The Kirkhill Chatter

Primary 4 had a very musical start to last week when we met Miss Mulholland, our music teacher from NYCoS.  NYCoS is the National Youth Choir of Scotland, and Miss Mulholland will be working with us every Monday up until Christmas.  In our first week, we learned about what a ‘beat’ is and why this is important.  We played some fun games to help us stay with the beat.  We are looking forward to our next session!

During Maths Week, we spent some time investigating the properties of 3D shapes – looking at the numbers of edges, faces and corners.  We also had to find out whether statements about shapes were true or false through investigation – for example, a cone rolls in a circle.  What do you think?  We have continued this learning in STEM with Mr Robertson, where we have built geometric shapes and nets of shapes using K-Nex.  We really enjoyed this and were over the moon when we found out we also have K-Nex in our classroom!  Guess what we all played with at Golden Time?

In maths, we are continuing to work on place value and we are getting good at partitioning numbers  – this means breaking numbers down into (for example) hundreds, tens and units.  This is something which will also help with our mental maths.  Some of us are beginning to work with much bigger numbers too!  We are keen to work on our multiplication tables so some of us have done a little work on this too.

In literacy, we are looking at the reasons people may write letters or send mail.  We will read examples of letters written for a range of purposes and compare their layout, form and ways of addressing different audiences.  We will consider how to write our own letters, selecting the style and vocabulary appropriate to the intended reader.  We will then use these skills in our IDL topic of organising our Coffee Morning – in areas such as advertising, invitations and thank you letters.  More information about the Coffee Morning will be sent home shortly.

Last week was Roald Dahl Day and we enjoyed discussing our favourite Roald Dahl novels and telling each other why we liked them.  Matilda and Miss Trunchbull were very popular characters!  We listened to some of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes and thought these were very funny!  We then brainstormed different fairy tales and tried to add a ‘revolting’ twist to them – some of us chose to work in pairs while some of us preferred to work alone for this task.

It also appears that it’s the season to be jolly!  This week we have been making Christmas cards, so look out for these coming home in bags shortly! Ho, ho, ho!

This week we enjoyed different maths lessons, learning that maths is not only lots of fun but can be used everyday.

We had maths outdoors in which we hunted for different shapes in the playground and even tried to arrange ourselves into different shapes. 

After looking for shapes, we tried to measure the height of trees using just our thumbs, a friend and a trundle wheel.  It was quite tricky making sure our friend was in the right spot but we gave a really good go of it.

We also had a very exciting email from James Bond asking us to help him to crack a code.  He definitely came to the right place because P3 did a superb job!

Continuing to practice our numbers to 20 in French, in teams we had a scavenger hunt looking for different numbers of items in the classroom. 

Mrs Headridge, from the school office, came to see us, explaining how she uses Maths everyday in her job.  We really learnt how important it is.

It it was lovely getting to meet some of you at “Meet the Teacher”  and “Maths with Munchies”.

Hope you are all enjoying a relaxing long weekend.