Over the past few weeks, P3 have been busy at home building 3D Scottish castles as part of a homework challenge. Here are some of the finished castles- don’t they look terrific?

Both P3 classes went to Edinburgh Castle as part of their Scottish Castles topic. We enjoyed spotting all of the special features of castles that we had been learning about. Thankfully, the portcullis stayed up until after we had left! We were also glad that Mr Clark and Mrs Turnbull didn’t leave us behind in the dungeons! Here are some photos of the great time we had.

Yesterday in P3a we were set a knights protection challenge.

We had to make work in pairs to make an item that a knight would use to protect them self. Some groups made a bow and arrows, a spear, a helmet, a sword or an axe. It was great fun and we enjoyed being creative.

By Rebecca

P3a drew and used metallic crayons to create knights in armour to add to the Great Hall wall in our classroom. We looked at lots of pictures of knights in armour to help us.

In the Forrest Room we were investigating Tessellation through the work of the Artist M.C. Escher.
We made tiles using shapes and printed patterns using in and stamps.

We found out that to be successful tessellations should have no gaps and that the shapes should not overlap.

In Primary 3B we looked at splitting different shapes into halves and quarters. We found out that there was more than one way of finding fractions of a shape. We had races in the gym hall and split our running track in half and then into quarters so we knew how far we had to run. We created a pizza with cones and played the role of different toppings to create the pizza Mr. Clark ordered on the phone. He ordered mushrooms on three quarters of his pizza. Yuck! Finally, we created our own pizzas back in the classroom. We chose our own toppings and wrote some fraction facts about our pizza underneath the pizza box lids!

Today, across the school we had maths masterclasses. In P3a, we spent the day being problem detectives. We were set lots of different challenges throughout the day. Some of the different strategies we used were:

– Drawing a picture or making a model
– Acting out the situation
– Having an idea and testing it out with examples
– Producing an organised list or a table
– Looking for a pattern
– Guessing, checking and improving

Here are some photographs of a few of the challenges we were set! We had a fantastic day.

This week underneath Mrs Turnbulls desk we found a rat! He had a letter with him. He was called Ramsay. The letter said that he was lost! We figured out that he was from a Scottish castle a long long time ago and that he has time travelled. Ramsay has asked us to find out some more information about Scottish castles. We are also decorating our classroom to look like a Great Hall to make him feel more at home.

By Rebecca

In P3a, we learned about the human eye and how it works. It is very sensitive! We did a pupil experiment and looked at how our pupils change size depending on how much light there is. We found that our pupils are really big when there isn’t much light and are small when the light is really bright.

We also made models of the eye and labelled them to show to different parts. We used part of a plastic poly-pocket to be our cornea, so they looked more realistic! Don’t they look good?