Author: Mrs Kennedy

A great start to the second term, we have  ‘hit the ground running’, as they say.  All the children have come back with lots of holiday news and are as eager to learn as always.

Our numeracy focus for the beginning of this term is addition.  We have been consolidating our number bonds to 20 and some have been adding multiples of 10 to 2-digit numbers.  We began with some problem solving – revisiting our prior knowledge to help us as we learn new things. We have enjoyed playing games on the smartboard and netbooks, these help us with our mental maths and recall of number facts.  We have also used text books; writing sums in our jotters and solving word problems.

In literacy, we have been concentrating on punctuation.  Although many of us know when to use capital letters, full stops, question marks and exclamation marks we sometimes forget to use them correctly when writing longer pieces of work.  We played a game call ‘Rapid Rounders’ on Education city – correcting lots of sentences, then we had a go at correcting sentences in our jotters. We will continue to discuss this and think about it when we are writing next week. In French, we began to learn parts of the body and will continue with this next week too.

On Tuesday, we had PE with P7 Sports Leaders who were teaching us ball skills.  They were good teachers and we enjoyed the session.  We also had PE with Mrs Kennedy on Thursday, our benchball skills are developing really well and we will be more than ready for the festival next month.

We have enjoyed comparing the climate in Australia to the Scottish climate.  We looked at weather websites and weather news reports from both countries, then created our own weather maps and presented them to the class in the style of TV weather reporters.  Each report was very professional and informative, with some wild weather on the way according to some!

Have a good weekend everyone, P3B and Mrs Kennedy

On Monday we learned that this year P3 will be in charge of the Shoebox appeal.  We will have to market the appeal, communicate it to parents and children and organise the shoe boxes as they begin to come into school as well as arrange to have them collected so they can set off on their travels to children less fortunate than ourselves.  It is quite a big task!  We began by making posters to let all children and staff know about the appeal.  Our posters were to be clear, eye-catching and have the correct information on them.  They are very good and are now ready to be distributed to classrooms around the school after the holiday.

We finished reading The BFG this week.  We have really enjoyed it and it was a fantastic exciting but happy ending!  We wrote our own blurbs and designed our own front covers – thinking about how we could entice others to pick up this book and choose to read it. Thay are all very good and thy would certainly make me want to read the book.

We were busy on Wednesday learning the very valuable skill of organising our work.  We sorted out our trays to make sure all work was neat and filed int he correct order.

We continued our Australian topic with some Indigenous artwork.  We learned about the history of very early Australian art – people told stories through pictures as they had no written language.  We tried our own dot paintings which turned out very well.

In maths, we began some data handling – we carried out a survey on our favourite Australian animals and then displayed this information in a bar chart – making sure to label the axes and give it a title.

On Friday we had a lovely Harvest assembly and our very first Committee meetings.

It was lovely to see so many of you this week, have a lovely October break.

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

P3B have worked very hard this week.  In numeracy we were learning how to estimate on a number line.  We discussed the importance of learning this skill and how it can be used in our everyday lives, for example, when we are measuring or weighing ingredients or using a thermometer.  We estimated individually and also challenged each other to place numbers on large number lines – one from 1 to 100 and one from 0 to 1000.  We also looked at number lines on different measuring and weighing equipment.  We worked hard to explain to others our thoughts as we made our estimations , verbalising the reasoning behind our decisions.  It is good to say our maths thoughts out loud and we learn from each other by doing this.

We have been continuing our research on Australia.  Thank you to D, H and A who brought in some Australian items and photos from home.  We have enjoyed looking at them and learning a bit more about them. I also brought in some Australian story books which we have enjoyed listening to.

During our planning for our Australia topic, quite a few of the questions were about Australian animals.  This week we have been learning a lot more about animals native to Australia and have each begun a ‘Fact File’  We have drawn our animals – looking carefully to make our line drawings as accurate as possible.

We also begun using the internet to search for information.  We have been thinking of good questions and key words to type into the search engine.  We also tried to find child friendly websites that had information that we could read and understand to allow us to take notes.  The Fact Files are really beginning to take shape and we have learned a lot of interesting facts through our research.

We continued to learn colours in French this week.  Last week we begun to say the colours and this week we were also reading and writing them.  We had fun making ‘fortune tellers.’ We wrote the colours on the top in French, spelling the french words out as we played with them.  We also tried an additional challenge to  say as many of the numbers as possible in French and to count in French too.

This is just a taster of our busy week.  I’m looking forward to seeing you all next week at Parents Night – I can’t believe how quickly we are racing towards the October holiday!

Enjoy the weekend.

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

This term the children are learning about Literature Circle roles to allow them to take part in discussions about text rather than just reading the words.

This week they were looking at the job of the ‘Summariser.’ This means to tell a shorter version of the story, selecting the main points.  They have summarised Goldilocks and the Three Bears, a passage from the The BFG and The Tale of Peter Rabbit.  The Tale of Peter Rabbit  writing was for Miss Baillie’s corridor display and everyone worked very hard on their summary.  Please stop and have a read when you are in school.

We also made paper flowers for the display.  It was quite tricky but good fun using card to shape the petals and stem.  They look fantastic on the wall.

In numeracy, we have continued our work on place value, continuing to partition and order numbers according to the value of their digits.

On Thursday we began some outer maths, extending our learning on symmetry this week.  We were using a mirror to find lines of symmetry and drawing mirror images.  We will continue to do some outer maths each Thursday.

In our class novel, The BFG, there has been a lot about dream catching and dream jars.  The children particularly liked the part where The BFG put a nightmare into the nose of the Fleshlumpeater and all his wriggling about started a fight with all the other giants!  The children made their own Dream Jars on Thursday as part of a lesson on density and chemical reactions.  It was really good fun and our dream jars looked really cool.  They thought about density – why the oil sank initially and then floated to the top.  They also enjoyed making their dreams fizz with the little bubbles of gas created by the Vitamin C effervescent tablets.

In PE this week we did a bit of yoga.  It wasn’t quite as quiet as a normal yoga class, as the children were excited at holding positions and wobbling about quite a lot!  They worked really hard though and the relaxation session at the end was lovely – great breathing!

Enjoy the weekend everyone.

From P3B and Mrs Kennedy

Hello, another packed week in P3B.

In literacy, the children had reading on Monday, they began to read the books they were taking home, we have been reading these together throughout the week too.  The children also wrote descriptions of themselves using fantastic adjectives, making word banks first to allow them to think carefully about the words they could use. The descriptions are very good.  They  also did some work on punctuation; how to use question marks correctly.

In numeracy, we have been learning about place value and partitioning numbers.  We have played different games to help our understanding and have started to use our new maths jotters with squared paper – learning how to lay out our number work correctly.  They are looking great!

On Thursday the children got the chance to be ‘Play Leaders.’  In small groups, they visited the P1 classrooms, assisting them with their activities and modelling good play.  The P3 children helped with turn taking and sharing, gave them ideas and helped them to really engage in the play.  They showed all 5 of our school values and really enjoyed themselves too!

We have been looking a little more at trees – the trunk and branches this week.  In art we looked at the shapes and forms of the branches and used bright colours to create eye catching pictures.  The colouring was quite restful too, a good bit of mindfulness 🙂

Our Superhero Class Charter is really coming on, just needing a title now!

At Assembly on Friday we were presented with ‘Peggy Bear.’  She will stay with us in P3 for the week.  We won her for walking quietly and sensibly through the school.  We have been working hard at being good role models for the younger children and it is being noticed!  Great work P3B 🙂

Have a great weekend.

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

What a great first week we’ve had in P3B.  It is lovely to see so many familiar faces and some new ones too – a very welcome addition to the class and everyone has settled in well.

We began the week reminding ourselves of Springfield School Values – Resilient, Kind, Confident, Included and Respectful.  The children remembered the actions well as you can see from the photo’s!  They worked in groups to design a poster showing one of the values.  They worked well together and I was very pleased with the final results. They now take pride of place at the entrance to our classroom.

As part of our outdoor learning topic ‘trees’, and to allow us to finish off the tree we have in our reading corner, we went outside to do a leaf identification task. We then brought the leaves inside and learned a bit more about why trees need leaves.  We looked at them very carefully through magnifying glasses to see all the parts close up.  Then we did line drawings and hung them on our tree.  Our classroom tree is now looking great 🙂 A nice quiet corner for us.

We have been enjoying our class novel ‘The BFG’.  This week we have worked on activities about ‘Appearance Vs Personality’ and adjectives.  Roald Dahl is very good with his character descriptions – we are trying to be as good or better!

We have had PE twice this week, with Mrs Reid on Wednesday and we me on Thursday.  The focus for my PE lessons this term will be handball as we will be attending a cluster P3 handball festival in a couple of months.

We also looked at the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, including looking at a coupe of annimations to help us to understand them. We discussed the ones that apply to school and education,  then children voted on what they would like our display to look like – they chose superheros. We will work on making our Rights Respecting School display next week.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend – nice to see the sun back again.

P3B and Mrs Kennedy