Comics and the Batcave in P4a
P4 a have had a very busy week. In Literacy we have had a focus on comics and graphics novels. We created a Batcave for our class library and have been reading comics in class. We enjoyed reading Dave Pilkey’s Dog Man so decided to make our own Dog Man comic strips. The first thing we had to do was learn how to draw Dog Man and Lil Petey. We watched tutorials on You Tube. Mrs Hocknull was very impressed and thought everyone made a better job than she did!
Next we learnt about different types of thought, speech and scream bubbles, caption words and jagged splats for action words. We only took 12 minutes to plan our comics! We were all very inventive and Dog Man was attacked by an evil toaster, stranded on a deserted island and fought evil powers in the city! We also designed our own front covers. Our comic strips are going to be made into a giant book to put in our class library so we can all read each other’s.
Once we were finished writing our comics, we used Stop Motion on the ipads to make our own animation movies. We had to make our own Play Doh characters which was tricky. We learnt that it takes real patience and perseverance to make an animation movie!
Mrs Hocknull was very impressed with everyone who went home and made their own comic strips and animation movies! Well done!
For reading this week we explored a text about Charles Rennie MacKintosh. It was all jumbled up and we had to work in pairs to sort it out into the correct order. We read it through to check for meaning and then made short notes about his life. Then we used Chatterpix on the ipads to record a mini autobiography, pretending to be Charles Rennie MacKintosh! We had lots of fun during this lesson.
Mrs Fleming also did a comprehension lesson focussing on literal questioning, meaning the answer is literally in front of you in the text! We used skimming and scanning skills to look for the answer. Next week, we will be working on deductive questioning. This means you have to ‘read between the lines’ and look a bit harder for the answer as it’s not so obvious!
As next week is Scots Week, we will be learning a Scottish poem for homework for our Scots Assembly on Friday. Look out for this in school bags!
In art we designed our own tartans and used oil pastels to complete these. Then we used a stencil of a Scottish animal which we covered with zentangle patterns in black pen. We cut these out and stuck them in the centre of our tartan designs. They are very effective.
Mrs Doyle, our new Support for Learning teacher, taught us for Numeracy this week. Mrs Doyle will be working across the two P4 classes to support raising attainment in Numeracy for the whole term. Mrs Doyle focussed on multiplication this week.
Mrs Hocknull taught us for Maths. We revised what we knew about data handling by answering questions about data that we were given. We had to use addition and subtraction to calculate the answers.
We had lots of different Number Talks sessions this week. We particularly enjoyed The Cookie Monster https://gfletchy.com/the-cookie-monster/ We had to work out which of the 4 operations to use to calculate how many cookies the cookie monster had eaten. We were given one clue at a time to help us. It was really tricky!
On Thursday we had NYCOS. We will have this every Thursday afternoon. We also had our first PE session with Mrs Reid.
During assembly last week Mrs Hocknull talked about our school values and we watched the short Pixar movie, Birds on a Wire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2PJ6T7U2eU. We spotted lots of school values in the movie. Mrs Hocknull set the school a challenge to think of a New Year’s resolution related to the playground and design our own ‘Birds on a Wire’ for our window. You should be able to see these in all our classroom windows from the playground.
After a very busy week, we continued our learning during Learning Through Play time. We were challenged to build something symmetrical. Mrs Hocknull was amazed!
Another great week in P4a. Have a lovely weekend.
Mrs Hocknull
Next Week
- Miss McAlpine will be absent all week. Mrs Hocknull will be in Monday and Tuesday. Mrs Fleming for the rest of the week
- Please watch out for home learning overview and new home learning grids coming home on 20.1.20
- Please note new P6 and P7 show dates in the learning overview
