Primary 4 2025/26
October
Welcome to our first Primary 4 blog post! We are very excited to share our learning, fun and P4 adventures so far.
Literacy
Spelling
We have been working exceptionally hard across all areas of literacy – spelling, reading, writing, grammar, handwriting and talking and listening. Now that we are in Primary 4, our spelling words are becoming more and more challenging. We have been learning tricky phonemes and can show that we understand them by diacritically marking them.
“We do rainbow writing, uppercase and robot writing to help us practise our spelling words.” Jessica D
“Miss May reads out our words and sentences during dictation and we have to spell them the right way.” Abigail
Reading
Our class novel for this term, Cliffhanger by Jacqueline Wilson, has been a big favourite in the class. As well as reading in our groups every day, we have also been developing our application of reading strategies.
“We read Cliffhanger and we answered questions, made predictions and visualised the characters and setting.” Jessica C
Writing
The writing genres we have practised this term are recount and description. We have worked on descriptive language, punctuation and structure.
“We created our own superheroes in our heads and then we described what they looked like and what they did in our jotters.” Sahan
“My superhero could fly really high and had pink hair.” Billie
As well as PM writing, we have also transferred our descriptive language knowledge to poetry. We were able to identify similes in different poems and, after an autumn walk around the playground, we created our own – they turned out brilliantly!
“We wrote autumn poems and we used similes and adjectives to describe what we could hear, see, touch, smell and taste.” Alana
Maths
Our maths topics so far have included place value, estimating and rounding and the four operations, which are addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. We are continuing to use fluid groupings, listening to Miss May carefully and then deciding what level we can challenge ourselves with.
“We practised our times tables in our heads and then using written strategies as well. Platinum did all of the times tables.” Ashton
“We did column addition and had to add the numbers from the top to the numbers to the bottom. If an answer in a column is more than nine, we have to carry it over to the next column.” Adeline
“I used Numicon to help me sometimes. I like how we can put the pieces together and count them to help with adding.” Lilly
During Maths Week, we participated in lots of outdoor activities. We made 2D shapes and 3D objects using natural materials, created Venn diagrams and tallied up how many different insects we could find.
Our topics next term include money, time, fractions and patterns and relationships. We have lots of visual resources ready to help us, including play money, miniature clocks and resources we can split into different pieces. We all agreed that using resources like this makes doing our work easier.
HWB
Mrs Brock teaches us Health and Wellbeing on Monday afternoons. We have been looking at different ways to keep our bodies healthy. We know that we need exercise and a balanced diet, smoking can cause damage to our lungs and that it is important that we look after our teeth and personal hygiene.
All of us contributed to creating our Class Charter, discussing what makes a good pupil and teacher and how we can be a good friend.
STEM
Friday mornings are our time with Mr Connor in the STEM lab – we always have so much fun and come back to class with lots of interesting facts that we’ve learned. Mr Connor has been teaching us about senses and showed us a really cool experiment using water.
“We put one hand in cold water and one hand in warm water.” Joshua
“After that, we ran and put both hands in the sink. I felt like one hand was cold and one was warm.” Lexi
“It was strange because the water in the sink was the same temperature. My brain was very confused.” Jessica C
Check out our reactions here…
As well as science experiments, Mr Connor has also been showing us how to code using the chromebooks.
“I liked when you had to tell your character what to do and give it directions. I could make mine move.” Kaiden
“I like using the chromebooks.” Cameron
Expressive Arts
Our class has been lucky enough to take part in a musical theatre workshop. We have been learning a song and dance from a classic Christmas film that we all know and love… the Grinch! You can come and see our amazing performance at the Christmas show.
“We’ve been learning the Grinch song. We sing and one of the teachers plays the piano for us.” Lillie Mae
“I like the dance because it’s got loads of different actions and moves.” Amelia
IDL
Our topic this term has been the Romans. Before starting, we created a KWL grid to see which areas of this topic we were interested in learning about the most.
We used the chromebooks to undertake group research, using our information to complete interesting fact files, posters and detailed descriptive pieces of writing.
“We learned about what school was like for children. Instead of paper, they had wax and used a bit of metal to scrape what they were writing. Only some girls were allowed to go to school.” Euan
“We researched what kind of food they ate. Rich Romans ate octopus and peacocks!” Ebony
Pupil Leadership
Even though we have only been in Primary 4 for one term so far, lots of us are enjoying our new leadership roles within the school. Our Pupil Council members, Abigail and Kaiden, attend important meetings with Mrs Marnie and other members in the school to discuss ways to make our school even better.
“I had to tell the class what Mrs Marnie had talked about during our meeting.” Kaiden
Our Reading Champions, Alana, Jessica and Reuben, have been attending meetings with Mrs Brock to help plan lots of fun activities to help encourage everyone to read for pleasure.
“We are planning reading assemblies and different classes to do. It’s top secret until Scottish Book Week!” Jessica C
