Welcome everyone to our new class blog.  We are delighted to share our learning from term 2 and some of the learning we will be doing in term3.

Literacy

In term 2, we started reading The Boy at the Back of the Class by Onjali Q Rauf and we really enjoyed it. We are continuing with this book in term 3, before we start a non-fiction text. Through our daily literacy lessons in term 2, we have covered inference, summarising, paraphrasing, metalinguistics and visualisation, among other strategies!

In writing, we focused on narrative writing. We also learnt about poetry and started to look at recount writing. For narrative writing, we created interesting Halloween and Christmas stories, and we also created a story about what we do if we could go back in time! For poetry, we created acrostic poems for Bonfire Night and calligram poems for Christmas all about Christmas trees. We wrote a recount on the Christmas Show and when we came back to school, we wrote a recount about our favourite moments from our Christmas Break. We have been working extremely hard to use imagery in our writing to up-level our writing and make it as detailed and as interesting as we can.

On Halloween, we had a whole school reading river to celebrate being a Gold Reading School which we loved.

We love having the opportunity to read for pleasure during the school day. We also participated in a December Reading Challenge where we were able to come to school in our cosy clothes or pyjamas, do some cosy reading in front of a fire (on YouTube!) and read upside on our chairs!

We loved participating in activities during Scottish Book Week too! We read in an unusual place, read a book called ‘Neeps and Tatties’ which is written in Scots and then made information posters about what makes Scotland unique. We then presented our posters at assembly for the whole school to see. We also had a visit from a fantastic author, Stuart Reid. There was a whole school assembly where Stuart talked a lot about his books, but we were incredibly lucky because we got to experience a creative writing workshop with Stuart! He gave us lots of tips on how to make our writing more interesting and Miss McKinstry is so proud of how hard we have worked to take on board Stuart’s advice!

‘I have enjoyed reading TBATBOTC so far because it is an interesting book with ups and downs in it. I was excited to start reading it again in term 3.’ – Jacob

‘I liked doing narratives in writing this term because I like to use my imagination. I also liked doing poetry because I learnt how to use similes in my writing more.’ – Haylie

‘In the December reading challenge, we got to read a book on our chair but upside down and we put a cosy fire on the smartboard. I liked this because it was relaxing.’ – Charley

‘I liked the cosy pyjama day because it was really warm, and it felt really good.’ – Arfa

‘I learnt how to use alliteration in my poetry in term 2.’ – Harrison H

In term 2, we continued to work on our handwriting.  We learned how to join our letters and to label diagrams correctly.  

“I like the animal noises to start our handwriting and to finish it.  It is very funny,” – Lewis.  

“I like copying out the poems to improve my presentation,” – Haylie. 

We will continue to work on our handwriting this term, by trying to increase our writing speed.  

Numeracy

In term 2, we covered place value, estimation and rounding, time, negative numbers, the written method of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and maths in the real world.

We continued to develop our mental strategies that we can use when completing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division questions. We were consolidating our knowledge of strategies like compensating, partitioning, counting on/number lines and friendly numbers.

We started to use a new resource in class called Plickr cards. We love when Miss McKinstry creates a quiz for us, and we can test our knowledge. We think its great that the Plickr cards log our score so we can track our progress and see how much we have learnt!

We used the Chromebooks in maths to create our own task sheets for our peers which helped us to consolidate our learning as we had to apply our knowledge in a different way. We also used the Chromebooks to research different jobs through My World of Work where we were able to see the different jobs that require a maths qualification or that use maths day-to-day.

‘I liked learning about maths in the real world on the Chromebooks because I learnt that some jobs use maths that I didn’t realise.’ – Sophie A

‘I liked when we were learning about time, and we got small clocks out and had to draw on the time that Miss McKinstry said.’ – Iona

‘I like our number talks sessions when we learn different mental strategies. I like doing it on a whiteboard and writing down my strategies for the question because it helps me understand more.’ – Kaiyah.

In numeracy with Mrs Marnie, we learned about parallel, perpendicular, and diagonal lines.  We identified these different lines in the outside world. We also learned about the properties of different types of shapes. In fractions work, we learned to covert mixed number fractions to improper fractions. Lastly, we learned about different types of triangles and we found out a new type of triangle – scalene.  

Health and Wellbeing

For outdoor P.E. in term 2, we continued with team games and started to learn about fitness. We played games like dodgeball which helped us learn about spatial awareness, good sportsmanship and how to effectively communicate in a team, while also developing our hand-eye coordination and balance. We also participated in races which helped us monitor our fitness levels and further develop our team-work skills.

We had a visit from the Fire Service in November where we learnt all about firework safety for Bonfire Night. We learnt how to be safe around fireworks and sparklers, found out how far away we must stand from sparklers and fireworks and even got a homework task from the firefighters!

For Anti-Bullying Week, we learnt all about cyber-bullying and being safe online. We were able to tell Miss McKinstry so much about how to be safe online, she was very impressed. We know about the dangers of being online, how to keep ourselves safe and who to tell if we think we or someone we know is in danger. We created eye-catching anti-bullying posters with our knowledge about cyber-bullying.

We had the opportunity to attend a Guide Dogs assembly which was arranged by Miss May and P3/4. It was so interesting to hear all about the work guide dogs do and how they support their owner. We asked fabulous questions and learnt so much. We now know that we should not pay attention to guide dogs when they are on duty as this can be very dangerous for the owner.

‘I enjoyed learning about cyber-bullying and making the poster because drawing really calms me down and I think bullying is an important thing we should learn about.’ – Ross

‘I learnt a lot from the fire service assembly.’ – Akillez

Topic

In term 2, we finished our Titanic topic. We loved learning about the ship itself, the people on board and the tragic incident that happened. We worked in groups to make a wall display for our classroom with all the main events from the time. We made a fantastic display for our wall which Miss McKinstry was so proud of.

We had a moral debate about the first-, second- and third-class passengers who were on board the ship and whether or not we thought it was fair that there was an order to get off the boat when it started to sink. We had great ideas and opinions and we shared them with our peers in a respectful way. Through our topic we looked at buoyancy which is an object’s tendency to float in in liquid. For our topic, we were looking at ship’s and their ability to float in water. We then used our knowledge to determine how the Titanic sank after hitting the iceberg. We made our own mini ships with Play-doh and tested them in a bucket of water. We then added marbles to them to see how many marbles our Play-doh ships could hold. The winning boat held 8 marbles before sinking to the bottom! We have now started our Scotland topic which is on Scottish Artists and we can’t wait to find out more about them and make some of our own art work!

‘I liked learning about the Titanic because it was really fascinating. It was interesting how all the passengers were treated differently depending on how much money they had.’ – Cairo

‘I liked what we did with the Titanic timeline. We had titanic information into our jotter in the correct order and then we worked in groups to make a large titanic timeline for our topic wall.’ – Tyshawny

‘I liked making a play-doh boat and looking at what objects are buoyant and not.’ – Leland

Expressive Arts

For Expressive Arts in term 2, we had our final skills-based workshop. We had a music workshop with Mrs Kennedy where we explored music and emotions. We gained so much knowledge from these lessons and developed skills for learning, work and life.

We made some beautiful Christmas art in term 2. We made Christmas Wreath art work which we made using oil pastels. We also made Winter Wonderland Windows which were inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’. We developed our use of line, sketching and shading in our art lessons.

We participated in social dancing practice to help us learn our dance for the Christmas party. We worked hard to learn the routine and we were fabulous on the day of our party and had lots of fun with our peers!

We performed in our fantastic Christmas show performance, ‘A Night at the Movies’. We had acting, singing and dancing in our show and we all had such an important part to play in bringing the show together. We put in a lot of effort to make the show the best it could be and our teachers were extremely proud of us. We loved showing off our expressive arts skills to the families and friends of Neilsland.

‘I liked doing the Winter Wonderland Windows because it was nice and relaxing and I liked using paint.’ – Harrison F

‘I liked the Christmas Show because it helped me develop my confidence on stage.’ – Ellie-Mae

‘I liked the Christmas Show because I discovered a talent of drama and my auntie said that if I keep it up, I might be able to perform at pantomimes.’ – Lewis

Science 

In term 2, we learned about bio-diversity in Science. We looked at different leaves and the patterns on them and we used a key to identify various types of leaves. Near to Christmas, we collected sticks, and we made Christmas stars.  This also helped use with our tying skills. Some of us created a massive star.

Our new Science topic in term 3 is electricity.  So far, we have learned about the dangers of electricity in our houses by identified dangers in each room and what we need to do to reduce them.  We will be learning about how different types of electricity are made in the next few weeks.  

 

John Muir 

We started work on the John Muir award. We have built dens and we had great fun tying the tarpaulin with string to create a waterproof ‘hide-out.’ 

“We pretended to have a tea party in our den,” – Ariana. 

“We visited our neighbour’s den,” – Arfa. 

Also, as part of the John Muir award, we made bird feeders and picture frames out of sticks. We also learned about ‘Common Puffer Mushrooms.’  We measured the size of trees using pencils.  This term, we will continue to work on the John Muir award and hopefully all of us will achieve this.