Dear families of P5A,

We have had yet another wonderful (and very short) week!

When we arrived back on Wednesday morning, the class took on the challenge of writing a procedure to tell others how to play their favourite game. We had lots of fun explaining and reminding each other of the steps and rules of our favourite games and some pupils even designed their own new games! We also discussed what we mean by ‘bossy’ words and how these can be helpful when writing the steps of a procedure.

After break we had numeracy where we were using our knowledge of rounding to help us estimate an approximate answer to a problem. To begin our thinking around this, Miss Ventisei placed tape all over the classroom and tables and we held a mini competition to see who could correctly estimate the approximate length of each piece of tape. After we had all estimated, the rulers were brought out to check for the final answers! Aarya’s group were closest in their estimations- well done!  Following this, we started to estimate the approximate amount of miles between Livingston and Edinburgh; this catalysed a lot of interesting discussions and questions! We then worked in partners to estimate an approximate distance between lots of different towns and cities shown on a map and used the iPads to find the actual distance.

On Wednesday afternoon we continued our science topic of Space. We really enjoyed watching a ‘Day in the life of an astronaut’ video and researching all of the different types of jobs that are involved in Space exploration. One member of our class even asked if we could go to a University on a school trip to learn all about space medicine and law!

Thursday was another busy day! We started our day with learning about and practicing the skill of clarifying in literacy. The class helped Miss Ventisei clarify a few things in the class novel that she was unsure of and then practiced their new skill with their own ERIC book. We continued to use our knowledge of rounding to estimate the answers to problems throughout numeracy and particularly enjoyed estimating how many cheerios were in a bag! Once we had decided upon a rough estimate, we had to work collaboratively to count them all. This was a little bit challenging because there were lots and lots of individual cheerios and we knew it would take too long to count them all in ones! We decided to count them in either 10s or 100s and this worked a lot better for us. We then worked out how far away our estimates were and rounded our answers to the nearest 10 and 100 to give an approximate answer.

After lunch, we had health and wellbeing where we were focusing on our SHANARRI indicators of Safe, Healthy and Responsible. We had a really open and mature discussion about our emotions, particularly when we get angry, and how we deal with these big feelings safely and responsibly. We spoke about ways of calming ourselves in stressful situations and what we can do to make ourselves and others around us feel better after an emotional outburst.

Our focus for outdoor learning this week was leaf and tree identification! We headed outdoors with our iPads to take some pictures of all of the different types of leaves in the school grounds-some pupils managed to take some fantastic quality pictures! We then used a key to identify the specific type of leaves we had found and looked closer at the shape and unique features of each individual leaf! We started to create some fantastic posters to show others the types of leaves around our school and will finish these next week.

On Friday we had our first ever House group meeting! We were all so excited to go to a different class and meet all of the other children in our house. In our house meetings we discussed and shared various different types and meanings of bullying, what happens in our school if this happens and why bullying might occur.

All in all, we have had a super successful week! Our Hot Chocolate winner this week was Akshaj who consistently demonstrated our school values of Ready, Respectful and Safe- congratulations Akshaj! Our lead learners this week were Ayden and Ashlyn; they both worked extremely hard this week and pushed themselves to be their very best, well done!