Author: Miss Quinn

This week in Thistle we have enjoyed moving our bodies and practicing our skills in balance and stamina. We have been using a variety of equipment to help us with static and dynamic balance.

We have also been investigating whole number and have enjoyed using a variety of different materials and resources to help us with numeracy activities and challenges this week.

We also have been continuing to look at different addition strategies in our Number talks. We have been talking about partitioning, friendly numbers and using a number line.

In French this week we consolidated our vocabulary from last week around hair colour and moved on to looking at eye colour. Children took time to ask “Tu et comment?” (What are you like?”) and had a go at answering both verbally and written. We then took a class survey of eye colour using our key vocabulary.

In writing we have been focused on the key features of description genre. We started off by writing a piece without any input to see what we could remember from last year. We have then been exploring a passage called “The Moon” and investigating the key features and vocabulary of a descriptive piece. This week we wrote a model together of what a good description looks like called “The Sun.” We will now use this piece to support us next week as we begin to write independently about the brain – related to our focus of Calderwood Cranium Consultants.

Here is the document we use to support us and help us self and peer assess a descriptive piece of writing. 1st & 2nd Level Narrative_self_peer_assessment_placemat

This week in Thistle clan we have been exploring our skills in balance during PE. We have been making balancing activities more challenging and then timing ourselves using stopwatches to see how long we can do them for.

We have also been looking at the strategy of partitioning during our number talks. We have been using progressively bigger numbers and have been practicing applying our strategy.

Here are some examples of how we have been laying out our partitioning answers;

In French we have begun to investigate hair descriptions, we have been taking our time to listen and repeat the key phrase “J’ai les cheveux…” and then we have begun building our vocabulary to describe hair colour, length and texture.

Finally we would like to share our health and wellbeing focus of Friendship. This week we have explored how to make and keep friends. We have enjoyed discussing personal experiences and giving advice to others. We created a friendship soup and added the ingredients we think make up a perfect friendship;