This week Primary 4 and 5 have enjoyed creating the Forest of Sin from Billy and the Minpins. Have a look at our contributions from beautiful butterflies to brightly coloured leaves to magical minpins!
Over the last fortnight we have celebrated World Book week and Nursery Rhyme week. We started with a visit from Rachel McGaw who read ‘The Kilted Coo’. Then we were challenged to learn a different nursery rhyme every day, starting with 5 Currant Buns which we acted out. Next was Humpty Dumpty, we had fun clapping each time we said Humpty and Dumpty. Our favourite was A Sailor went to Sea, clapping 3 times every time we said sea or see. We finished the week with I’m a Little Teapot and Round and Round the Garden. As a treat we invited our parents and carers in to hear our rhymes and watch the children receive their Book Bug Bags.  They enjoyed home baking and shortbread made by the children then participated in our nursery rhyme concert. It’s been a fabulous few weeks celebrating with our families.
In Primary 3, we LOVE reading and we have been excited to take part in fun learning activities to celebrate Book Week Scotland 2018.
Visualising the character: Through our IDL based on the book, The Boy Who Grew Dragons, we have been developing the reading skill of visualisation. We used this to help us when beginning to look at our whole school book, The Lost Thing. We listened to the book being read without being able to see any of the illustrations or the front or back cover, and we were challenged to draw ‘the lost thing.’ We then created a fact file for our creatures, describing its appearance, habitat, diet and hobbies. We compared our ‘lost things’ to the real illustrations, watching the film version of the story to visualise the characters and settings further.
Creating animations: Using our own lost characters, we used Puppet Pals 2 to create short animations based on the book. As some of us had not used the app before, we began by ‘tinkering’ with it, exploring its features and teaching each other when we learned something new. We took pictures of our lost things and made them into movable characters, adding voice overs to narrate the stories.
Read, Write, Count: In addition to all of this, Primary 6 joined us to gift us with our Read Write Count Book Bags. They helped us to explore the exciting books, create our own stories and play the fun games with us.
We have also taken part in a Book Week Scotland reading contest on Sumdog, continued to read our own books for enjoyment and given our review of lots of exciting new novels that our PSA has very kindly funded. We also enjoyed a visit from author, Colin Drysdale, who shared lots of incredible facts about sea creatures and sea birds found in Scotland. What a busy and book loving week in Primary 3!
Primary 5 have had a great few weeks exploring the school’s woodland areas and using the space as an ‘outdoor classroom’ for various challenges in Literacy, Art, Technologies and Health and Wellbeing.
As a class, we have been reading ‘Billy & the Minpins’ by Roald Dahl. Challenge one saw us using our visualisation skills to imagine what the Gruncher (a terrible man and Minpin-eating creature) would look like and then creating natural art inspired by Andy Goldsworthy.
Challenge two was based our Technologies skills. We had to design and create bridges for the Minpins to travel from tree to tree. There were some magical creations!
Our final challenge was very different! We used the woodland as a setting for ‘yogateering’. Pupils had to find, memorise and repeat various yoga sequences to earn points for their team.
Overall, we have thoroughly enjoyed taking our learning outdoors and hope to do more in the new year.
Primary 4 have enjoyed looking at the book The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan. The children took part in several activities to explore one of the main characters in the book ‘The Lost Thing’.
Visualisation challenge: The boys and girls had to listen to the book without seeing any pictures. As they listened, they were asked to pick out information that would help them to visualise The Lost Thing in their minds. Have a look at their creations!
True, False or Unsure challenge:Â Once we had found about the Lost Thing, the children were set a challenge to decide if a set of statements were True, False or Untrue. The boys and girls then shared their decisions and justified their choices. It was a really interesting discussion and the children had lots of different opinions about the Lost Thing. These were some of the statements we looked at:
‘Found’ poster challenge:Â Our last challenge was to create a Found poster so that if someone or something was looking for the Lost Thing we could help them find it! We thought about creating detailed character descriptions for our poster, have a look!
Wondrous P5 Star Writers!
P5 Star Writers wowed us with their descriptions of scary settings. They were working on giving more detail in their descriptions. They did this by writing about what the setting looks like and the colours that the character sees. They were trying to put in the thoughts and feelings of their characters too.
We are all working on core targets of using capital letters and full stops in every sentence. We could try and create longer sentences using conjunctions such as and and but.
We listened to a good model for writing and adventurous tale that was called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. It would be a very good bedtime story to listen to.
Please ask them what happens in the middle of their stories and get them to tell you what happens in their visual story maps that they have made as we will be working on that in the forthcoming weeks.
In Primary 3, our IDL is based on the novel, The Boy Who Grew Dragons. As one of the main characters in our book is Flicker the dragon, we decided that we wanted to learn more about dragons. We made lots of fantastic suggestions about how we could do this, and our most popular choices were to research dragons, design our own dragons, build dragons and plan a home for a dragon.
Breathtaking Builders- We have been learning how to build a dragon using Lego and Knex. Some of even built our dragons a home to live in and food to eat.
Powerful Planners– We have been learning how to plan a home for a dragon to live in.
Deadly Designers– We have been learning how to design our own dragon using the iPad app, Art Set.
Roaring Researchers- We have been learning how to use a search engine effectively, using key words to find out interesting facts about dragons.
We are really enjoying everything that we are learning through our IDL, The Boy Who Dragons. Why not ask us about the reading and drama skills that we have been developing as well!
Update- next PSA meeting is Tuesday 8th January 2019 at 6.30pm.
