Author: Mrs Kennedy

We began the week getting our new homework and working on our spelling skills at active stations.  We also got new reading books and have enjoyed reading them throughout the week.  We have begun to have some discussion about what we have read.  As a group,  we can chose to be either Word Wizards, Punctuation People, Character Cruzaders or Setting Soldiers – this gives our reading session a focus for discussion.  Most of the groups chose to be Setting Soldiers this week.

In Numeracy we have continued our work on place value, working with larger numbers.  We had active stations and completed many activities to allow us to practise.  We really like the place value basket ball game that is on the topmarks website – it’s free and easily accessible if anyone wants to play it at home:   www.topmarks.co.uk/learning-to-count/place-value-basketball

In outer maths we learned more about symmetry.  We were deciding whether objects or pictures were symmetrical and explaining the reasons for our answers.  We also worked on identifying lines of symmetry.  We enjoyed a symmetry hunt outside too.

We have also been working on capital letters and full stops as Mrs Kennedy had noticed that some of us are forgetting them as we write – some very long sentences 😉  We are now getting better at remembering capital letters in the correct places but it is tricky to decide when to use a full stop and begin a new sentence.  We will continue to work on this.

In PE we continued to develop our skills for benchball – different types of throw this week.  We have begun to think about what kind of throw to use depending on where our teammates are on the court.

We got together with P3B for a lesson on Islands on Tuesday.  We suggested quite few islands that would be good for our geography topic.  After a vote it was decided that Hawaii will be the island that we learn more about and compare to Scotland.  If anyone has anything Hawaiin please let us know, if you’ve been maybe you could tell us about it?

Our assembly this Friday was a little different as we all attended a House Assembly for our own houses.  The P7s who would like to be House Captains spoke to us then we voted for them.  Lots of voting this week!

Enjoy the weekend, P3A and Mrs Kennedy

We’ve had a very good first full week in P3A.  Our routines are becoming more established and those with classroom jobs are doing really well, helping our classroom to run smoothly.

We began the week learning about the Queensferry Crossing.  As we have had a lot of building work done in the school recently and the builders are still here, we thought our corridor could be turned into a building site.  As the Queensferry Crossing is an important construction in our local area we learned a bit more about it and made our own bridges using paper straws.  We looked closely at the lines and shapes on the bridge and worked hard measuring, cutting and sticking the straws to create our pictures.  The finished results are fantastic and they make a great wall display.  We learned some cool facts about the bridge too, our favourites are: the height of the bridge is the same as 48 London buses stacked on top of each other and all the cabling used on the bridge would almost reach around the equator – 24,874 miles!

In PE we have begun to learn some skills used in the game Benchball.  We are going to a P3 Benchball tournament at Linlithgow Academy in November so we will be focussing on these skills and learning how to play the game so we are really ready for the tournament.  We also did a yoga session with Mrs Kennedy on Thursday – it is a great way to start the day and we were all very good at it.

We read the story ‘Have You Filled Your Bucket Today.’  This is a story about how being kind to others helps them and you to be happy.

We worked in groups, reading statements and deciding if they were ‘bucket filling’ or ‘bucket dipping’ actions.  We then wrote some of the things we could do be kind to ourselves and others.

Mr Wells asked each class for some artwork for the corridor so we set to work painting a bugs-eye view of a flower.  We looked closely at part of a flower and painted only some of it.  We also learned a little about the artist Georgia O’Keefe who painted flowers in this way.  They look very effective and we have some of them up in our classroom too.

Our first Play Leaders took some P1s for corridor play on Thursday.  This is a job that every P3 will be doing as we will have several sessions throughout the week where small groups of P3s will take some P1 or P2 children to play with them, they will help the younger children to play nicely and tidy up well!  Fantastic work guys!

We have been enjoying ‘James and the Giant Peach.’  We looked at describing words this week as we listened carefully to Roald Dahl’s descriptions of Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker.  We drew pictures of what we think they may look like and wrote lots of great describing words.

We have been learning more about place value in numeracy – partitioning the numbers and identifying how many tens and units make up the whole number, some of us were working with hundreds, tens and units.

On Friday we learned some colours in French – Mrs Kennedy was very impressed by how quickly we picked up the names of the colours and even how they were spelled as we played French hangman 🙂  Maybe you could ask us what these words mean – rouge, marron, bleu, blanc, jaune, vert, rose, gris, noir, violet and orange.

We hope you all have a great weekend.

P3A and Mrs Kennedy

 

 

 

Another busy week in P3B.  On Tuesday we were learning about how to use medicine safely.  We identified when it is ok to use medicine and the benefits that medicine can have as well as thinking about situations when taking medicine may be harmful, such as taking medicine that isn’t for you and not under the supervision of a trusted adult.  We were given lots of different scenarios that we could encounter, e.g., you find a jar of pills with the lid off, what should you do?  We were all very sensible and had lots of great advice to make sure we did the right thing.  After our discussions we wrote down at least three golden rules when it comes to medicine.

In our Social Studies Local Area topic we have decided to begin a campaign to reduce the amount of litter that is dropped in our school grounds.  We want to get the whole school involved as it the responsibility of all to look after our local environment.  On Tuesday we learned about mind maps – what they are good for and how to make them.  We worked in pairs to make mind maps outlining our ideas for the campaign.  There were lots of really good suggestions.  We have also spoken to Mrs Hutton who spends a lot of time in our outdoor areas and asked her for her opinion on the problem areas.  The pitch, trim trail and outdoor classroom seem to be the worst areas.  On Friday we went to look at these areas and write down ways to target them.

We have been learning about minibeasts with Mrs McVay over the past couple of weeks.  This week we had a ladybug ball – made masks and sang songs.

In Music with Ms Bain we have been writing a song about reduce, reuse and recycle and she even recorded us singing this week!

We completed and presented the powerpoints we have been making to convince the Simpsons to move to Linlithgow.   We were not short of ideas for things to do in and around town.  The Leisure Centre, Loch and Palace featured in quite a few.  We have been reminded how lucky we are to live in such a lovely place.

In numeracy and maths we have been multiplying 2-digit numbers by 2, 3 and 4 and some have begun dividing.  In outer maths we learned about capacity this week.  We had three stations which we each visited throughout the lesson.  We played computer games where we had to read the amount of liquid in a container using the scale on the side.  We completed capacity question sheets and practised estimating and measuring  using water, beakers, spoons and jugs.  It was a busy lesson and everyone was very engaged.

Thank you for reading our blog, have a great weekend.

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

When I asked the children today what they would like me to include in our blog this week there was a resounding  cry for coding.  We had a session with Generation Science called ‘Bricks and Blocks’ On Wednesday. We learned about computer programming. We began by discussing robots and how they work, we learned that they are given their instructions by computers.  To help us to understand the importance of instructions a bit more, we instructed a human robot to make a jam sandwich.  If our instructions are not correct, the results can be very wrong!   We then worked in pairs to build Lego robots, learning more about  coding as we worked.   We used instruction blocks to program our robots. Our challenge was to score a goal against our robots which were programmed to be goalkeepers. A big thank you to Generation Science for an excellent session.

We also carried out a science experiment.  We discussed why science experiments are a very important part of our world today, the children mentioned medicine and looking after our planet as two big areas where science can really make a difference,  We were very professional in the way we carried out our water absorption experiment.  Our question was ‘How does the type of paper affect how far water will travel through it?’  We observed and discussed the properties of the three types of paper – kitchen towel, A4 paper and tissue paper, then we each wrote a hypothesis on how far we thought the water might travel up each paper when the end was placed in water for 30 seconds.  We planned the resources we would need made a diagram of how our experiment would look, making sure to note down anything we had to keep the same to make sure it was a fair experiment.  We then we carried out the experiment in groups.  Finally, we measured the distance the water had travelled and used our findings to write up and record the results.  We found that the kitchen towel was most absorbent and the type of material definitely has an impact.

In our writing lesson this week we used the notes we wrote before and during our experiment to write a science report.  They are detailed reports, set out with headings and sub-headings.  We used some good science vocabulary too.  We  all self assessed our writing today.

In numeracy we have begun to increase our knowledge and understanding of multiplication.  We have worked on 2, 5 and 10 times tables this week, and some children worked on 3 and 4 times tables.  We have been quite active whilst saying our tables – getting our brains and bodies working at the same time and have also played lots of games to help us to recall our tables facts.

Some children have been practising their tables in Play Based Learning time.  Excellent work girls!

We begun to look at fitness in PE.  We had one fitness session outside and one inside this week.  We did circuit training, working really hard at each station to increase our heart rate.  Each station also worked on a different skill and a different part of our body.

Have a lovely long weekend everyone, see you on Wednesday.

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

 

 

We started the week finishing off our social studies history trail.  We have been learning about the development of cameras throughout different periods in history.  As part of the project we worked in pairs to create a powerpoint presentation to present to children in P3A.  Each week we added a slide showing our new learning, building up to a complete presentation. P3A have been doing a similar project although they studied computers.  On Monday we shared our work with p3A. During the presentations, Mrs Kennedy and Miss Harrison were able to listen in  and observe each group to assess their learning and understanding.  We were very impressed.  The powerpoints were very professional, the content was good and the children were great at both presenting and listening to each other’s presentations.

On Tuesday we spent most of the day outdoors.  We had an outdoor learning trip in the morning.  We walked to Linlithgow Loch where we were met by two West Lothian rangers.  They taught us about animals that are found in our local environment.  One of the rangers, Hannah, set up an animal hunt where we had to find a toy animal hidden in the trees.  Each time we found one, Hannah told us a lot of information about it.  We learned about: Squirrels, Badgers, Bats, Spiders, Rabbits, Foxes and Otters.

The other ranger was called Tracy, she played a game with us where we had had to find three cards representing food, shelter and water – all the things animals need to survive.  She then sent in ‘predators’ to catch us as we were trying to find the cards we needed.  We then did an animal footprint activity.  We were given an information sheet with a picture and some details about each animal, we had to find the footprint cards hung on trees and match the footprints to the correct animal – this was not as easy as it sounds!

We really enjoyed this outdoor session and were very lucky with the weather.  It helped us to enjoy what we have just on our doorstep.

On Tuesday afternoon we had a visit to the park as our treat for collecting ‘springs’ for our houses.  We went with P3A and everyone had a great time 🙂

On Wednesday this week we drew some spring flowers and painted them using watercolours.  We were looking closely at shape and colour, trying to make our work as accurate as possible to what we could see.  To get the correct colours we used mixing palettes.  This was a nice opportunity just to practise drawing and painting, the work wasn’t for display and we could try as many times as we liked.

We enjoyed our walk to St Michael’s this morning, again the weather was very kind to us. We took part in a lovely Easter Service. A big thank you to our parent helpers.

Well done P3 for continuing to work incredibly hard right up to the end of a very long term.  I hope everyone has a good break and I’m looking forward to all that we will do in the summer term.

Thanks for reading our blog, P3B and Mrs Kennedy