Category: Primary 4

Everyone has been very busy since returning from our half-term holiday. Here is a round-up of some of the things we have been learning about over the last 2 short weeks.

It has been another busy week in P4a. In Numeracy we have continued our work on multiplication with Mrs Donald and Mrs Doyle. We have been multiplying up to 3 digit numbers by 10 or 100. We are trying hard to remember to think about the digits moving the correct number of steps to the left before we add any zeros to the end of the number. This will help us in  our future learning when we work with decimals.

In Health & Wellbeing we have been continuing to learn about emotions using the Emotion Works cogs. We have already looked at the orange Emotion Words cog to help us extend the range of vocabulary we use to describe feelings and emotions. This week we looked at the red Body Sensations cog and thought about where in the body we might feel different emotions and what these body sensations are. We worked well in small groups to label or illustrate a body template with some body sensations for an emotion e.g. pounding heart when we are scared, butterflies in our tummy when we are worried.

In French we have been learning to name parts of the body. We have enjoyed singing ‘Tête, épaules, genoux et pieds’. We played ‘Jacques a dit’ to practise recognising our new vocabulary.

Tuesday was a very exciting day! Primary 4a and Primary 4b were lucky enough to have two Viking visitors, Cathbad and Sigurd, from Cluaran. They brought lots of interesting Viking artefacts with them and set up their camp in our library. We enjoyed listening to their storytelling about Viking life and heard lots of interesting information which will help us in our learning about the Vikings.

After break we split into groups to rotate around different activities. Cathbad and Sigurd let us have a closer look at the items they had brought and told us more about life as a Viking. We worked in pairs to make clay playing pieces for a board game called the Game of Sea Kings. We then challenged our partner to a game. Mrs Donald was really impressed by how quickly we picked up the rules. With Mrs Burton, we looked at and drew some of the items that were commonly buried with Vikings when they died. We learned that the types of items found at a burial site can give us information about a Viking’s status.

In the afternoon we went outside to learn more about how Vikings built their settlements and travelled to other lands by playing ‘Settlers to Sea Kings’. We worked in teams to collect everything we needed to build our village. We had to remember to protect our village at all times, even when some people were away travelling over land or sea to collect items. Some teams discovered that unprotected villages are easily visited by Viking raiders and they lost some of the resources they had worked hard to gather!

Our day ended with the opportunity to have a closer look at some Viking shields and swords and a musical instrument called a lyre. Some of us even tried on some heavy chainmail armour. What an amazing, action-packed Viking day!!

Comics and the Batcave in P4a

P4 a have had a very busy week. In Literacy we have had a focus on comics and graphics novels. We created a Batcave for our class library and have been reading comics in class. We enjoyed reading Dave Pilkey’s Dog Man so decided to make our own Dog Man comic strips. The first thing we had to do was learn how to draw Dog Man and Lil Petey. We watched tutorials on You Tube. Mrs Hocknull was very impressed and thought everyone made a better job than she did!

Next we learnt about different types of thought, speech and scream bubbles, caption words and jagged splats for action words. We only took 12 minutes to plan our comics! We were all very inventive and Dog Man was attacked by an evil toaster, stranded on a deserted island and fought evil powers in the city! We also designed our own front covers. Our comic strips are going to be made into a giant book to put in our class library so we can all read each other’s.

Once we were finished writing our comics, we used Stop Motion on the ipads to make our own animation movies. We had to make our own Play Doh characters which was tricky. We learnt that it takes real patience and perseverance to make an animation movie!

Mrs Hocknull was very impressed with everyone who went home and made their own comic strips and animation movies! Well done!

For reading this week we explored a text about Charles Rennie MacKintosh. It was all jumbled up and we had to work in pairs to sort it out into the correct order. We read it through to check for meaning and then made short notes about his life. Then we used Chatterpix on the ipads to record a mini autobiography, pretending to be Charles Rennie MacKintosh! We had lots of fun during this lesson.

Mrs Fleming also did a comprehension lesson focussing on literal questioning, meaning the answer is literally in front of you in the text! We used skimming and scanning skills to look for the answer. Next week, we will be working on deductive questioning. This means you have to ‘read between the lines’ and look a bit harder for the answer as it’s not so obvious!

As next week is Scots Week, we will be learning a Scottish poem for homework for our Scots Assembly on Friday. Look out for this in school bags!

In art we designed our own tartans and used oil pastels to complete these. Then we used a stencil of a Scottish animal which we covered with zentangle patterns in black pen. We cut these out and stuck them in the centre of our tartan designs. They are very effective.

Mrs Doyle, our new Support for Learning teacher, taught us for Numeracy this week. Mrs Doyle will be working across the two P4 classes to support raising attainment in Numeracy for the whole term. Mrs Doyle focussed on multiplication this week.

Mrs Hocknull taught us for Maths. We revised what we knew about data handling by answering questions about data that we were given. We had to use addition and subtraction to calculate the answers.

We had lots of different Number Talks sessions this week. We particularly enjoyed The Cookie Monster https://gfletchy.com/the-cookie-monster/  We had to work out which of the 4 operations to use to calculate how many cookies the cookie monster had eaten. We were given one clue at a time to help us. It was really tricky!

On Thursday we had NYCOS. We will have this every Thursday afternoon. We also had our first PE session with Mrs Reid.

During assembly last week Mrs Hocknull talked about our school values and we watched the short Pixar movie, Birds on a Wire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2PJ6T7U2eU. We spotted lots of school values in the movie. Mrs Hocknull set the school a challenge to think of a New Year’s resolution related to the playground and design our own ‘Birds on a Wire’ for our window. You should be able to see these in all our classroom windows from the playground.

After a very busy week, we continued our learning during Learning Through Play time. We were challenged to build something symmetrical. Mrs Hocknull was amazed!

Another great week in P4a. Have a lovely weekend.

Mrs Hocknull

Next Week

• Miss McAlpine will be absent all week. Mrs Hocknull will be in Monday and Tuesday. Mrs Fleming for the rest of the week
• Please watch out for home learning overview and new home learning grids coming home on 20.1.20
• Please note new P6 and P7 show dates in the learning overview