The Kirkhill Chatter

Welcome back!  I hope you all had a lovely holiday!

This week there was excitement in P4 when we came in from lunch and discovered a hot air balloon in our classroom!  The visitor, Passepartout, had a letter explaining he had gone travelling and his balloon had been blown off course – he asked for our help to get around the world in 80 days!  Our first task was to find out the names of the continents and major oceans in the world.  We used globes, atlases and Google Earth to help us do this.  We ‘re looking forward to receiving our next task from Passepartout.

In maths, we have been using the symbols for greater than, less than and equal to.  We all showed a good understanding of this.  We have now moved on to rounding – revising rounding to 10 and extending our understanding to include rounding to the nearest 100.  Why don’t you ask us to explain our strategies when rounding?

In grammar, we learned about adverbs and how they help describe a verb.  We used our learning to improve our writing – using both adjectives and adverbs to make our description of a setting more interesting and exciting.

Here’s what we think of our first week back:

Kara:  I am enjoying our class novel ‘Really Weird Removals.Com’ because it’s quite funny and I like the company RWR.

Lucas:  I enjoyed learning about the countries of the world.  I learned about all the oceans and continents.

Amber:  I am enjoying our topic about the countries.

Nicole:  I am enjoying our topic and I am really enjoying studying about Germany for my Home Learning Project.

Leah:  I am enjoying our topic and our class novel.

Robert:  I have chosen to study China for my Home Learning Project and it is really interesting.

Blair:  I am looking forward to doing more about our project because finding out about Spain and all the other countries is really fun for me.

Piotr:  I am learning about Japan for my Home Learning project and it is really fun finding out the information.

We have been busy getting settled back into P3 after having a lovely, relaxing week off.  This week in literacy we have been continuing to look at adjectives, thinking of more interesting alternatives to make our writing more interesting.  We have also been learning that a noun is a naming word and is a person, place or a thing.

In maths we have been gaining more and more confidence working with number to 1000, counting forwards and backwards in increments of 1, 2, 10 and 100.  We have also started looking at time.

P3 have been so lucky to be selected to be involved in Roots of Empathy programme, which will be our focus in Health and Wellbeing.  Next week we are so excited to meet the baby who is going to teach us about empathy and to think about how others could be feeling.

This week has been bittersweet for P3 as we had to say good bye to Mrs Clayton who takes us on Thursdays, but we were also so excited to see Mrs McDonnell who will be with us instead.

P3 have been given the big responsibility of fundraising for Children in Need this year and we have started thinking of different ways we could help raise lots of money for such a great cause.  So watch this space for what we have in store! 🙂

Have a great weekend!

Wow, I can’t believe Term 1 is over already!  We’ve been so busy that it has literally flown past!

We’ve all settled into our new class really well; we have made new friends, tried new activities and learned lots of new things.  We will continue to enjoy our learning next term through our new context for learning ‘Around the World in 80 Days’.

We’ve had an exciting last week of term.  We found out the total raised from our Macmillan Coffee Morning was £831 and we are very proud that our hard work, commitment and effort has helped raise such a tremendous amount of money for such a worthwhile charity.  We also had a visit from Gist, who taught us lots about road safety – including information about road signs, stopping distances and how lorry drivers can’t see us when we are very close to the cab.  We were lucky enough to have a lorry come to visit us and could have a practice at how far away we would need to be from the lorry for it to stop without injuring us – a lot of us underestimated the distance so this activity was very worthwhile.  We were allowed in the cab and were excited to find two bunk-beds and a fridge!

This week we also enjoyed learning our harvest songs and taking part in the whole school harvest assembly.  We’re really beginning to understand how and why we should help each other.

I hope you all have a fantastic week off!  Have fun and keep yourselves safe (especially in the darker evenings – wear your Gist reflective keyrings!).  And just a wee warning, as it’s my birthdays in the holidays, I’ll be even older and grumpier next term!  Happy holidays!!