Author: Mrs Kennedy

We have had a busy week yet again.  As the weather has been good we have been outside for 15 minutes most afternoons doing our ‘daily mile’.  As well as getting exercise it definitely helps us to concentrate when we get back into the classroom.

The whole school are learning about internet safety at the moment.  We use resources from the thinkuknow website.  The lessons for P3 are called ‘Jessie and Friends’ there are three cartoons to help us to gain the skills and confidence to respond safely to risks we may encounter online.  The lesson we looked at this week was about sharing photographs.  After watching an animation on sharing photographs digitally, we played a game where one of Jessie’s friends, Tia shared a photo with three friends, but unknown to Tia they all shared the photo with three friends, who in turn shared with yet more people.  The game showed how quickly photographs can be seen by many people and you often do not know who is seeing them.  We also made ‘helping hands.’ We wrote the names of four people in our lives that we can go to if we are worried or unsure about something that we have seen or done online.  Next week we will look at playing games online.  There is a parents section of the website if you would like to know more:

https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/

We have also been very busy making a display for the P3B part of the corridor.  Carrying on the ‘great outdoors’ theme we were going to do a woodland scene, however we watched a short clip of ‘Art Ninja’ kids tv show and saw some really cool art in the style of Claude Monet so we completely changed our minds!  We learned about Monet’s ‘impressionist’ style of painting and about his garden in Giverny, France.   As well as admiring his artwork, the pictures of his real garden were amazing.  He really was passionate about the beauty of nature and we were certainly inspired by it too. We worked in teams to make various pieces of art to put together to make a scene similar to his water lily paintings.

In between all of this we have begun to use the written ‘chimney sum’ method of subtraction in numeracy and learned more about how to use adjectives to make our writing more interesting in grammar.  We are continuing with our tennis lessons in PE – hitting the ball over a net this week.  (Putting the net up was Mrs Kennedy’s triumph for the week!)

Have a great weekend, looking forward to seeing you next week at parent’s night.

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

What an eclectic mix this week has been!

We began with verb tenses on Monday.  After practising together, we worked in groups to sort sentences into past, present and future.  We then discussed the verbs in the sentences and looked at how they changed according to the tense.  After that we worked individually to change present verbs into past and future tense.  We then wrote sentences about what we did yesterday and what we will do tomorrow, using our verbs correctly.

Each year, Springfield School takes part in the Linlithgow Round Table children’s competition.  The topic for this year is ‘On the Savanna.’ P1 to P3 children were asked to create some artwork on this theme.  We painted sunset backgrounds and then drew silhouettes of animals and trees found in the Savanna.  The results are very effective and we hope the judges are impressed too!

In writing this week we wrote ‘explanation’ texts.  We wrote about the features of a woolly mammoth. On Wednesday we carried out research on the physical features of woolly mammoths and made notes.  On Thursday, using our notes, we wrote factual pieces of writing, making sure to include a heading and subheadings.  We also had to write relevant information under each sub-heading, writing in past tense as woolly mammoths are extinct.  To finish it off we drew and labelled a diagram.  The standards were very high and everyone achieved their success criteria.

On Friday we were at a very good assembly led by P4.  It was all about Egyptians, we learned a lot, including some quite disgusting facts!

We hope you have a good weekend.

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

 

Continue reading “P3B Going on a Bear Hunt”

Phew, what a busy week!  A big shout out to P3B as they have worked incredibly hard, producing some excellent work and having a lot of fun along the way.

At the beginning of the week we were product designers, we had to name and design the wrapper for a new Fairtrade chocolate bar – what would make people buy our bar rather than the many others on the shelf?  The children really rose to the challenge and I was so impressed with every design.  Each one was eye catching and fitted the design brief really well.  They are now proudly displayed on our classroom wall.

On Wednesday we created a character profile for Elsie from our book The Ice Monster.  We used describing words to write about Elsie’s appearance and personality and we used our knowledge of the story to write about Elsie’s life so far.  Again, we worked incredibly hard, taking time to choose the best words to describe Elsie.  Our sentences were well written, we are getting so good at remembering capital letters for proper nouns 😉 The sketches of Elsie were also very detailed and some even labelled their pictures to describe her appearance further.

It was World Book Day on Thursday and we watched the premiere of a new show on the Puffin Virtually Live website: https://puffinvirtuallylive.co.uk/ You can search for the link if you’d like to find out more.  We particularly enjoyed watching the interview with Humza Arshad and drew along with former Waterstones Children’s Laureate, Chris Riddell.  It was tricky drawing along with an illustrator but we all gave it a go.  We were very complimentary to each other.

After the video we could choose what other World Book Day activities we would like to do; design a bookmark, do a World Book day word search, create a new front cover for your favourite book, write and illustrate your own book or sketch a woolly mammoth in the style of Tony Ross, the illustrator of The Ice Monster.  Everyone was very busy, some of us chose to work together to write books and some worked in small groups following the step by step instructions to draw woolly mammoths.

On Thursday afternoon we enjoyed a paired reading session with P1.  We read and encouraged P1 children to read too, we were very helpful with techniques to help if someone is stuck on a word.  It was a lovely quiet session and all children were completely engaged in reading, it was lovely to see and hear.

We have also been busy in maths. All of us are now subtracting bridging the tens number. We have begun by subtracting a single digit from a 2 digit at the moment, e. g. 65 – 8, this will increase confidence before we move onto larger numbers. We also used our subtraction skills to work out change from 50p. If anyone has coins out at the weekend maybe they could practise this.

We also had PE with Mrs Reid and Mrs Kennedy, with Mrs Kennedy we have begun a block of tennis lessons.

Have a good weekend everyone, let’s hope the rain stops for a bit.

P3B and Mrs Kennedy 🙂

 

We have had a ‘news’ focus this week. Some of our lessons have been linked to our class novel, The Ice Monster by David Walliams. It is a funny book with lots of very interesting characters.  It is quite exciting too, we’ve had quite a few cliff hangers already.  We are also learning a bit about science and Victorian London as we read.

Continue reading “P3B Breaking News”

What a great start to the holiday weekend! – I’m sure you are extremely proud of your assembly stars today – I couldn’t have asked any more of them, they performed in such a professional way, remembered all their lines and where they should be at exactly the right times.  We have had many lovely comments from others in the school too – A massive well done to all the children 🙂

You will not believe that even after all the rehearsals and two shows today, I do not have one photograph!  Miss Baillie has uploaded one to her blog post and has written a little piece about it.

In other news – as part of ‘Scotland Loves Languages Week’ we welcomed Miss Baillie and two Springfield language ambassadors to our classroom on Tuesday for a Spanish lesson.  We listened to The Gruffalo in Spanish and learned the names of the animals in Spanish then we sang ‘Head Shoulders Knees and Toes’ – ‘Cabeza, Hombros, Rodillas y Pies.’  We then learned the numbers to five and played a game.  Thank you to Mrs Gordon for all her planning and organisation this week, and to Miss Baillie and the girls for our great lesson, we really enjoyed it.

On Wednesday we had a real treat when Prismatic Winds came to school and performed for us.  We learned all about the oboe, flute, clarinet, bassoon and tenor horn.  As well as playing some really cool tunes – including The Simpsons theme tune, because they were in Springfield – they taught us a lot about each individual instrument and how they work to produce such lovely sounds.  The children really were captivated by the music, I tried to get pictures of their faces, it was lovely to see.

Here is the weblink if you would like to know a little more about the quintet https://prismaticwinds.com/

As P3s we have special jobs in the infant part of the school.  Each Monday and Wednesday we are given the opportunity to be Play Leaders and 2 of us each time collect four P1 or P2 children from their classroom and take them for block play.  We help them to make structures and to put the blocks away again – the blocks need to be organised very well to fit back on the shelf correctly so this is not as easy as it sounds.  The interactions between the children is lovely and the creativity is excellent too. P3 are doing a great job.

In PE this week we did a little yoga, it was nice to have some quiet time in all the build up to the assembly.

On Friday, we had an extra long reward time as we had worked so hard on our assembly.  Some of us made, and then played with, play dough and some played games that Mrs Kennedy brought from home that she thought  we might enjoy – again it was so busy there are very few photos!  It was good fun though.

Have a really good long weekend everyone, it was lovely to see so many of you this morning.

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

We began the week with some grammar, learning about proper nouns.  Once we got into the swing of things we came up lots of proper nouns and learned that they ALWAYS begin with a capital letter.  Mrs Kennedy will be looking for this in our writing jotters from now on.

On Tuesday, we had our house treat – a trip to the park.  It really was a treat , we had great fun and played together really well.  We’re hoping to get out and about  again soon.

We are continuing our cameras history trail.  We learned about some of the first cameras which were pinhole cameras, these are simple cameras  with a tiny pinhole – essentially a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through the hole and projects an upside down image on the opposite side of the box, this is known as the camera obscura effect.  To help us to understand this we made our own pinhole cameras.  This was also a good technology lesson as we had to work hard to make sure our tube did not let in any light – including securing paper over the end with no gaps.  We also had to make two tubes – one slightly smaller than the other so it could fit inside the larger one.  All the groups managed it, with a few re-starts and adjustments.  There was great excitement as we tried them out.  Great teamwork too.

At the end of our History of Cameras project we will be presenting our learning to P3A.  We have begun powerpoints to help us to do this.  We will add one or two slides per week to build up our presentations as we go rather than do it all at the end.  This is a good way of recording what we learn each week for us to look back on too.  This week we worked in pairs to design title slides and produce one slide about pinhole cameras.  We used a check list to make sure we completed the task correctly.  A great start!

In numeracy, we continued our subtraction and time topics.  We really are improving our mental subtraction skills.  We looked at quick ways of subtracting teen numbers from 2-digit numbers by subtracting the 10 then the units.  Some of us have been subtracting a single digit from a 2-digit number, with bridging.  To do this mentally we took away the number of units to reach the multiple of ten, then subtracted the remaining units (e.g., to calculate 35 – 8 mentally, we would do  35 – 5 = 30, 30 – 3 = 27).

We have a new time wall display, it has a real clock and labels to help us to read the clock throughout the day.  Some of our clocks from last week are on the wall too as well as examples of digital clocks.  We will continue to practise quarter to the hour, especially on a digital clock.  We will move onto ordering times next.

We are also continuing our ‘French Fridays.’  We are now great at numbers to 10, we can count out loud, as well as read and write the number words.  We have begun to learn numbers to 20.  Today we played a game where we rolled dice, said the numbers in French, added the numbers, said the total in French and then coloured the number on our sheet.  The person with the most numbers coloured was the winner.  This got quite competitive!  I heard great French too.

In between all of this we have been very busy rehearsing our assembly.  Thank you very much for helping the children to learn their lines and for help with props.

See you next Friday 🙂

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

This week we helped P1 children with Education City.  We showed them how to log onto a netbook, helped them to find the website and type in their usernames and passwords and then helped them to play some games of their choice.  Mrs Kennedy was very impressed with how patient we were and how well we explained what to do. We were also mindful not to do everything for the P1s but to help them to do it for themselves – they will learn much better that way.

In literacy, we worked on our spelling pattern – ‘ed’ ending words and revisited alphabetical order.  Some children were becoming more secure with finding words in the dictionary – trying to open the book near the letter they wanted according to where that letter comes in the alphabet.  Some children were putting words in alphabetical order – sometimes having to look at the third letter to do this as the first two were the same.

We also began our History trail topic.  Last week the children chose the camera as the invention they would like to learn more about.  We will look at the history of cameras, a little on how they work and how cameras are used today.

We began by thinking about all the ways cameras feature in our lives today.  Together we came up with lots of answers.  For example, to communicate – pictures in newspapers, magazines and on the internet, speed cameras, x-rays, to name a few.

Next week we will learn about the very first cameras and begin to think about how they work.

In numeracy and maths, we have been continuing with subtraction.  It was quite tricky this week as we were learning mental maths strategies of subtracting near multiples of 10 (9, 11. 29, 31…) from 2-digit numbers.  We were subtracting the nearest 10 and then had to remember to add one if the original number ended in a 9 and to take another away if it ended in a 1.  This required a lot of resilience as quite a few had to keep trying when their first answers weren’t correct.  We kept at it though and we’re getting there now.

On Thursday we looked again at time.  Concentrating on quarter to and quarter past.  Some children were learning am and pm times.  When Mrs Kennedy marked our work, she discovered that  a lot of children were struggling to read the correct hour when it was quarter to.  To help us we made clocks and practised setting them to ‘quarter to’ times read the times out loud, explaining where the hands were.  This seems to have helped and we are much more confident now.

We have also been very busy coming up with ideas and writing the script for our assembly – words will come home next week and I might be asking for some props too!

Have a lovely weekend, wrap up warm.

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

During reading on a Monday, while each group is getting their new book, the others have reading tasks to work on.  This week we looked at identifying the main features of a story – the main characters, supporting characters, setting/s, the problem in the story and how the problem was resolved.  The children worked in their reading groups, deciding together which book to use for the task.  The groups worked well  and there was lots of good discussion as they studied the stories closely.

On Tuesday we looked again at punctuation – our learning outcome is to use capital letters,  full stops, question marks and exclamation marks correctly every time we write. The tricky part is transferring our learning into all of our writing and not just the lessons when we are specifically looking at punctuation.  The activities were good fun and hopefully memorable enough for us to remember correct punctuation, the first time, every time we write.  A brought in the balloons from his birthday party last weekend, we had great fun trying to make as many words as possible with the letters.  We wrote a long list of words and this was a very popular activity – thank you!

In numeracy we have been trying some problem solving at the beginning of each lesson – applying the skills we have been learning.  This week we had to use our mental subtraction knowledge to think of as many ways to make a different number each day.  We will continue with various problem solving activities to encourage the application of our learning to help us to deepen our understanding.

We finished our mini topic on Williamina Fleming this week.  We did some space chalk drawings.  It was good to work with chalk and we created some very good effects when we gently rubbed the colours together.

We also wrote diary entries of a day in the life of Williamina.  We made the date 1888 and described what Williamina’s day might have been like the day she discovered the Horsehead nebula.  We thought about what life might have been like in 1888, food, transport, etc and how Williamina might have felt on that day.  We worked with a partner and typed our diary entries onto word.  Our checklist helped us to remember to write the date, write in first person and to describe the day in the correct order.  Everyone produced a very good diary entry and our word processing skills are getting quite good too.

On Thursdays I have been taking the children outside for PE.  Last week we were very fortunate to have Mr Fyfe with us, who is an experienced football coach and referee.   He took us for some drills and refereed a game at the end.  I learned a lot too and I will be able to add the drills into my lessons.

On Friday, N, S and C presented at our ‘Famous Scots’ assembly.  N read his detailed Williamina Fleming report and S and C read the very good diary entry they wrote together.  Great work boys and well done for being so confident today too.

Have a lovely weekend, enjoy your haggis 😉

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

We began the week researching Williamina Fleming as part of the whole school ‘Famous Scot’ focus.  I showed the children a picture of Williamina and they discussed their thoughts on her – the date of the photograph? Do her clothes tell us anything? What do you think she was famous for? We then looked at a picture of the Horsehead nebula and asked what they thought it was and how the two pictures could be related?  The children had some great ideas – quite a few thought Williamina was an artist and the nebula was her painting, someone thought the nebula looked like a volcano and maybe she was the first person to discover it.

    

On conducting an internet research, the children quickly discovered that the picture was the Horsehead nebula and it was first recorded in 1888 by Scottish astronomer Williamina Fleming  at the Harvard College Observatory.  The children made notes on Williamina’s life and we used these notes to learn how to write a report.  This was quite a new concept and we worked hard to use headings and sub-headings as well as write in paragraphs, using our notes to help. The children were quick to realise that although Williamina did not always have an easy life she worked hard and became successful.

On Wednesday we had our first visit to the new library.  Mrs Manlove and some very helpful parents have made it  much more welcoming and easy to use.  The children really enjoyed choosing a book, especially as there are quite a few new ones.  We will visit the library each Wednesday so please try to remember to bring books back that day.

In numeracy we are continuing with subtraction – moving onto subtracting a single-digit from a 2-digit number, and subtracting multiples of 10.  In outer maths we have been looking at time.  Reading digital and analogue clocks – O’clock, half past, quarter past and quarter to.  While we are pretty good at it.  Some of us have to keep practising quarter to and quarter past and thinking about the size of the hands on the analogue clock to help us. maybe you could practise this at home and when you are out and about – can you find any clocks to read?

On Friday, we were consolidating counting to ten in French and learning how to read the number words in French.  We played some good games on the smartboard, sang some songs in French and then worked with a partner to match the words to the numbers and played a pairs game together.  At the end we played hangman with french words – it is amazing how well this helps to learn to read the words as the children begin to think about where the letters come in each word in order to be the first to guess correctly.  Lots of enthusiasm this morning – great work!

Have a good weekend everyone, more bright, cold days would be nice 🙂

P3B and Mrs Kennedy