Category: Primary 3

We had fun in the snow on Tuesday morning as we went out to enjoy it before it melted.  It was a lovely way to start the day with some daylight and fresh air 🙂

On Tuesday we did some planning to help us to write an imaginative story.  On our tree in the library corner a small door has appeared, our stories could be about anything that was behind that door.  We had a story starter:

On a quiet day, you can sometimes hear them. Every now and then, there’s a tapping or a scraping or a rustling from behind the door. Occasionally, movement can be glimpsed through the dark windows.  One day the door began to slowly creak open… 

We listened to sound effects of the door opening and took some time to put our imagination to work and think about what might be behind it.  We wrote our ideas on ‘grafitti walls’ to share them with others and to help our thoughts develop further. We then wrote notes on the beginning, middle and end of the story.  We also created our own word banks of descriptive words that we might need in our stories.  On Wednesday wrote stories using our notes.  They are certainly imaginative and I really enjoyed reading them.  We will continue to work on imaginative writing over the next couple of weeks, hopefully seeing progression as we further develop our story writing skills.

We learned more about healthy eating on Thursday, again focusing on where our food comes from.  We looked at dairy farming and examined some of the products we have in our supermarkets that begin as milk from the cows in dairy farms.  We also learned about how calcium is good for our teeth and bones.  We had some cheese, butter and oatcakes as a snack.

It is Scotland Loves Languages week next week and we are looking forward to a visit from our P7 Language Ambassadors who will teach a French lesson and we will be learning about French culture with Mrs Kennedy.

Enjoy the weekend, P3A and Mrs Kennedy

P3A are very much back in the swing of things this week.  In maths we have begun subtraction.  At the moment we are practising our mental subtraction through number talks and working hard to become more confident with missing number sums (eg, 18 – ___ = 7 or ___ – 5 = 12)  as quite a few of us were finding these tricky – we’re getting good at them now though!

In outer maths we have begun ‘time.’  We are working on telling the time using an analogue clock at the moment.  Focusing on half past and quarter past.  We also drew the hands on a clock face to represent these times too.  We have to remember that the little hand points to the hour and the big hand points to the minutes.  We will continue with this topic for the next few weeks.

All classes are changing their corridor wall displays at the moment and P3A chose ‘snow animals’ as their theme.  We have been learning about how some animals have adapted to survive in very cold climates, we have been learning about snow leopard, snowshoe hare, sika deer, arctic fox, bobcat and polar bear. In groups we did some reading for information, highlighting interesting facts.  We then used these notes to write a fact file.  These are very informative and will be great on our display.   We have been enjoying watching clips from a program on BBC iplayer called ‘Stunning Survivors: The Secret Skills of Snow Animals’  It has been very interesting and we have learned a lot about how animals survive extremely cold conditions – much better than us humans can!

We also created some artwork for the display.  When we were watching Stunning Survivors we saw the Northern Lights and decided to learn more about them.  We then created our own interpretations using water colour paint.  We also drew line drawings of a snow animal of our choice and glued them onto our Northern Lights backgrounds.  They are very effective and we worked hard to look at the animals looking at the lines, shapes and features and trying to recreate them in our drawing.

We read the book The Secret of the Kelpie by Lari Don, an adaptation of a traditional Scottish folk tale.  This led us to look at traditional Scottish designs.  In the Secret of the Kelpies there are some drawings carved into stone – shapes to represent objects and tell a story.  We decorated our own initial with Scottish patterns.  We also did a ‘Spot the Silly Word’ reflective reader task on a passage from the book, we read the passage carefully, spotted the silly words and suggested more suitable words to use in their place.  This really helps to increase our vocabulary as we work together, discussing possible words to use.

We now have music lessons with Ms Bain on a Thursday.  This week we were singing the Scottish song – Katie Bairdie, I haven’t heard it yet but I got very good feedback from Ms Bain on how well P3A sang 🙂

In PE we have begun a block on football.  We were improving our dribbling skills this week – trying to keep the ball close to our bodies and in control while we move around quickly.

Another great week, well done P3A.  Have a lovely weekend everyone.

Wow, what a fun, busy week!

I’ll just mention some of the highlights.  On Monday we had a technology afternoon.  We were set two challenges – the first was to build the highest tower possible using only newspaper and cellotape.  It had to stand unaided, with a platform at the top for a toy car.  The car had to balance on it for 10 seconds.  Every team fulfilled the brief and the winning team built a tower that was 57cm high!  The second challenge was to make elf shoes that fitted someone in your group.  They had to be able to come off and on and be strong enough to last in a parade around the classroom.  Every team succeeded and we got two children from P3B to judge the best looking shoe to help us to decide on a winner!

Our party on Tuesday was great.  It was like a real disco with cool lights and Mr Wells was our DJ, he played lots of good music and helped with instructions for the games.  We played pass the parcel, musical statues, Christmas corners and had a Christmas zumba dance to finish off.

A large bag of daffodil bulbs was recently donated to the school and Mrs Tucker (who usually helps us with reading) came in to do some planting with us on Thursday.  She could only stay for a while so she got us started and trained a few helpers to show the others what to do – thank you! Also, a big shout out to O, L and S who did an amazing job – helping all the children in both P3 and  P1 classes to plant some bulbs – thanks boys!  The plants are for the children to look after at home and hopefully they will see some flowers in Spring.

We sang so well at the Carols Around the Tree concert – especially as we we opened the show 😉 We had been practising hard and are very proud of ourselves.  We hope you enjoyed it.

Have a wonderful Christmas,

P3A and Mrs Kennedy

We are still working away in P3A, trying to keep as much normality as possible in these last two weeks before Christmas.   We have been continuing our learning of column addition, focusing on carrying this week.  To begin with we all sat together and worked through some addition problems, helping each other if we got a little stuck.  We have really enjoyed the challenge of these sums and by the end of the week we all got it.

‘Kindness’ was the theme for both our health and our writing lessons.  We watched the animation – Giraffes Can’t Dance and then went into groups to discuss how the animals reacted to Gerald, how Gerald felt, what advice we would give to the animals and possible solutions to make Gerald feel better about himself.   We then worked individually to draw a picture of ourselves and Gerald dancing, we then wrote some sentences of encouragement for Gerald.  The encouragement P3A gave him was fantastic!  For writing we wrote a ‘Recipe for a Good Friend’. On Tuesday we wrote grafitti walls of words about what qualities we look for in a friend. We used these words to make our own word banks. On Wednesday, we wrote our recipes, choosing the qualities we like most as our ingredients – almost as though we were baking a gingerbread friend. For the method we used ‘bossy verbs’ to give instructions. I’ve put a couple below so you can see what they’re like. They’re such lovely recipes and the children know what positive traits our friends should have.

We worked in groups to paint large pictures to decorate the school hall for the Carols Around the Tree event next week.  Each group could decide to paint any Christmas image they wanted – but they all had to agree on what it was, there was some compromising to be done but we got there and the pictures are looking really good.

On Wednesday, Mrs Kennedy’s neice came to visit. She lives in Saudi Arabia and she showed us a little film she made about her life there. We asked her lots of questions about living in a different country. She also taught us some Arabic. P3A were very welcoming, polite and kind and although she was pretty nervous she had a lovely afternoon and thought our school was great 🙂

I can’t believe it’s just a week until the holidays! We’re looking forward to our last week in school, the children’s excitement, although loud 😉 is lovely and we get carried along with it.

Have a good weekend, P3A and Mrs Kennedy

 

We have had a fun week in P3A, learning business and enterprise skills.  We  looked at product, pricing, marketing and selling as we prepared for the Christmas Fair.  We all worked very hard to make the items to sell on our stall:  Making reindeer food, Christmas tree decorations using wooden discs,  reindeer and snowmen lollipop holders.  We also bought some wristbands as they were quite cheap and we thought we could sell them for a good price and make some profit from them.

The other products were chosen as we were looking for some environmentally friendly goods to sell, with as little plastic as possible – our reindeer food does not have any glitter as it is plastic and not good for the environment – ours is entirely edible and birds might enjoy it as well as reindeer 🙂  They are in paper bags too and these can be recycled after use. The wooden discs are also all natural products.

As we were making the products we had to think about quality control and make sure they were as neat as possible and of good quality – no one would like to buy something that is falling apart or poorly made!  We were a great production team, the classroom was like a factory with everyone working hard on their job.

In our writing lesson, we learned about persuasive language.. We worked in teams to think of words and phrases that we could use to make signs that will make people want to buy each of our products.  They also had to show information about the product and clearly show the price too.  We also thought about reasonable prices to sell our goods at – taking into account the money spent to buy the resources.  Learning what a profit is.

On Thursday we had our school Christmas lunch. The lunch hall looked great and there was Christmas music playing too.  The food was lovely and we all had a good time.

As the hall was busy with Christmas lunches we had PE in the classroom again this week.  We did some Scottish country dancing, by popular demand (from some!)  The children have been learning Scottish dances with Mrs Reid and we had great fun and good exercise practicing them in class.

In numeracy, we continued with column addition sums and learned about making a profit or a loss when selling goods.

On Friday, we were very busy at the Christmas Fair – we worked hard on our stall, adding prices and working out change.  Some of us even went around the Fair with baskets of products and did really well.  We showed lots of confidence and had excellent sales chat!  We sold out of everything on our stall and we are looking forward to finding out from the PTA what our takings were.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the Fair today, it is always great fun and the children get so much out of having their own stall.

Have a lovely weekend, P3A and Mrs Kennedy

We said goodbye to James and his insect friends this week as we finished reading James and the Giant Peach.  The end of the story was really good and very funny – the poor people of New York did not know what was happening when a giant peach floated over the city!  We pretended to be journalists reporting on the story.  On Tuesday we learned about some of the features of a newspaper article, working in a group to identify the who, what, where, when and how in an article, as well as looking at the headline and some eye-witness quotes. We then wrote notes for our own article on James’ arrival into New York.  On Wednesday we wrote our own articles, they are really good, excellent information and descriptions of events.

In outer maths we made tables and drew bar charts on the colours of Smarties in one tube.  The main focus was the drawing of the bar chart – learning the words axis and axes, labelling them and giving our bar chart a title.  Everyone drew an accurate bar chart and we enjoyed the Smarties afterwards.

We enjoyed a visit to the school library this week.  We are hoping to visit each Wednesday so please bring back books then.

As part of Book Week Scotland and our own campaign to further engage the children in reading, we had another BEAR (Be excited about reading) event on Friday.  It was nice to read by torchlight, with an open ‘fire’ in the classroom, a different reading experience 🙂 We were very lucky to receive our Read, Write, Count bags on Friday too.

Thank you to everyone who handed in sticks, the teachers and support staff have been working hard this week to transform the corridor play area with lots of Stick Man related activities and even a family tree!  We have really been enjoying playing in the new areas and being Play Leaders there too.

That’s all for this week, have a good weekend, P3A and Mrs Kennedy 🙂