Happy New Year! I hope you all had a lovely break and enjoyed the celebrations.
We are well and truly back into the swing of things, we began Monday setting some personal goals and New Year’s resolutions – something new we’d like to try and something we do already that we’d like to get better at.
Before Christmas the children decided that they would like to decorate the wall outside our classroom based on Antarctica. We began by learning about the wildlife in Antarctica – the only two land creatures to live there are seals and penguins. We had an art lesson on pencil drawing and how to use shading to enhance our pictures, then we drew penguins and seals using our new techniques.
On Tuesday, we worked in groups to create posters on a topic relating to Antarctica, the topics were: Antarctic Geography, Scientists in Antarctica, Antarctic Explorers, Antarctic Ships, Fun Facts about Antarctica, Antarctic Wildlife and Antarctic Weather. The children worked very hard and we all learned a lot from each other as we shared our learning. A group of children have also been working on some other art work for the wall, including a picture of the new Royal Research Ship ‘Sir David Attenborough’ and pictures of orcas which are often found in Antarctic waters. We are really pleased with the finished result and think the wall looks interesting and will encourage others to stop and read our work.
We had a HIIT (high intensity interval training) session with a personal trainer on Tuesday, it was a very active session and we did not stop moving for 45 minutes! We did a lot of running as well as burpees, press-ups and squats. It was hard work and great fun.
On Thursday we began our new PE topic with Mrs Kennedy – football. We were working on our dribbling skills this week and played different games that allowed us to practise dribbling. We are hoping that we can get onto the grass soon.
In numeracy and maths this week, we began subtraction. We started off with mental subtraction – practising different techniques and learning some new ones, finding out what works best for us. On Thursday we started our new outer maths topic – grid references, we looked at where they might be used and learned to use them to locate and describe positions.
We also competed our book study of ‘Charlotte’s Web.’ As an assessment, we showed our understanding of the story by summarising it. We selected the main points, ordered them correctly and then made cartoon strips showing these points. Every child was able to show that they had understood the story well as they not only identified the main points, they also realised the ’causes and effects’ that created the events in the story and made the story flow the way it did 🙂 Soon we will look at how to transfer this into our own writing.
We will continue to have Mrs McVay for Science this term. On Wednesday we started to learn about materials and began by sorting objects according to the material they are made from.
It has been a busy week with introductions to a lot of new experiences. Please look in school bags on Monday for more information on what we will be covering this term. We will soon begin our study on a famous Scottish person – Williamina Fleming.
Thank you for reading our blog, P3B and Mrs Kennedy
