Dear parents and families,

We have had yet another wonderful and busy week as we celebrated World Book Week, Fairtrade Fortnight and St John Ogilvie’s feast day.

Our area novel study for World Book Day is ‘Here We Are: Notes From Planet Earth’ by Oliver Jeffers. Here is a short summary:

‘Written as a manual to life on Earth from new dad Oliver Jeffers to his baby son, this simple, life-affirming picture book is both an overview of Earth and a guide to living well: concepts of kindness, tolerance and environmental responsibility are discussed’ (Scottish Book Trust).

All week we have completed lots of fun and thought-provoking activities centred around this book. For example during literacy, we created our very own whole-class project board to share lots of our ideas, knowledge, opinions and artwork. As a class we absolutely loved the pages about space and the solar system so on Tuesday, Mrs Callaghan very kindly taught everyone all of the planet names in Spanish! We are very excited that we can now list every single planet in the correct order from the sun- in both Spanish and English!  Our love for learning about the solar system also inspired us to make our very own planet Earth models. We used air-drying modelling clay to create a sphere shape, cut it in half, added our land and left to dry. After leaving to dry for 24hrs, we painted our land and sea and added our layers. We know that the Earth’s layers are made up of the crust, mantle, outer core, and inner core. Take a look at our fantastic creations below!

On Wednesday, we were very excited about our book-tasting event! As we moved around the class, we explored lots of brand new books for ‘starter’, ‘main’ and ‘dessert’ and even gave each a star rating out of 5. The children particularly enjoyed completing their ‘menus’ and it was lovely to see everyone had chosen lots of new books that they would like to read next! Well done P5A!

For outdoor learning this week, we were lucky enough to join P3B for a reading-buddy session in the woodland!  We really enjoyed selecting a book and finding a nice, cosy spot to read in- whilst also keeping our buddies safe in the woods. We even had a chance to show some of the P3 pupils our mouse houses and bird nests!

Throughout maths we have been focusing on fractions of quantities and percentages. We identified lots of examples of percentages in everyday life- the most common being our iPad batteries- and also thought about how they are linked to our knowledge of fractions and decimals. Lots of children said that their favourite activity was at the game station on Wednesday. We were challenged to match up over 200 percentage dominoes in under 20 minutes! All 3 teams did a fantastic job but no one quite managed all of them, so we will have to have a rematch next week! Another class highlight for maths this week was our Number Talks starters. We have been making our way through lots of challenging splat! fraction tasks (we have completed over 25!) and we are now really good at solving these problems in record time.

Since today (10th March) is the feast day of St John Ogilvie, we have been learning all about our school’s patron saint. After lots of class discussions and research, we decided to create a Padlet page with all of our knowledge and thoughts around St John Ogilvie’s life. We managed to add over 250 posts of thought-provoking observations and information which we were very keen to share with our classmates. We also printed this page off to display in our classroom and share our knowledge with others. Excellent work P5A!

On Thursday afternoon, we spent some time thinking about our child rights and Fairtrade. We reflected upon the benefit of Fairtrade for farmers and their communities and also considered our role in this. After creating a whole-class mindmap, we made some fantastic posters and leaflets to share our own learning and reflections with our school community.

On Friday morning we had a whole-school mass for the St John Ogilvie feast day with Father Simon. We also celebrated with some yummy cake, kindly baked by our kitchen staff! We all agreed that this was our favourite moment of the week!

Thank you for another fantastic week P5A, have a lovely weekend and see you all on Monday.