In our topic about Mary, Queen of Scots, we have been learning all about the mysterious death of her second husband, Lord Darnley.  We investigated his death by looking at various documents and evidence from the time – including maps, letters from Mary to the Earl of Bothwell, and letters to Mary from Elizabeth I.  We discussed the evidence and considered its reliability.  We thought that the evidence was probably not reliable, however, we now know that fingerprints and DNA evidence wasn’t available in the 16th Century!  Most of us thought that the Earl of Bothwell (Mary’s soon-to-be third husband!) was the most likely suspect, but we’ll never know the truth!

We used our knowledge to become crime correspondents and wrote newspaper articles about the case.  We enjoyed using writer’s tricks such as alliteration, puns and rhyme to make attention-grabbing headlines!  Some of our headlines include, ‘Darn!  Darnley’s Dead!’, ‘Deid Darnley!’ and ‘Mysterious Murder’.  We used the questions ‘Who? What? Where? When? and Why?’ to form the basis of our introductory paragraph, then gave more information including quotes from witnesses to complete the body of our reports.

We have been continuing to decorate our castle and it’s coming along nicely!  Here are a few photos of our work so far – including our maps of a Royal Burgh, castle maps, our Crown jewels, our historical evidence folder, our portraits of Mary and our newspaper reports.  This week we’re looking forward to typing up our ‘Secret Panel’ creative stories and sharing those too!

In maths, we have begun a block on fractions.  We have been learning the terms ‘numerator’ and ‘denominator’ and finding out what they mean, and what they tell us about the fraction.  We found out that the bigger the denominator (the number at the bottom of the fraction!) then the smaller the actual fraction!  Some of us have also had a quick look at improper fractions and mixed numbers.  Next week we will look at finding unit fractions of numbers.

We all enjoyed sports day this week – despite the rain.  Well done on your efforts, P5!  We also held our class auditions for the school talent show.  What a talented bunch P5 are (Miss Thomson thinks she may have discovered the next big boyband!) – well done to everyone who took part.  It takes a lot of courage to perform in front of an audience and you all did a brilliant job!

We were excited this week to put our knowledge of evaporation (which we learned about in our water cycle topic!) to good use when we finally started trying to grow some sugar crystals (Miss Thomson’s only been promising we can do this since Xmas…!)  The classroom still smells like a mixing room in Willy Wonka’s amazing factory after some of us decided to add some flavouring to the mix.  Keep your fingers crossed that we manage to grow some crystals!