We spent a brilliant day yesterday at Polkemmet Country Park learning about trees and building dens.

We walked from school to the park and split in to 2 groups- Primary 3 and Primary 4.  We spent one half of the day with a ranger who taught us about different kinds of trees, how they spread their seeds and the names of different types of trees we can find in Polkemmet Park.  We also looked at different types of animals that would live in the woods, where they  might live and the types of things they would eat.

We spent some time at the park during lunchtime- we were all starving after spending a busy morning out in the fresh air and we had lots of fun playing with our friends from Stoneyburn at the play park.

In the afternoon, we swapped over and we went den building with Mrs Gibson.  First we made forest cocktails using lots of different leaves, sticks and things we found on the forest floor.  After this, we spent time in teams building some amazing dens!  We had a really great time and were sorry to have to stop building our dens as we were having such a great time.  We hope that we can come back at another time to build dens again next term.

We were learning about multiplication and division today.  We looked at array patterns and learned about how to read the patterns, what they meant and then how we could use these arrays to show how we could divide numbers by 2.

We talked about our learning and Blake told us that he realised that dividing numbers by two was the same as finding a half!  This was a great discovery and helped a lot of us to understand more about what we were doing.

“Ah, I get it now” was a phrase said by a lot of the boys and girls when they cut up the array patterns.  This helped them to understand about how when dividing by two they were creating two equal groups.

Many of us were a bit nervous about looking at division because we thought it was hard, but now we don’t really think that.  We need to practice dividing a lot more but today was a good start.  The array patterns really helped us.

In the afternoon, after our art lesson with Mr Henry, where we were creating mosaics, we went back to look at our houses we built at the start of the week with Miss Milne and we used these to plan a piece of descriptive writing.

We talked in small groups about the houses we built and tried to think of lots of adjectives we could use to describe our houses.  We would like our writing to be descriptive enough that someone else could read it and draw a picture of the house we are writing about.  We will need to carry on with this next week as we didn;t get our writing finished today.  We put a great list of adjectives together, as a class, during our planning time though!

Greenrigg Primary Six pupils went up to Stoneyburn Primary today to do some more work on our transition project- Bridges.

We spent the day looking at Scottish bridges and where they are in Scotland, how they are built, what they look like and finally we created some bridges of our own- inspired by the bridges we had looked at in the morning.

The children all worked together very well, in mixed groups and all had a lot of fun.

Take a look at our Twitter pages for more pictures of our activities from today @greenriggps @stoneyburnps

This morning we worked together in groups, in pairs or individually to solve different problems in class.  The thing that got us most excited was a large foam jigsaw puzzle of a World Map.  We worked together in quite a big group on different parts of the puzzle and put the pieces together to make the full map.  We then talked about different places we had been, what we saw or did there and why we went and we also talked about the places we would like to go!  We found out where Scandinavia and Africa were too – we had been reading stories from these countries this week and wanted to know where in the world they were.

We were very pleased with ourselves once we had completed the challenge- it took patience, concentration and team work to be successful!

We also used Triominoes, multiplication squares and dominoes in our other problem solving activities- we had a busy start to our Thursday morning!