Category: Clan News

Multiplication circles

We all had a think about our learning in numeracy and felt that we needed to work on our times tables a bit more as knowing these will help us in many other areas of Numeracy and Maths.  We made a times tables booklet which includes all our times tables from 2-12.  We worked on a challenge, called multiplication circles, to find patterns in our times tables.  We connected numbers from each of the times table, creating a shape/pattern in the circle such as pentagons and stars.  We also could see that some of the times tables created the same shape/pattern so this helped us to understand relationships between different times tables.  Primary 5 learnt this 1^st and then taught the primary 4’s how to do this task.  We were fascinated at the results.

Planting

We have been learning about how seeds become plants and wanted to have a go at this ourselves.  This week we were able to go outside and plant a variety of seeds with Bluebell and Thistle.  We all planted our seeds in a pot and have placed them in our school garden.  We hope that over the Easter holidays these will grow.  Our nursery children are going to help to water them while we are not in school.  We enjoyed learning about planting and how a seed grows and have lots of questions about which we will explore in the new term.

Engineering

We have been learning about the engineering process through IDL lessons.  We discussed different inventions and how they have affected our lives.  We also looked at the history of different Scottish inventions and what problems these solved.  This then led us on to thinking about what we might invent ourselves.  We thought about a problem locally, internationally or globally and came up with a solution to solve the problem by creating our own invention.  We drew a labelled diagram of our invention and wrote a persuasive letter to an engineer, asking them to invent it, giving reasons why this should be invented.  We loved being creative and designing our own inventions.  Look in our class notebooks in TEAMS to find out what we designed.

Reading – Note-taking

We have been learning to take notes on a text.  We have been recording key words and phrases from different texts into different note-taking formats – some of us like to use mind maps and some like to put our notes into sections.  Some of us also like to add pictures to our notes.  This helps us to remember all the information.

Through note-taking we have been taking notes on different processes such as how an earthquake happens, how sound travels and how a seed becomes a plant.  We have found these topics very interesting and have built our vocabulary and knowledge through our note-taking lessons.

We have also used these notes to help plan and write explanation texts in writing.  We have really enjoyed learning about the different processes and writing about them.

School trip

There was a buzz of excitement around the P4/5 corridor as we went on our 1st Calderwood School trip to the Glasgow Science Centre.  We watched a movie about a space station in the I-Max cinema.  We loved wearing our 3D glasses and were trying to touch all the images.  It was fascinating!  We also loved all the hands-on activities to touch and explore, especially the wonky house!   A ggreat time was had by all.

We have had yet another busy and exciting term!  Well done Bramble Clan.