Dear Families,

Wow, what a busy week we have had again!

Throughout literacy this week we have been focusing on our reading skill of clarifying. We thought about what this means and how we can use different strategies to clarify a word or term we don’t understand. We had great fun trying to clarify the meaning of words in different languages with Mrs Callaghan and worked on producing a Frayer model to clarify the definition of some vocabulary we had not heard of before. For writing this week we have continued our procedural writing where we have been looking at ‘bossy’ verbs and ensuring we always include a title, goal, material and steps. We wrote a procedure to tell others how to plant a daffodil bulb (we did this ourselves last week during outdoor learning!) and Miss Ventisei was once again so proud of the quality of writing produced. Well done P5A!

This week in maths we have been using our knowledge of rounding to estimate an approximate calculation. We worked really hard on some challenge cards and enjoyed playing lots of different games throughout the week to help us understand this concept. On Wednesday, we worked collaboratively as a class to share and practice our understanding of the concept by producing some fantastic posters for our maths working wall- take a look at these in our collage! We also really enjoyed learning all about the  properties of a circle with Mrs Callaghan this week.

Another highlight of the week was our learning through science. We were learning about all of the different inventions that have changed space exploration and also some that have impacted our daily lives today- who knew that Nike Air Max trainers were designed by a NASA aeronautical engineer?! We enjoyed taking part in a QR code hunt around the classroom to collaboratively find all of the different inventions and use technology to research each one. Super teamwork was shown by everyone!

Throughout IDL this week we have been learning about Robert the Bruce. We listened to and discussed the famous story about the spider and Bruce losing the battle against England 6 times and also researched his life using the iPads. Some of us presented our findings using videos, images, powerpoints, word documents and lots more. We even posted them on a padlet page so we can all view them together. We also designed our very own battle shields fit for William Wallace and Robert the Bruce! We thought carefully about the design of each one and worked really hard to produce some amazing artwork- well done Primary 5!

On Friday, we started our introduction to coding. We used a programme called Scratch to code a short animation of our choice and Miss Ventisei was so impressed with our enthusiasm, wonderful digital skills and creativity. We are looking forward to developing our coding skills throughout the year!

Here are some of our class highlights of the week:

Emily: I LOVED the estimation and rounding ball toss game in maths this week!

Leo: My favourite part of this week was definitely coding.

Farrah: I liked cutting up newspapers and magazines to make our spelling posters this week!

Our Hot Chocolate Friday winner this week was Tyler. He consistently showed our school values of Ready, Respectful and Safe all week- well done Tyler, we are so proud of you!