Author: WLCarolyn.Ewart@glow

This week has been a busy and quick week.

On Monday in Green Gym we were being animal detectives. We had previously laid cat food out in trays of soil and mud. We then came back to these trays to investigate and look for any animal footprints. We were convinced that we saw deer footprints! We also played a game of Predators and Prey, we had to camouflage ourselves from the prey to avoid getting eaten! We are really enjoying green gym, it is great to be active outside whilst learning about our environment.

This week our teachers apprentice group had the great honour of presenting to Mrs Cochrane. They did a fantastic job of leading the learning and facilitating a discussion surrounding their chosen text about dinosaurs. We are getting very good at using the language of reciprocal reading and being able to apply it to our reading tasks within the classroom. Some of us were a bit nervous but we rose to the challenge and felt proud of our efforts afterwards.

In numeracy we have been looking at strategies to assist subtraction, including exchanging, place value and being able to read word problems for numbers up to 1000. We thoroughly enjoy a challenge and although we initially found this a bit of a challenge we persisted and learned from our mistakes to help us feel confident in out learning.

In writing this week we have been focusing on the planning stage for next week’s task. We have been revising all of the concepts of Persuasive writing and looking at appropriate vocabulary to up level our work. Next week we will be writing about why Santa should give us our chosen present.

We hope you enjoyed a brief snapshot of our week in Primary 4/3.

This week we have been working hard on developing the Reciprocal Reading skill of Summarising. We have been using the idea of 5-5-1. This is where we write 5 sentences about the chapter or book, 5 words to describe the book and 1 word to sum up the whole book. Here are some of our pieces of work.

We are continuing to work on the Persuasive genre of writing. This week we were arguing why pets are good for our health. We came up with some incredible reasons to convince our audience that having a pet can be incredibly beneficial for our lives and mental health. This week we have been focusing on using persuasive vocabulary, such as ‘I strongly believe’ or ‘I am certain that you will agree’ . Here are a few examples of our work.

This week has been Scottish Book Week. We have been working on a few different activities throughout the week to promote reading within our classroom. We have enjoyed listening to a few sessions of  Authors Live, we have taken part in Stop Drop and Read everyday and have been busy designing and making a diorama scene from our favourite books.

We hope you have enjoyed reading about some of our learning so far this week.

Primary 4/3 have been packing lots of exciting learning into this week.

On Monday in Green Gym, we were set the challenge of building a hibernacula, for an animal to use to hibernate in during the winter months. We had 15 minutes to find as many natural materials as possible to insulate our hibernacula.  We then filled up a pot of hot water which was to represent our animal, if after 15 minutes the pot was still hot our animal would have survived the winter!

Keeping on our topic of conservation, sustainability and helping the environment, we decided to write our persuasive piece of writing focused on why we should help save trees in our environment. This week we looked at using some more convincing and persuasive language to help reinforce our arguments.  Here are some examples of our work.

We have also been thinking about why we celebrate Remembrance day. The Primary 7’s have been selling Poppies all week so we decided to create our own poppy picture of Flanders Fields. We  used water colours to create a wash effect for the sky and used bright red and black for our poppies. In the fields we added grass using crayon. We are very proud of our efforts in this art task.

We hope you have enjoyed a little snapshot of our learning from this week.

 

It’s been another busy week in Primary 4/3.

On Monday we checked on our bees nests and hedgehog homes, they are still intact, thankfully! We also took the opportunity to smash our clay flower bombs. We can’t wait until Spring to see all the wildflowers grow in the field and know that we have done a little to improve the biodiversity of our school grounds.

On Tuesday we worked on some fireworks inspired art. We investigated the work of Wassily Kandinsky and used one of his famous abstract pictures ‘Colour Study’ to help us complete our pictures. Here are some of the finished products. We think they look great.

Keeping to the theme of Bonfire Night we decided to write about why we should or shouldn’t ban fireworks. We discussed in depth reasons both for and against. We are getting good at using persuasive language and arguing for what we believe. Here are some examples of our writing.

We hope you have enjoyed reading a few of our learning highlights from this week.

After having a well deserved rest we have returned to school this week raring to go!

Firstly, Mrs Dobbie and the rest of the staff at Deans would like to congratulate Brendan who won the sunflower competition back in September. Well done Brendan for growing such a super sunflower!!

This week we have been learning about the new reading skill of Summarising and we are looking forward to putting this into practise next week. This week we focused on using the skill of clarifying  to complete a Frayer Model to help us learn about the word and clarify the meaning of  Hibernation. Have a look at what we have been working on.

We were also lucky to have a session of Futsal this week. We practised our dribbling and defending skills through playing a game of ‘splat tig’.

We tried our hands at the skill of Zentangle. This means ‘calm doodling’ using a simple black and white repeated pattern. We used a pumpkin template to practise this technique.

We hope you have enjoyed reading about some of our learning this week.

This week in Primary 4/3 we have been working hard on finishing off our topic of gymnastics in gym. We have been working on linking a series of movements together, including a balance, a pose and a jump into a roll. We have thoroughly enjoyed this topic in gym and are looking forward to learning some basketball skills after the October Holidays.

 

We also had a very exciting and a little soggy session of Green Gym this week. Alice was our teacher and she was teaching us all about bees and biodiversity. We learned all about how pollen spreads and how we can help save the bees by planting more flowers.

In our Victorians topic this week we have been exploring different methods of creating texture within a piece of art. We used, smudging, crumpling, tearing and shading to create a picture of a chimney sweep.

We hope you enjoyed a little snapshot of our week. We are very much looking forward to a little break during  next week. Happy Holidays!

This week has been incredibly busy and jam packed with lots of interesting and challenging learning taking place in our classroom and beyond.

In maths, we have been focusing on identifying a fraction of a whole number. We have been using concrete materials to do this as well as using our knowledge of multiplication and division. It was tricky to get our heads around but once we practised everyday we are becoming more confident at applying these skills.

In numeracy, we are continuing to work on using place value to help us with addition calculations.

We are still working on the writing genre, Recount. This week we wrote a recount featuring our Best Birthday Ever! We are experts at this genre now and becoming very skilled at using the self assessment placemats to help us identify what went well and what we can do next time to improve. Here are some examples of our wonderful work.

We have been exploring the concept of perspective in Art and Design. Seeing Autumn has finally begun we decided to draw an Autumn Scene, including a pumpkin patch. We worked step by step to create an element of depth to our pictures. We are very proud of the final result.

We hope you enjoyed this little snapshot of our week.

 

It has been yet another busy week in Primary 4/3.

This week in numeracy we have been focusing on fractions, decimals and percentages.

We have been investigating what a fraction is, how it looks and how we can represent a fraction in different ways. Together with Mrs Stevenson we made up a fraction cheat sheet to help us recall some key vocabulary associated with our learning.

We have been looking at each of our names and what fraction of our name is a vowel or a consonant.

We then completed an activity called Fraction Street, here we not only had to use our knowledge of fractions but also our listening skills. Mrs Stevenson called out an instruction, for example – 1/8 of the houses have a red door or 1/2 of the houses have a car parked outside, then we had to colour the correct number.

We also created our own Fraction Sundaes. Here we created a sundae with lots of different flavours, we then had to identify what fraction of each flavour made up our sundaes. Some of us were super greedy!

We didn’t complete nearly as much as we would have liked to this week so we will continue our learning of fractions into next week too.

In writing we are still working on the genre ‘Recount‘, we are all becoming such experts at what this genre of text requires. This week we wrote a recount of a gymnastics lesson from the previous day. We are very good at using a wide variety of time connectives to help sequence all the different events within our pieces of writing.

This week we have also begun to focus on our Reciprocal Reading skills and have been examining what skills are involved in our current skill focus – prediction. We made a ‘four door’ model of all the skills we will be examining. Prediction, questioning, clarifying and summarising.

Behind each door we can write our answers for the text we are focusing on. When predicting, we have been talking about the most important point, which is justifying our answers using the clues such as  –

The Title,

The illustrations,

The blurb,

The Genre of book,

The audience.

We hope you have enjoyed a little taster of our learning this week. We are looking forward to a well earned rest on Monday and Tuesday next week!