Dear families,

Another action-packed week has passed us by!

Our writing focus for this month is narrative. We explored some examples of narratives and thought about various techniques we would like to take into our own writing. We also highlighted some parts that we would improve and uplevel in our writing going forward. We particularly enjoyed creating our own character and detailing their appearance and personality. We are also very close to finishing our class novel, Wonder, and this week we enjoyed participating in some reciprocal reading stations to consolidate our understanding and analysis.

We have also been super busy throughout maths this week! We started our week with a scavenger hunt around the classroom and area to practice and consolidate our understanding of fractions of quantities. We are getting really confident with this concept which is fantastic. We also made some wonderful working posters to showcase our knowledge – some of us even managed to complete over 50 questions in less than 10 minutes! On Thursday we recapped and revised our understanding of equivalent fractions, it was lovely to see so many light-bulb moments and lots of learning being taken even further! We made some beautiful equivalent fraction flowers to display on our working wall, well done P5A! Alongside all of our learning around fractions, we also entered into the West Lothian Schools Sumdog competition! All pupils worked really hard both in and out of school time to improve our score and we did really well as a class.

Our Health and Wellbeing focus this week was developing our confidence. We thought about times when we might have lost our confidence and what we did to overcome this. We also reflected on someone that we admire and realised that no matter how successful they are, there have always been times when they have made mistakes and continued to carry on. As a class we have also enjoyed developing our skills in skipping throughout P.E. lessons. It has been lovely to do P.E. outside in the fresh air too!

Throughout IDL this week we have had lots of fun! On Monday we were learning all about food chains and made our very own whole-class food chain with string. We all took turns to grab a piece of string and then pass the ball to the next ‘animal’ in the food chain. As we finished, we noticed that all of us were connected in some way. This showed us that all animals and plants in the food chain are also connected. We particularly enjoyed each picking a different animal to be either a producer, predator or prey. On Thursday it was sadly too wet to go outside for outdoor learning but that didn’t stop us! Instead, we went on our very own bug hunt in the classroom, using keys to classify and find out interesting information about some bugs and insects. This was a particular class highlight.

Since it is Lent, we have been looking at different charities in R.E. Many of us have very kindly contributed towards our ‘Wee Box’ which is an appeal run by a charity called SCIAF. This week we did some research about this special charity and considered different ways of being charitable during Lent.

Our Hot Chocolate winner this week was Madeleine. She always tries her very best and shows kindness to everyone in the class. Congratulations!

Have a lovely week everyone and see you all on Monday!