On Wednesday, Baird clan enjoyed their Christmas party with Burns, Muir and Mackintosh. We played lots of games, including musical chairs, and enjoyed a festive snack with friends. After our party fun, we created our own festive origami stars, which tested our fine motor skills and resilience. To end a fantastic day of fun, we then went to watch the pantomime in the hall. Baird clan are well and truly in the festive spirit now!
This week, Baird have enjoyed a range of reading and writing activities to celebrate Book Week Scotland. We were given the opportunity to deliver the book bags to the Primary 3 clans and read their books together. Both Baird and P3 loved this experience! We have also created some new front covers for books we have been reading, completed a Book Week Quiz and created fact files for characters from our novels.
In writing, we have been focused on creating narrative texts. This week, we became authors as we looked at creating a sci-fi story. Before writing, we revised the different features of a narrative. We used a diamond 9 diagram to identify the importance of each feature from most important to least. We then reflected on our previous stories and chose a feature to focus on this week.
We began planning for our writing by creating our own planets to visit. We drew these in our jotter and labelled our planets with any key information we wanted to add. We then filled out our plans, wrote our stories and shared them with our peers, who then gave us some feedback before we edited and self assessed. 
This week, Baird and Burns clans were visited by Matt from Veolia, who are a water, energy and waste recycling company. Matt explained to the children how waste from our homes is taken to their sites, like the one in Almondell. They then use a range of processes to clean the water enough so that it can be recycled into rivers. Matt had also brought along samples of the water from the local site to show just how clean the water becomes before it is returned to the river.
The clans also took part in their own recycling activity. In table groups, the children were shown how to make an origami hat. They were then able to make these hats into paper aeroplanes and then finally a bag. This showed the children that things can be recycled multiple times and still have their uses. The children absolutely loved the visit and learned lots of new facts.
Baird Clan have begun to get in the Halloween spirit this week by creating our own spooky characters! We started with a game of “table wars”, with each table giving examples of Halloween related vocabulary until only one table was left. We then created riddles in pairs or independently as a way of focusing on describing objects without using their names. Finally, we created our own monster characters and used adjectives, similes and metaphors to describe our creations. Next week, we will use our monsters as the basis of our own spooky stories.
This week in our numeracy lessons, we have been focussing on making estimates. We have used our knowledge of rounding to help us to estimate the answers for different addition, subtraction and multiplication problems.
We also took on the challenge of esti-mysteries and used our maths knowledge and problem solving to answer the problems. We enjoyed these so much that we decided to create our own esti-mysteries. We used clues that tested our knowledge of number patterns, place value and fractions to create our problems. We are so excited to try out our esti-mysteries next week!
This week, Baird clan have began to learn about descriptive writing. We started by creating self portraits that included visuals of our hobbies and interests. In reading, we used the game “Guess Who” to focus on using adjectives to describe others as well as ourselves.
Towards the end of the week, we completed our cold piece of descriptive writing, which included details about our physical appearance, our hobbies and interests and our goals for the future. We will use our feedback on this writing to help us to form our next steps for writing in the descriptive genre.
Over the last two weeks, Baird Clan have been using the book “Our Clan is a Family” as a context for our learning. We have discussed how the idea of our Clan being a family relates to our school value of belonging, and how we can demonstrate this around the school. While making our clan charter, we spoke about one of Miss Boden’s favourite sayings, “we are just like popcorn, our learning all pops at different times”. We used this quote as the basis for our clan charter. 
We have also looked at the importance of resilience and working as a team. We started with a small team game where each team had to balance a hula-hoop on their fingers and get it to touch the floor. We soon realised without good communication this was extremely tricky! As a clan, we looked at some successful teams from this year’s Olympics, and discussed what made them a good team. We were surprised to see that many of the skills were ones we used in our own Clan team.
This term, Bluebell clan are learning about different countries around the world, their climate and their characteristics. This week we have been learning about different types of deserts that can be found. We have used this as the topic for our information report this week, using non-fiction books to gather information to use in our texts. As a clan, we wrote the general statement and evaluation for the reports, ensuring that they included interesting sentence openers and adverbs.
Learners also worked in pairs to create a diorama of different deserts. The clan had the choice to create a hot or a cold desert and used different materials to add texture and colour to their designs.
This term in Bluebell, we have been looking at how we can build our resilience through purposeful play and discussions about “bounce-backability”. This week we tested our resilience by trying to lift a plastic cup without touching it.
We had to lift a cup by only using string and an elastic band without touching the cup. To be successful, everyone had to work together and try different strategies until we found one that worked. It was very tricky but when we worked together we managed to do it.
It was such a fun activity to do together.
This week we have been learning about Fairtrade and cocoa farmers for our explanation writing. We learned about a group of farmers called the Kuapa Kokoo co-operative, which consists of approximately 65,000 farmers.
We learned what Fairtrade is and how it works. Fairtrade gives different farmers (for example banana, coffee and cocoa farmers) a fair price for their products. We made lots of notes about the different stages of cocoa bean farming and worked in pairs or independently to make a colourful and informative leaflet. We also used our genre targets to make sure that our writing followed the correct structure, used complex connectives amongst other things to make our writing as informative as possible. We also got to taste some Fairtrade chocolate and bananas to compare them to non-Fairtrade products.
All in all, it was very fun and interesting to learn about this topic.
