Category: Whole School

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 🙂

We began the week with a Remembrance Day assembly, we took some time to learn about why we have Remembrance Day and why we wear poppies.  In class there was some paint and red paper, card and other art materials for us to make our own poppies at Learning Through Play time.  At 11am the whole school had 2 minutes silence and we were all very sensible and respectful.

In numeracy, we are still adding 2 digit and 3 digit numbers.  On Wednesday, we worked on quick recall of doubles to help us with our mental addition.  We warmed up by rolling a die with a partner and quickly doubling the number shown.  We then used these skills to double larger numbers, e.g. 42+42.  Some children had a very competitive game of ‘Mathopoly’, each space has an addition sum on it and points are given for working out the answer mentally, there were also chance and challenge cards too so sometimes we lost points!

In science we started making our ‘forces’ models.  Each model had to be something in a playground that involves a force.  There are some very good ideas – rope slides using gravity, climbing frames that you need to pull yourself up, swings that you need to use your body to push.  Although these were started on Tuesday with Mrs Begarnie, we have worked on them every day, to finish them so we can present our model to the class next Tuesday.  Lots of great teamwork, discussion, problem solving, negotiation and decision making going on.  Every child can explain their model well and the forces used either by the play equipment and/or the person using it.

For Reflective Reading this week we read a comic strip and answered some comprehension questions with a partner, we had to read carefully to find all the information.  We also had to answer a couple of inference questions where we had to think about how the characters were feeling.

We are changing our infant play area next week and have chosen the Stick Man  by Julia Donaldson as our theme.  Mrs Hocknull read it to all P1 to P3 children and then in our classes we decided what play areas we would like based on the story.  There are some great ideas and teachers will be working with the children next week to get this set up.

Our writing this week was also based on the Stick Man story.  We had to summarise the main points, in the correct order and then create a comic strip.  These are absolutely fantastic, I’m looking forward to putting them on display so everyone can see our hard work.  Everyone was so quiet when were writing and some were asking for quiet music, so we put on the music from Blue Planet.  It was a lovely relaxing afternoon.  Some of us have began to write Further Adventures of Stick Man, creating our own comic strips.

We finished off the week with a lovely assembly all about Kindness.  Have a good weekend, P3A and Mrs Kennedy 🙂

 

 

Another busy, busy week.  We began the week continuing our grammar work.  Over the past few weeks we have been learning about nouns – proper and common nouns and have been trying to remember to use capital letters when writing a proper noun.

In Science with Mrs Begarnie we furthered our research on forces.  Mrs Begarnie left some forces resources in the classroom for us to use during our ‘Learning Through Play’ time.  We have had great fun making steeper and steeper ramps!  We have also tested different surfaces and tried our which works best to allow our cars to move well.

On Wednesday, we really enjoyed having some parents and other family members in the classroom to see some of our numeracy work.  We worked in groups at different problem solving activities, sharing our strategies and understanding as we talked to each other.

We collected an amazing 60 shoe boxes in our Shoe Box appeal!  They were collected on Wednesday and are now on their way around the world to children less fortunate than us, there are going to be 60 very happy children – a big thanks to Springfield families for supporting this 🙂

 

We continued our ‘Reflective Reading’ with a ‘Jigsaw Jumble’ on Thursday.  Our activity was based on our Outdoor Learning topic – The Life Cycle of an Oak Tree – (although we didn’t actually get outdoors as the weather was so awful!) We are now really good at explaining the life cycle – ask us!  We worked in groups to sort out sentences that had been cut in half.  This wasn’t as easy as it sounds – we looked for capital letter and full stops to sort the writing into which strips were at the beginning of the sentence and which were endings.  We then had to read really carefully to check which parts went together to make sense, checking tenses and singular and plural words as we worked.  Every single group managed this task really well – all got 7 out of 7 sentences correct!  We had some visitors from Norway in the classroom during this lesson too, they came to visit Springifled as they had heard about all our wonderful children and they were very impressed 🙂

A few weeks ago P7 set us a challenge to design new pictures to put on our school House display.  We looked very closely and the houses – Ochiltree, Hopetoun, Binns and Champfleurie and drew excellent line drawings to submit for the competition.  The winners will be put on display in the corridor.

On Friday, we had another French lesson on fruits, it is always good to revisit these words often so we really remember them.  We played some games on the smartboard, a corners game and a fun ‘line bingo’ game.  Our vocabulary is getting really good.

Have a good weekend everyone, P3A and Mrs Kennedy

The October holidays are now a distant memory and we have had a busy couple of weeks in P3A.

Last week we learned about the volcanoes on the Hawaiian islands. At the beginning of our geography topic the children planned what they would like to learn about and volcanoes was high on the list.  Actually,  without volcanoes Hawaii wouldn’t exist – the islands emerged from the sea millions of years ago forged by volcanic power.  We studied Kilauea more in depth – it is a volcano on the ‘Big Island’ and has been constantly erupting since 1983.  To help us to understand of how volcanoes work we got some really good information from the Reachout Reporter website –  we use this in class each Friday to watch the latest weekly science news from around the world, the website address is www.reachoutreporter.com it is really worth a look.

Although we couldn’t recreate an actual volcano we did some chemistry and experimented with the reaction between vinegar  and baking soda – creating carbon dioxide and making explosions of our own!  As part of this lesson we learned how to carry out a proper science experiment and we wrote a science report, writing about the equipment, method, possible hazards, prediction, what actually happened and what we learned from it.  It was messy but great fun!

To finish off our Hawaiian topic we researched and produced a final piece of writing.  Our job was to write a tourism leaflet to tell people about the best tourist attractions in Hawaii and to encourage people to go there.  Everyone worked really hard and they are all fantastic – eye-catching front covers, lots of good information, laid out really neatly – well done P3.  They made me really want to visit Hawaii!

One of jobs P3 do each year is to organise the Shoe Box Appeal, we launched this last week and worked in groups to make posters to let the rest of the school know about the appeal.  This week, we visited classrooms and told them about the appeal too.  We were all very confident speaking to other classes and lots of teachers have commented on how well we did 🙂 We have quite a few boxes already, please hand any others in on Monday, 4th November.

In numeracy, we are continuing to learn different methods of adding 2 digit numbers.  We have looked at adding multiples of 10, using this knowledge to add near multiples of 10 (9, 11, 19, 21…)  and how to add  teen numbers to a 2 digit number, by adding the 10 then the unit.  We often use 100 squares to help us, Splat Square is a good online one.  In outer maths we are now learning about information handling.  Next week in homework jotters there will be a numeracy homework sheet for term 2 with suggested activities.

In reading we have been working  on becoming ‘reflective readers.’  At the moment we are working on understanding what we are reading and increasing our vocabulary.  Last week we did an activity called ‘Blankety Blank’ where we read an extract from James and Giant Peach – there were some words missing and we had to fill in the blanks with the correct word and then think of other words that would also make sense.  This week we did a ‘Spot the Silly Word’ activity.  This was based on the book Funnybones.  Mrs Kennedy typed some of the book but she changed some of the words to silly words and we had to spot them, we then had to suggest a sensible word.  These are paired activities and as well as reading there is lots of good discussion about words and their meanings.

The highlight of this week was the Halloween party, we all looked really scary in our costumes.  The party began with a spooky story read by Mr Wells – who really got into character!  We played a team game where we had to make the best mummy using toilet roll and played a spooky corners game.  We then had a snack with our friends.  A big thank you to the PTA for organising the food and drinks and helping on the day.

On Friday, we did some French – learning how to say the names of some fruits.  We do a little French each day, including counting, ordering our lunch, classroom instructions and lots of French songs.  We really do pick up the words quickly!

Also on Friday, P1 came to visit to play a pumpkin game.  We worked in teams, rolling a dice and drawing part of a pumpkin according to the number on the dice.  The winners were the ones who drew all the parts first!  It was a fast and furious game and I was really please with how well P3 showed P1 how to play and they took turns really well.  We had lots of sibling teams too 🙂

Have a great weekend everyone – enjoy any bonfires and fireworks.  Stay safe.

P3A and Mrs Kennedy