing our own stories.
Here are some other things we’ve been covering:
“We’ve been improving our joined-up handwriting with Mrs White and now our writing is beautiful :-)” – Alexa
“We’ve just started summarising with Mr Connor which is when you take a long piece of writing and take out what is important” – Lailah
“We also learned how to make story planners so that we don’t get lost when we write our stories” – Noah
Reading
“The story we’ve been reading is ‘The Invisible Boy’ – We found out about Hilda Hardbottom and the fact that she is extremely mean” – Caleb.
“Mrs Kelly came in and heard us reading” – Devon.
We’ll soon be moving onto a new book. This time it’s going to be fact-based – ‘The Search for Tutankhamun‘. It’ll be fun finding out about Howard Carter and his quest to find the tomb.
Topic
We learned all about Pompeii which was a place in Italy until it got destroyed by a Volcano – Mt Vesuvius.
We made our own volcanoes by putting paper around some 2L bottles and then decorating them with paint and little houses. This link shows what happened to the green group’s volcano recently. It’s quite dramatic!
Soon we will be making our own tornados using 2 bottles and sticky tape – you tip the bottle over and spin it around to make the tornado.
We made a cool display picture for our classroom wall with lots of rocks and lava detail. Alexa made lots of little people who were screaming in the windows – lovely!
PE
In PE we’ve been doing lots of fitness which involves different stations such as: running up and down the hall, stepping up and down on benches, gymnastics, hula-hooping, the maze game, obstacle courses, basketball timed star jumps. The pupils learned to keep trying even though things got tough. Resilience is a great skill to have.
In the run up to Christmas we’re going to be doing some badminton – so get practising at home!
For outdoor PE we played various outdoor games. We have also been practising ball skills like how many claps can you do before you catch the ball.
For outdoor learning we have just started the John Muir Discovery Award. This is designed to get the pupils to appreciate our outdoor space – to explore it, conserve it and understand it. We’ll be covering this until Easter when we’ll hopefully complete the award.
Assembly
Our assembly is coming soon – it’s going to be all about natural disasters (it’s on the 23rd of November) – we don’t want to give too much away but it will involve: seismographs, songs, reporters, the news, and charities – and that’s all we’re going to tell you. We’d love to see you there but if you can’t make it we’ll be making a recording for YouTube.
Skills Workshops
“In our skills workshops we did music with Mrs Kennedy – we even made up our own songs!” – Lailah.
Then with Mrs White we did art – replicating works by Claude Monet, and van Gogh. We plan to sell them at Sotheby’s at a later date.
