Author: Mrs Kennedy

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

Well, what a quick term!  P3B have worked extremely hard all term and continued to do so this week.

We had a ‘Kindness Advent Calendar’ in the classroom with messages behind each door to make us think about kindness, particularly in the run up to Christmas.  We began by asking someone new to play with us on Monday, then gave three compliments to someone on Tuesday.  On Wednesday, we were to carry out a random act of kindness at any point throughout the day.  On Thursday we discussed the importance of being kind to ourselves.  We wrote 5 things that we like about ourselves and discussed the importance of doing things that make us happy and being with people that make us happy.  Finally on Friday, we made a card to say thank you to someone in the class that had been kind to us.  It has been a lovely thing to do  and the children have been enthusiastic, we wrote any special acts of kindness on post-its and put them together in a tin, as the week went on it was great to see the tin filling up.

In maths we have been tiling – not as easy as it sounds!  We were using 2D shapes to explore how different shapes fit together and made repeating patterns using more than one shape. It is tricky to make a pattern using different shapes and leave no gaps! We’re getting very good at it though, anyone needing their bathroom tiled…?

You should hopefully have received a Christmas card from your child – if not please search the bottom of their bag!  we made cards using strips of paper of different lengths and worked out how to place them to make the shape of a Christmas tree.  Everyone worked carefully to do a good job.  They are very effective.

The disco on Wednesday was a big hit – here’s a photo of us just before we went along.

On Thursday we did Basic Moves in PE.  Basic Moves is designed to help children develop many different gross motor skills that can be used in many different sports.  It is also a good cardio work out.

Throughout the week we have been learning about how Christmas is celebrated in different countries around the world.  Then, in pairs, we chose a country to research and made powerpoint presentations to show our findings.  We presented these to the class.  I have been very impressed with the children’s ever-improving ICT skills as well as the content in the presentations.  We all learned a lot and this was a very interesting activity to do.  As always, our presentation skills were very good.

We also enjoyed singing at the ‘Carols Around the Tree’ service. We had been practising hard and it was good fun singing in front of a big audience.

Have a wonderful Christmas everyone and Happy New Year when it comes.

                            P3B and Mrs Kennedy xxx

This week I have been trying to balance Christmas fun with learning and keeping our routine.  We began the week with our normal spelling lesson although the children chose the activities that they like best to practise their words.  We also had a lesson on ‘fact and opinion.’  When answering reading comprehension questions we sometimes find it tricky to give our our opinion.  We could choose various ways of showing our understanding – worksheets with highlighters, large sheets where we could work with others and games where we sorted facts from opinions.  This is something we will continue to work on through reading comprehension activities.

We did some Christmas art on Tuesday, making spiral snowmen.  This was good fun and we even managed to discuss a little about the effects of gravity on our spirals.  These will be coming home soon.

In maths we used our addition skills to play different games – a racing track board game, snakes and ladders, bingo and smartboard games.  It was fun and quite noisy but there was lots of good maths going on!

On Wednesday we finished off our Forces topic with Mrs McVay by making kites and flying them outside.  Typically after all the windy weather we have had there was very little wind that day!  They still flew though 🙂

We had a great time at Jack and the Beanstalk Pantomime on Thursday.  It was a really good show, full of lots of laughs and we loved when Mr Wells had to go on the stage and get married to Jack’s mum!  There was lots of singing and dancing too – a very good Christmas treat!

We hear there is snow on the way this weekend – have a good one everyone!

From P3B and Mrs Kennedy

 

What a busy week!  I suspect this may be the way of things for the next few weeks too as we begin our Christmas preparations.  We have begun production of items for our stall at the Christmas Fair.  We will be selling Reindeer lollipops and wooden christmas tree decorations.  We have also been working on our business skills – working out how much each item has cost to make and deciding on a good selling price to make a profit – but not too expensive that no one will buy them!

We have also entered Tesco ‘Design a Snowman’ competition – using the template given to us by Tesco, we have come up with some pretty funky designs.  Winners will be announced next week and even if none of us win anything I’m certain our designs will really brighten up the store – please keep an eye out for them in window.

In science with Mrs McVay we have been continuing to explore forces.  We learned about friction this week and got to use some great equipment with lots of different surfaces to see what works for fast movement and which materials will slow things down.  We have also been playing with these resources throughout the week as we learn best when we are given time to investigate and try out our own ideas and increase our understanding.

We had a go at a tricky problem solving task on Thursday.  Mr Zuckerman (Charlotte’s Web) had just been to market and he was counting his profits, he had to sort his coins into 3 bags, there were several different problems, but the one most of us looked at was:

Mr Zuckerman has 10 gold coins, he sorts them into three money bags.  The first bag has three fewer gold coins than the second bag.  The second bag has two more gold coins than the third bag.  The second bag has an odd number of coins inside.  How many coins are in each bag?  

How quickly can parents work this one out? Test them!

In addition to practising our numeracy skills, we were also looking at good ways to approach problem solving.  Usually Mrs Kennedy tells us how to solve maths problems but not this time! We used the RUDE method!  Read, Underline, Draw, Estimate.  Working on maths activities like this one was quite new to most of us and it is something we will be doing more regularly as it is important to practise the skills required then questions like these are not so scary and we know how to approach them.

As many of you will remember, Mrs Kennedy is a big fan of learning through play.  This is planned play with a specific set of learning outcomes.  It is so important to a child’s development as it is a great way to develop many of the skills that are likely to be required in the world of work that the children will go onto: creativity, complex problem solving, STEM skills, people skills and critical thinking to name a few.   This week we have been trying weaving and sewing.  Not only is it very good for fine motor development and creativity, it also requires patience, problem solving, as well as resilience and it is a bit of mindfulness too.  The children have been really engaged in this (far more than I actually thought they would be!) It hasn’t always worked first time but they have kept at it 🙂

 

We are looking forward to seeing you at the Christmas Fair next Friday, all profits from our stall can be spent by the class so we’re hoping for a successful day.

Have a good weekend, P3B and Mrs Kennedy

Following on from Miss Baillie’s assembly on kindness on Friday, the whole school have had an Anti-Bullying focus this week.

This has tied in very well with our book study too as we learn about the value of friendship through Charlotte and Wilber.

On Monday, we began to think about the qualities that make a good friend.  We thought about our best friends and why we like them; is it the way they behave or maybe the way they make us feel?  Is it the things we enjoy doing together that make us good friends?  Is it because we are very different but our differences complement each other?

We played a pairs game to begin our discussion.  The cards had pictures and sentences showing attributes of a good friend.  This was good fun and we had some good group discussion too.  Then we each wrote notes on the qualities that we look for in a friend.

On Tuesday, we used these notes to write ‘A Recipe for a Good Friend.’  The words we had on our list from Monday helped us to write them.  Mrs Kennedy had a lovely time reading the recipes, the children worked hard on them and each one had the perfect ingredients to make a good friendship.

We have also been celebrating our differences this week, we had a great discussion when thinking about what the world would be like if everyone was the same. We spent some time discussing what the consequences would be if everyone in the world was a fantastic builder but they couldn’t do anything else.  We would have no doctors, farmers, teachers, scientists, artists… We came to the conclusion that it just wouldn’t work, we need everyone’s different skills and qualities to make life interesting, much more fun and actually to allow us to survive!  Without talking to anyone else we wrote down what our personalities are like and our very favourite things to do.  We decorated handprints to celebrate all the things that are unique to us.   They really are very good and I can see all the children’s personalities reflected in their work.

I actually took a couple of photo’s of maths this week!  The children are continuing their addition work, improving mental maths methods of adding 2-digit numbers.  One of their favourite things to do is to be the teacher  and explain how to solve problems to the class.  It is really good for me too as I can observe how well they are picking up the skills I am teaching.

We had a great time at the benchball festival at Linlithgow Academy on Thursday.  It was good to meet children from every school in our cluster.  It was a very busy afternoon and we each played a lot of games.  The children showed excellent teamwork and put all of the skills we have been learning into practise.  Their behaviour was very good too, they showed all the Springfield values and were very good representatives of Springfield School.

I think we have earned some well-deserved rest this weekend.  Thanks for reading our post, P3B and Mrs Kennedy

As we continue our study of Charlotte’s Web, we began the week looking at some vocabulary from the book.  We learned dictionary skills, using our knowledge of the alphabet.  We practised together at first then we worked on individual tasks; looking up tricky words and writing down the definition.

Also on the theme of Charlotte’s Web, we have been looking at farming, in particular the different types of farms we have in Scotland and the food and produce that comes from each.  We also investigated the foods that are made from farm produce, e.g., cereal, yoghurts, meat pies, bread, etc. Here are some pictures of our shops and farmer’s markets full of products made from farm produce.

On Tuesday, we began to learn about using speech marks when writing direct speech.  We learned the rules of how to use them, then chose which way we would like to practice using them.  There were 3 activities to choose from: 1. Write out a story changing the text in speech bubbles to direct speech, using speech marks correctly.  2. Copy sentences on a whiteboard – writing the speech marks in the correct places and ask a friend to check it before rubbing it  out and moving on to the next sentence. 3. Find sentences in your reading book which feature speech marks, copy the sentences onto the graffiti wall.

For a first attempt we all did very well, we were enthusiastic and all managed to use speech marks in some format.  There was a lot to remember.  We are good at spotting where the speech marks should go, we need to remember the other rules of punctuation and continue to use full stops, question marks and exclamation marks correctly – inside the speech marks. We also need to remember to take a new line every time a new person speaks.  We will continue to practise this over the next few weeks.

On Thursday Wilber met Charlotte in Chapter 4 of our novel.  After lunch when we arrived back in to our classroom, our Charlotte had spun ‘Salutations’ into our classroom web.  We are looking forward to hearing how Charlotte and Wilbur’s friendship develops next week.  We then made our own spiders webs.  We practised using different types of lines – straight and curved to make the shapes we needed.  Some children chose to colour using a paint wash and some chose to make colourful webs using oil pastels.  Drawing the lines was tricky to begin with and we had to be quite resilient and keep trying to draw the outside of the web.  The results are very good and I’m looking forward to putting them up in the classroom.

Next week, we are looking forward to the benchball festival and will be reading more of Charlotte’s Web, thinking about the friendship between Charlotte and Wilber and how we can be good friends to each other.

Have a nice weekend, P3B and Mrs Kennedy 🙂

 

 

 

 

Primary 3 would like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who contributed to our Shoe Box Appeal.  It was World Kindness Day on Tuesday and  kindness is one of our very important values at Springfield, this has certainly been shown by our community too. We were overwhelmed by the kindness of Springfield families and 90 shoe boxes are now on their way to children in areas of the world where they will be very much welcomed.

Miss Harrison and Mrs Kennedy would also like to commend both P3 classes who took their roles very seriously, communicating very well with classes throughout the school and working hard to collect and organise the boxes when they arrived.

P3, Miss Harrison and Mrs Kennedy X

‘Remember, Remember the 5th of November!’  We began the week learning a little about Guy Fawkes and then watched some films and looked at pictures of fireworks.  We drew our own interpretations of what we saw, thinking about colour, patterns and shapes.  I’m sure you will agree the results are fantastic.  All of the pictures are now on our classroom wall and they have really livened it up.

On Tuesday, a visitor arrived in the corner of our classroom in the form of a friendly spider called Charlotte.  We have begun to read the novel ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and were very relieved in the first chapter when Fern saved Wilber the pig!  Wilber has just moved to a new farm and at the moment has no friends, we think he may meet a special friend very soon.

On Wednesday we had a ‘Big Spell’ event in school where family members were invited in to see our spelling lessons.  As we do twice a week, we had different spelling stations for us to choose from to allow us to practise our spelling words in various ways.

On Thursday we did a ‘setting’ activity based on Charlotte’s Web.  We listened to an extract from Chapter 3 which described the barn that Wilber has just moved to.  We then chose an activity to show our understanding of the setting.  Some of us wrote about it, some drew detailed pictures and some built it using Lego.  All of the children now have a good understanding of what a ‘setting’ is and I could tell they listened well as they added a lot of detail in each of the tasks.

The 22nd November is not far away and we are continuing to prepare for our Benchball Festival.  We had some really close games and I can see that our skills are improving all the time.  This week we thought about our positioning and tried to find spaces to allow our teammates to pass the ball to us.

As we approach a very special Armistice Day with the 100th Anniversary of the end of the First World War, we have been learning the ‘Poppy Story’ which has helped us to understand why we wear poppies at this time of year.  We also had our own poppy factory at Golden Time on Friday.  The children used different resources to create their own poppies – with great results!

We also learned a little about communication during the war as our problem solving task this week was to use morse code to decode a secret message.  We also looked at several other methods of communication during the first and second world wars, the children were all very interested and engaged in this.

In numeracy, we are continuing our work on addition, although we are adding 2-digit numbers, remembering our number bonds within 10 helps us with this work.  If you are trying a maths games next week for homework, number bonds games would be a good idea.

In Science with Mrs McVay we were learning about the eight planets in the Solar System and began to learn the correct order for them.  The children completed a scavenger hunt to find the names of the planets and then grouped them into the rocky planets and the gas giants.  They listened to ‘The Planets’ by Holst and tried to identify which part of the music represented what planet.  Some children have been drawing the solar system in their free play time – a sure sign they have and enjoyed and understood the lessons 🙂

Friday was the deadline for our Shoebox Appeal.  We have been overwhelmed by how generous Springfield families have been.  There will be a special blog about it next week but a big thank you to those who handed something in 🙂

Have a great weekend, from P3B and Mrs Kennedy

In literacy this week we have been learning several different skills.  As well as our usual spelling lessons, we have had a lesson on expressing our likes and dislikes about a text, giving reasons why we have these opinions. This is quite a tricky skill and we will continue to practise.  We have been adding our reading books to the school total for the First Mininsters Book Challenge, as we do this it is important that we can discuss what the books are about and give our opinion on the book.

We further developed our letter writing skills as we wrote letters to children in Australia.  As Mrs Kennedy has a friend who teaches in a school in Ferny Creek, Melbourne, she thought it would be good for us to write to children in an Australian school to find out about the differences and similarities between growing up in Australia and growing up in Scotland.   In our letters we introduced ourselves and wrote a little about what we enjoy at school as well as our hobbies and interests outside of school.  We also got the opportunity to ask lots of questions.  Mrs Kennedy will post the letters at the weekend and we hope to receive some replies soon.

On Tuesday we furthered our research on Australian landscapes.  We chose either the Great Barrier Reef or Ayres Rock and then carried out some research and created a powerpoint to show the information.  We presented our findings to the rest of the class.  We were very lucky to have some children from P7 to help with our research and they were also a fantastic help in creating our powerpoints.  They made sure they showed us what to do as well us letting us try for ourselves rather than do all the work for us!  The P3s and P7s worked very well together and Mrs Kennedy was very impressed (I could almost have gone for a cup of tea and let them get on with it!)

In numeracy, we have continued our work on addition, learning different methods of adding a two-digit number and a single digit and some have been adding two two-digit numbers.

We have had the excitement of Halloween this week too.  We all had fun at the party, playing lots of games and enjoying a Halloween snack.  A big thank you to the PTA and our compare, Miss Baillie.

In music with Mrs Bain, we have been creating musical magic spells!  We chose  instruments to create atmospheric sounds to tell the story of The Witch’s Magic Potion. We followed conducting signals, including crescendos and diminuendos to control the volume. As well as being great musicians we learned a little Italian too!

We have been busy spreading the message about our Shoe Box Appeal, encouraging children and teachers throughout the school to bring in shoe boxes or items for shoe boxes.  We would be very grateful for any items you have.

Have a lovely weekend, stay safe and enjoy any fireworks you may see, P3B and Mrs Kennedy