Month: January 2020

We have had another busy week in P3/4 this week.

We started our mini topic this week. Our ‘wee tour’ of Scotland. We worked collaboratively with P3 as we explored the names of the different cities in Scotland. P3/4 helped the P3 pupils use an Atlas to discover and correctly place our Scottish cities on a blank map of Scotland. The children also shared some interesting facts that they already know about this amazing country. We completed mind maps to show our prior knowledge of this topic and also came up with some things that we would like to discover.

Keeping with our Scottish themed topic we looked at how to make Scottish Shortbread in our literacy lesson this week. The children were given the instructions, however, these were all jumbled up and the children had to write these in the correct order. But before that we discussed the language that is used in instruction writing. The children were also set the task to include sentence openers that flowed in a sequence of events. Such as: First, next, then and finally. The children really enjoyed this lesson and to expand on this they will use the instructions that they have ordered correctly to make shortbread next week. Look out for a special delivery next week!

Also in literacy the children were introduced to a number of new spelling strategies this week that will help with their spelling words for this week. One of the strategies had the children exploring alphabetical order and showed them that its not always the first letter that we go by. Ask your child to show you some of these spelling strategies.

The children were continuing to work on addition this week. We were using the chimney sum strategy as this has proved tricky for some of the children in the class, especially carrying over those cheeky 1’s! If the children could practice these at home that would be brilliant as we are moving on to subtraction strategies next week.

Thank you for all your continued support and encouragement. Have a lovely weekend.

It has been another busy week in Deans Den as we continue to work on achieving our individual targets. Mrs Morrison is proud of the efforts of all the boys and girls, well done!!

Another success of Deans Den this week has been the children’s enthusiasm towards developing the role of the lead learner within the group. Children are given the opportunity to take a main role in learning opportunities such as storyteller, line leaders and group helper. These are all important skills to develop to help the children become independent learners. Keep working hard boys and girls!!

Happy New year!

It was lovely to see all the children back happy, healthy and ready for the new term.

To start the week off the children and I shared how we all spent our Christmas holidays. We sat around in a circle and took turns talking. This was a great way to practice one of our 4 skills from our skills 4.0 document. This document focuses on what makes a good work force and this term we are focusing mainly on social intelligence. It was nice to hear that they all had a nice time off and that Santa was good to them.

On Wednesday we explored what New Year’s resolutions were and discussed why people set these for themselves. The children then had a look back at 2019 and shared what they enjoyed the most about last year. Focusing on the feelings skill from skills 4.0 the children then came up with their own New year’s resolutions. The children thought about aspects of their learning  and what it was that they would like to improve going forward. There were some great goals set during this task!

This week we have also worked hard to finish our Viking helmets, it was a lovely task to finish our Viking topic. They have all done a fantastic job with these. 

We also closed our Viking topic with an exciting drama lesson. The children loved this lesson and all are budding performers. The children were asked to act out a scenario in which they played estate agents and had to sell a long house to potential buyers. The children were displaying great communication, collaborative and leadership skills throughout this lesson. They worked well together in their small groups to produce some great pieces of improvisation.

Well Done P3/4!

I hope you all have a lovely Weekend!

Firstly Happy New Year to everyone, I hope you all enjoyed the holidays I know the children did, they couldn’t wait to share all their news at check in time. We  thought it would be a good idea to write a thank you letter to Santa, to tell him how much we loved our new toys.

On Wednesday we had a surprise visitor, Hamish McHaggis from Coorie Doon in the Highlands . He brought some amazing books with him. We have started to read all about his Scottish Adventures. The children are loving the new scots words from the books such as “braw”, “blether” and “peely wally”(lots more words to come!)

We created the first page of our Scottish floor book which demonstrated what we already know about Scotland.

Over the next few weeks we will use Hamish’s adventures as a vehicle to learn more about important places in Scotland such as Edinburgh Castle, Loch Ness, Glamis Castle, The Falkirk Wheel and the Islands of Scotland. We will also explore Scottish food, drink, music, wildlife, tartan etc.

In Math’s we will be exploring shape and time. We began today by looking at calendars for 2020. The children plotted their birthdays  and we discussed the purpose of a calendar and how to use it.

In a previous post I spoke about the importance of Developing the Young Workforce, it is an initiative which schools across West Lothian are developing. We are focusing on Social Intelligence which can be divided into 4 parts- Communication, Feeling, Collaborating and Leading. The children had some good ideas about how they would like to lead learning in our class-

Sophie would like to lead reading groups. She would do this by encouraging her peers to sound out words and point to each word as they were reading.

Louie feels confident when identifying sounds and would like to lead others by helping them use their sounds to create new words.

Jayden really enjoys art and would like to lead some art lessons by encouraging his peers to add more detail and use real life colours.

Mark would like to lead a number talk. He enjoys solving number problems and can lead and support others by explaining necessary steps that need to be taken to arrive at the  answer.

I shall keep you updated on their progress.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend.