Category: Primary 3

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 🙂