Writing

This week we completed part three of our Alien adventure. We were able to compare the three pats and see how we have improved over the past few weeks. We are now more confident using writing planners and sentence stretchers to make our writing more interesting for the reader. We are definitely becoming more confident using adjectives and adverbs in our writing.

Maths

This week we have been revising what we know about division. It quickly became clear we had forgotten quite a bit and we are really beginning to understand what Mrs Little means when she says we need to learn to take our learning with us as we begin to make links between skills and concepts. We have been learning about the link between multiplication and division before we move on next week to setting out division sums.

Ranna – doing the multiplication and division was very challenging but fun

Kiara – division is just like times tables

Denholm – we were writing the times tables and doing the division opposite

Music

Following on from last week we learned about timing and pace. We used glockenspiel and sleigh bell instruments to play along with the song that we have been learning. We are finding it challenging as this requires good hand eye co-ordination whilst learning to play by ear before we progress to reading basic notation.

Suvi – I liked the activity where we listened to Blame it on the Boggie and we compared it to the song we learned last week

Teighan – I found it difficult to play the glockenspiel and not look at the screen for the notes

Have a great weekend!

Writing

In our writing this week Mrs Little was very happy to see that we are all using adjectives and adverbs correctly. We have writing about an alien who visits earth to learn about how we look after our planet. He asks us to go back to his planet to help him teach them how to reuse, reduce and recycle. This has given us plenty of opportunities to show how and when to use adjectives and adverbs correctly.

Maths

This week we have been learning about deconstructing two and three digit numbers to help us add mentally. First we started with the written method before moving onto calculating mentally. If we had to add 47+32 we know to add the tens numbers first then add the units and finally add them together.

Music

This week we have been learning to follow the pulse/beat of the music. First we listened to a piece of music then we discussed what type of music it was. Next we did some vocal warm ups then we sang the song. We also had fun doing actions to the song and because we did them in a set pattern this made it easier for us to identify the beat pattern.

Enterprise

We have been making posters and setting out rules for our Christmas enterprise at the school fayre tomorrow. We are working with P4b to raise money using fun games. We had to learn the rules for the three games and decide how much to charge. We also have been learning about giving change as we might need to do that!

HWB

This week with Mrs McKenzie we were learning about what to do if we get hurt or if someone else is hurt. We discussed who could help us and what the number 999 is used for. Lots of us thought it was just for the police so it’s good that we now know if ever we need to call an ambulance or the fire-brigade that’s a number we can use.

Have a great weekend!

Writing

After consolidating our learning about verbs we have been learning about adverbs.

Ranna – adverbs describe verbs

Euan – jumping (verb) quickly (adverb)

Alex – run (verb) slowly (adverb)

In our writing this week we have been focussing on using interesting adverbs to describe verbs. We have also been trying to start a sentence using an adverb.

Suvi – Quickly I ran away.

William – Slowly we started to take off.

Ranna – Silently I read my book.

Jason – Swiftly we ran across the road.

Maths

This week we have been learning about the decimal point and adding and subtracting money. As well as the written method we used coins to give change.

Megan – you have to remember to put in the decimal point

Lucas- you have to use the pound sign

Ranna – I think it’s easier to work out change using the coins

Expressive Arts

Over the next few weeks we will be taking a look at different artists

This week we were learning about the style of Vincent Van Gogh. We looked at some of his most famous paintings then had to recreate ‘Starry Night’ We discussed the picture before choosing the right colour of chalks we would need then we had to make sure we used the same flowing line style that Van Gogh used. Here are a couple of our pictures –

P.E.

This week in P.E. was fun as we have been learning about moving in flight using gymnastics moves. The ultimate goal was to be able to perform the move and land securely on two feet.

Alex – the ‘bravery test’ was part of the gymnastics and it was fun because we had to stand up and fall back onto a big squishy mat

Teighan- I liked it when we had to jump as far as we could and land securely then we had to place our bean bag down as a marker

Have a great weekend!

Writing

We wrote a recount of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots with Mrs Aitken this week. This time we worked without a writing planner which is tricky but we did very well! We had to write using time connectives to sequence the recount and make sure it was in chronological order.

Maths

We were learning to time an event using a stopwatch. It was good fun. We had to see what we could manage in 60 seconds. We had to estimate first then time the activity to see if our estimation was correct. Some of the activities were- hopping, writing our name, taking our jumper off and putting it back on, standing on one leg, try to build a tower of 30 cubes. We also did a fun activity to consolidate what we had learned about telling the time, we had to make the time on a paper clock and write the digital time then match it to times on the board.

Expressive Arts

We enjoyed making ‘autumn windows’ this week with Mrs Spence and Mrs Aitken. We folded our paper in half then cut a window in one half and painted an autumn picture on the other. When the paper was folded over it looked like a window. we really enjoyed this! Here is some of our work – oops we will load pictures another time as we are having difficulty uploading images..

Teamwork

We have been working hard to support each other in class. This week we did a really tricky activity to help us learn more about working together and supporting each other. We worked in pairs and had to use only one hand each to tie a shoelace, it was very good fun. Apologies again as we can’t upload pictures at this time.

Have a great October break everyone!

Literacy

We have been learning how to write a newspaper article this week. We used a writing planner to take notes before transferring the notes into a full article. We had to make sure we had the correct layout and an appropriate headline. Some of us included quotes in our article and Miss Drummond was impressed with our ‘have a go approach’ with punctuation we weren’t sure of.

Mia– I enjoy writing and I like trying new kinds of writing and different punctuation

Euan – I enjoyed doing the newspaper article and I think I had a good headline – Murder Mystery

Maths

We have been learning about the 24 hour clock this week. It really is extremely tricky because there are 24 hours in a day but that’s actually day and night. A.m. is the part between midnight and midday and pm is between midday and midnight but pm gets 12 hours added on but you don’t say 13 o’clock you say thirteen hundred hours …easy ! There is so much to remember however we are getting there.

Connor – I really enjoyed learning about the 24 hour clock.

Jason – It was tricky at first but I kept trying and that’s our growth mindset

LATC

We have been discussing the death of Lord Darnley and who the possible suspects are, and if he was indeed murdered.

Suvi – I thought that Elizabeth killed Darnley because she wanted Mary to marry one of her friends

William – I think the Earl of Bothwell killed Darnley because he knew everyone hated Darnley and killing him could mean that everyone would want him to be king for killing him

Sophia – I think Mary killed Darnley because she said she was at a masked ball but no one would know if she was there or not or she might have sent someone else in her place . She wanted Darnley dead because he was horrible to her.

Have a great weekend!!!

We can’t believe how fast our days are flying in. One minute it’s big start and the next it’s home time, that’s how it feels anyway!

Literacy

This week we have been learning to write a letter. We pretended to be the young Mary Queen of Scots, who had been sent to live in France, writing a letter home to her mother. We used a writing planner to help structure our work. Here is an example of the opening paragraph of  one of our letters-

Maths

We have been continuing to practice our recall of the times tables and feel we are getting better. On Monday we were consolidating what we have learned about rounding numbers. We have also been learning how to tell the time in 5 minute increments.

Mia – I am finding it easier to tell the time

Connor – I am enjoying rounding numbers

Suvi – I feel more confident with telling time

Campbell – I am enjoying rounding number to 100

LATC

We have been learning about the time when Mary Queen of Scots was sent to France to live so that she would be safe from King Henry.

Jason – the four Marys’ went with her but got sent to live with nuns

Denholm – in France she liked horse riding and she learned to play the harp

Euan – she played with her cousin Elizabeth and the king’s son Francis

Amy – she learned to play the Lute

Music

We had a great time learning rhythms…

Have a great weekend!

P5a Blog Entry – 13.5.16

English and Literacy

This week in English we were focussing on note-taking. We had to read a passage in pairs and then make notes under subheadings and did very well with this task! We now know that notes are used to record information quickly and use key words, rather than full sentences.

We then applied our knowledge of note-taking when we began to create a fact file of our own new species of animal. We selected appropriate subheadings: habitat, diet, description, and then took notes under these headings. These notes helped us when we began to design a leaflet on our new animal and had to write out our notes in sentences.

We are really enjoying the book that we are reading together in class: ‘Rat Burger’ by David Walliams. We get through about a chapter per day and love to make predictions about what might happen next in the story! We are also developing our summarising skills when Miss Brown asks us to explain what has happened in the story so far!

Pupil comments:

Alanna – I liked making the leaflets and drawing our new species on the front of the leaflet.

Ty – I am enjoying our class book, it’s full of suspense!

Maths and Numeracy

This week we have been making connections between our previous learning of fractions and our new topic of percentages. We now know that the whole amount of anything is recognised as 100%. We have been looking at equivalent percentages and working out fraction, percentage and decimal conversions.   Next week we will move onto finding the percentage of an amount using various strategies.

Pupil comments:

Sophie – I didn’t realise how many things used percentages, like in shops and when downloading music. It has been fun to learn about percentages!

Tom – I found maths quite tricky this week but I think it will get easier as I learn more.

LATC Topic

We have been continuing with our topic ‘What a wonderful world.’ This week we have been learning about food chains! We have been classifying animals into different groups: carnivores, herbivores and omnivores, and working out what animals eat and if this makes them predators or prey.

We have also been following the progress of our caterpillars which have now turned into chrysalids! We have moved them into a netted enclosure so that they can continue to grow and eventually turn into butterflies. We have found this process very exciting to monitor each day!

Pupil Comments:

Lucy – I didn’t know how caterpillars made their chrysalid themselves and enjoyed watching this happen.

Zoe – I found it interesting to learn about food chains and what animals eat other animals!

Have a great weekend everyone!

English and Literacy

This week in English we were working in pairs to complete a reading comprehension on a written passage.  We had to use lots of different skills to do this, including finding evidence in the passage to back up our opinions, and using our ‘context clues’ to work out the meaning of tricky words.

We have also been working on developing our writing skills and were writing about the long weekend.  We had to remember to include capital letters, punctuation and paragraphs.  Some of us used ‘wow’ words to impress Miss Brown!

Ty – I enjoyed the reading exercise, it was really fun but tricky as well.

Lucy – Doing our writing regularly is helping me to improve!

Maths and Numeracy

In Maths this week we have been working on fractions word problems, which we found a bit tricky at first but we were beginning to understand be the end of the week.  We can now simplify basic fractions and find a fraction of a quantity.   We are still enjoying the game ‘Exterminate’ and ask to play it in every maths lesson!

On Thursday we did something exciting in maths!  We had 5 different stations and 15 minutes at each station.   There was an ICT station with a game which required us to use our division strategies, and a fractions card game to improve our speed and accuracy.  There was also a ‘Mild, spicy, Hot’ station where we got to choose the difficulty of our fractions worksheet and give ourselves a challenge!

Rhia – I’ve really enjoyed division, I think the games are helping me with this.

Lennox – I’ve really enjoyed doing fractions, especially simplifying fractions!

LATC Topic

We have found our topic very interesting this week as we have been learning all about evolution and what animal characteristics help them best to survive! We have discussed the kinds of things that can lead to an animal’s extinction, such as other competition and changing climates.  We have identified the features of animals that help them to survive, adapt and reproduce within a natural environment.

As part of this week’s topic, we really enjoyed creating our brand new species of animal!  Firstly we designed our animal, thinking carefully about how it would look like and what colour it would be.  We then labelled our new species, identifying the features we had given it that would help it to survive in its habitat.

We have also been monitoring the progress of our classroom experiments – we have been growing runner beans and recording our observations.  We are always very excited to see how they are growing every morning!  Our other experiment has been watching our tiny caterpillars get bigger and bigger.  We are looking forward to them changing into chrysalis’ and eventually butterflies!

Abbie – I really enjoyed creating our species this week and combing different features of animals.

Lucie – I have learned about evolution and how animals can become extinct.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Literacy and English

This week in literacy we have been learning about how to tell fact from opinion. We had a fun lesson where we had a jumble of facts and opinions and we had to sort them into the right categories. We have also been learning about report writing. We will use what we have been doing in our LATC as a focus for this. We have identified the conventions of writing a report and now have to gather information over the next few weeks for our final report on the lifecycle of a plant.

 Numeracy and Maths

In maths we have been focussing on a range of things this week. We are continuing to develop our recall skills using the four operations and always remembering to use the inverse strategy where we can. We have been consolidating our learning of simplifying fractions and finding fractions of a quantity. We had great fun learning about probability and chance. Miss Brown asked us lots of questions that really helped us to understand this concept.

LATC and Science

We have been enjoying learning about our topic, ‘What a Wonderful World.’ Carrying on from last week’s lessons about religious creation stories we have been learning about the scientific theory of the Big Bang.

We have also been learning about lifecycles. this week we each  planted a runner bean. we will give our seeds water and sunlight, we are also experimenting by giving one seed water but no sunlight, one seed sunlight but no water and one seed no water or sunlight. we have made predictions about what we think will happen and we will be recording and changes to the seeds over the coming weeks.

Lennox – now that I am learning more I think the big bang theory happened

Lucy M – We did a fun thing to help us understand the big bang. We put glitter into a balloon and then we burst it and the glitter went everywhere.

Jennie – Our group burst our balloon and we measured how far away the glitter spread. Some of the glitter was 10 metres away from where the balloon burst.

Expressive Arts

We have been practising lots for our world record attempt. Parents, carers, guardians, family and friends are all welcome at the Livingston football stadium on Thursday 2^nd June to watch as we attempt to set a new world record for the biggest Djembe ensemble. There will be around 900 children from West Lothian schools taking part!

Have a great holiday weekend!!!!

What a great week!

We have really stretched our brains in maths this week. We have been going over all the strategies we have learned when using the four operations. We are able to identify what skills we need to transfer to certain maths contexts. We are working hard to use this knowledge to set the success criteria for certain maths learning outcomes. We have also been learning how to calculate the perimeter of a shape.

Ty – if it is a rectangle you can times by two

Sam – there is a length and a breadth in each perimeter

Lennox – if the shape has lots of sides then you can add two sides at a time then add them all together at the end

Our writing has been exhausting this week as well! We asked if we could have sheets of paper that we could write an imaginative story on. Mrs Drummond says she has learned a lot from us doing this. Some of the pupils who don’t enjoy writing are now asking if they can continue their writing at golden time. We have used this piece of writing to develop our self-evaluation skills and we all have a post it note that we have used to bullet point things in our writing that we could improve as our stories continue.

Brooklyn- the post it note really helped me. I enjoyed doing that.

Rowan- we had to pick part of our writing to re-write using the post it note to make changes and I am describing things better now.

New Lanark

On Tuesday we went to New Lanark with P5b. We had an amazing time.

Cole – it was really cool because the man told us that they had the longest river.

Lucie T- I liked the Annie McLeod ride because I learned more about her.

Here are some pictures from our day at New Lanark-

Have a great weekend!!

We posted a blog last week yet it can’t be found so here is last weeks blog (again) followed by this weeks blog!

P5a

Last week-

Maths has been really tricky this week as we have been learning about the 24hr clock. We say that ‘am’ is after midnight and that ‘pm’ is past morning and it’s really helped us with the 24hr clock!

Lennox – the 24hr clock is different to the clock we normally use because it just shows numbers to twelve.

Jenny – you have to add twelve hours on to the pm time to make it 24hrs.

Yasmin – 8 o’clock in the morning is O800 hrs.

We have also been practicing our mental maths skills. We are getting much quicker adding nine to a number and we are all much faster when adding ten to any number.

Our writing this week has been about writing instructions. We made a Victorian theatre and we had to follow verbal instructions then write our instructions down after we made the theatre. We also used the theatres as a focus for writing a play working in pairs. We will finish our playwriting next week and let you know how it went.

Here are some pictures of our theatres-

This weeks blog!!

P5a BLOG

This week we have been learning about how to write a diary entry. We have been learning about the conventions of writing this way.

Lennox – write short notes.

Rowan- write in the past tense and in chronological order.

Cole – you can use bullet points for things.

Jennie – always have the date.

Maths this week has been building on what we have been learning about time. We have been learning to read journey timetables. We found it quite straight forward when we had to add or takeaway whole hours however it was very tricky when the time differences were more difficult. We had a fun time with rapid fire questions when Mrs D would say a time and then we would have to add or subtract 15mins, 30 mins, 45 mins etc. we all agree this helped us a lot !

We have also been learning how to measure an area in square centimetres. We really got the hang of this very quickly! We know it’ll get harder next week but we are really looking forward to more complicated measure work.

Learning about the lives of Victorian children has been great fun. This week we made peg dolls. They didn’t take long to make but we all had great fun finding different materials to use for clothing and arms etc.

Here are some pictures –

We did a really fun task on Thursday. We had to works in pairs  using one hand each to make a paper aeroplane. We had to really work together to be successful. Lots of instructions meant intense listening ! Here are some pictures-

Have a great weekend!!

Another great week in P5a!

We have been learning how to use a dictionary this week and we now feel much more confident with this. We were also learning about synonyms and for this we used a thesaurus. We noticed that the earlier work we did with the dictionary helped us when it came to using the thesaurus.

In maths this week we have been converting kg into grams and vice versa. Some of us found this a little tricky at the start but we are all feeling very confident with this now. We are also able to determine which unit of measure we would use to weigh different things.

LATC

We made a thumatrope this week. A thumatrope is a toy that Victorian children would have made and played with.

Most exciting of all this week was our Victorian classroom afternoon.

Eva – I liked the desks being single

Cole – you could get the cane if you were slouching and had your elbows on the table

Lucy M – you had to listen very carefully because the teacher wouldn’t keep repeating things

Harvey – I didn’t like having to sit up straight

Here are some pictures –

Have a great long weekend !!