Dear parents,
We have had yet another wonderful and very busy week in P5A which was kick-started with some spectacular, spooky costumes for Halloween!
On Monday, we were busy writing spooky stories and creating some fabulous fireworks themed artwork with Mrs Callaghan. We had a wonderful day and were so excited for some Halloween celebrations.
Throughout numeracy we have been learning about profit, loss, expenditure and income. We were also trying to solve some tricky money word problems! We did a super job and could even apply our knowledge to our own Enterprise, very impressive! We also enjoyed playing lots of fun practical money games and particularly loved our ‘lego maths’ challenge! We had to build a small bridge or tower and calculate the cost of doing so (each brick had a different price!), but we only had a budget of £10 so we had to build wisely!
During literacy we have recently recapped and furthered our knowledge of the reciprocal reading strategy, questioning. We know that the best type of questions to ask whilst we explore literature are ‘Extreme’ questions; these require deeper thought and higher-order thinking skills to answer. We really liked watching small segments of a short film and working with a partner to generate some tricky, thought-provoking questions! We also started a new writing topic this week- discussion. We had to write a balanced viewpoint with both for and against arguments presented. Our class question was ‘Should children receive homework every day?’ and we had lots of passionate arguments offered! Despite this, we still did a fantastic job of providing the reader with a balanced viewpoint and a clear structure. Fantastic work P5A!
We have been working really hard on our Enterprise and we have made lots of great progress with our creations this week. Each group has worked really well together to ensure that everyone is involved, respected and having lots of fun! Some of us have learnt to sew and others have been getting creative with lots of different materials which were kindly donated to us. We also linked our Enterprise with our coding and numeracy learning this week. We have been learning about variables throughout ICT, so we decided to write a code for a program to calculate the exact amount of change a customer is due. This was quite tricky, but we worked together and managed to get everyone’s programme working!
On Tuesday and Wednesday we celebrated All Saints Day and All Souls Day. As part of this we reflected upon those who had died and also researched a saint to create a special prayer for. It was lovely to see the children recognising saints that stood out to them personally and being able to share with the class why this particular saint was special to them. We designed a template for our prayer and decorated our classroom wall with them.
Another highlight of the week was Outdoor Learning. We explored symmetry in nature and found lots of different examples of rotational and reflectional symmetry in our school garden. We also looked at various natural resources and examined their features to determine if they were symmetrical or not. We then had lots of fun using chalk to draw around half of our bodies and trying to draw the exact mirror image of our other half! We are really enjoying learning outdoors this term and would like to continue this throughout the winter term so, if possible, it would be great if children had appropriate footwear and coats for cold, wet and muddy conditions.
Our Hot Chocolate winner for this week was Liliana. She consistently displayed our school values all week and went over and above to be helpful to others. Congratulations Liliana!
