Wow, P4 have had a super busy week – culminating in our class assembly and, after lots of organisation and preparation, our Macmillan Coffee Morning.

This week was mainly spent preparing for these two events.  For our assembly, we had to learn our lines, as well as the words and actions for our song ‘Bake It Off!’.  We also had to sell tickets, take orders for cook books, collect raffle prizes, count money, give change, print and bind cook books, advertise our event and book, as well as keeping accurate records of orders etc- all before the big event of the Macmillan Coffee Morning itself!  Phew!  On Thursday we were excited to see the entries for our Kirkhill Bake Off, and the House Team were excited to judge these!  The morning itself was a huge success – it was a very well attended event with an abundance of cakes.  We enjoyed running a number of stalls to raise extra funds – including our Cakehill Cook Book stall, nail painting, Guess the Teddy’s Birthday, Guess the Sweeties in the Jar, a raffle and a Bottle Flip Challenge.  We are not yet in a position to confirm our total figure, but it looks like a record-breaking amount!  Thank you so much for your support with this.

This week, we also enjoyed learning about the journey of coffee.  We used atlases to locate where in the world coffee is grown – we loved looking through these and finding out how different maps give different information.  We then used the measuring tool on Google Earth to find out how many miles the coffee had to travel before it reached us here in Scotland.  We were able to practise our rounding skills on the number of miles, rounding to the nearest 10 and nearest 100.  We were aware of fair trade and showed a good understanding of what it means to farmers and producers when people choose to buy fair trade products.  One interesting thing we learned this week is that the world’s most expensive coffee is produced in Vietnam.  The beans are fed to an animal called a palm civet, and then collected from their poo before being roasted and ground into coffee to drink.  No-one in P4 (not even Miss Thomson who loves coffee) wanted to give this expensive drink a try!

We enjoyed working collaboratively to create presentations to share our learning.  Some of us chose to use iMovie and some chose to use Book Creator on the iPads.  We love this app!  We are keen to use it again and are certain it will enhance our learning in all curriculum areas.

We still found time to sneak in a futsal taster session with coach Woody this week.  Futsal originates in South America and is very similar to football, though uses a heavier ball and is played indoors.  In futsal, players generally have a lot more touches of the ball making it more exciting for them to play as well as working lots on their control of the ball.  Lots of very famous footballers credit futsal to helping develop their skills – including Messi, Aguero and Ronaldinho.  I think everyone really enjoyed their session!  There will be an after-school futsal club running on Thursdays next term for those keen to develop their game.

Organising our coffee morning has been our main topic this term, but we still have a week of learning left!  We were excited to choose a mini-topic for the remainder of term and we have chosen Animals and Dinosaurs.  We are looking forward to more learning next week!