Primary 5 – Page 23 – St Ninian's Primary School

P5 round up

This week we completed our imaginative story about finding a treasure map. The children peer assessed each others middle section of their story which they wrote last week and Mrs Docherty and I were very impressed by the childrens ability to give really constructive feedback to each other. The class then discussed what would make a good ending to a story and we developed a success criteria from this. The children all listened really carefully to this input and as result we had some very imaginative endings…and there was not one single “it was all a dream and then I woke up!” ending. Well done everyone!

Our data handling in Maths this week has been focusing on gathering data. We created appropriate questions which can be asked to give us good data. We then practised recording that data in the form of tally charts and frequency charts. We started to learn how to transfer this data into bar graphs. To do this we had learn “what makes a good bar graph?”. We used the following web link to a game to help us,

http://www.learnalberta.ca/content/me3us/flash/lessonLauncher.html?lesson=lessons/15/m3_15_00_x.swf

Next week we will record the answer to our above question in our Talking Book to showcase our understanding. Also, working in trios we will create a bar graph which we can use to tell a Maths story about which fruit would be best to have on our Friday Healthy Snack tuck trolley.

Our Maps topic has been focusing on different ways of recording information on a map and we compared political, relief and road maps. We watched this video presentation to deepen our understanding,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRYSSNq5GSc

Next week the class will be going to a basketball festival on Tuesday afternoon with Mrs Thomson. On Monday they will be given a team and we will revise the rules of play. Basketball has already been a focus for the class in PE lessons this session and we have some very strong players. The children will require a packed lunch for this day which they will have in class before changing and making their way onto the bus. The festival will run from 12.45pm and we will return to school for 2.45pm.

Have a lovely weekend.

Mrs Currie

P5 are hunting for lost treasure!

We have continued with our treasure map theme linked to our topic Maps. Most of us have completed our maps and aged them using teabags, they look amazing! We achieved our success criteria if we have included a compass and key/labelling on our map.

Our maps are linked with our piece of writing and this week we had the challenge of writing our middle section of our adventure story. Before we started writing we discussed how to include good description and effective speech into our work. We compared two texts, one which was just dialogue and then the same dialogue embedded in a text with description. We learned that dialogue in a story must be punctuated with speech marks, and you must say who is speaking. We then used the following Sky advert to inspire us to use good description within our writing, click on the link below,

Painting Words With Pictures

In Maths we have been discussing sorting data and using graphs and charts to display data. Our focus this week has been Venn Diagrams. We have used both two and three circle Venn Diagrams to sort information and the children have all grasped this well. For extra practise try the game on this link (send a reply if you play it)

Venn Diagrams

World Book Day was a huge hit. There were some great costumes and many children had put super effort and thought into their character and also brought the book into class for reading during ERIC time. Here are our class photos.

To finish off our blog today try out our Five-A-Day Spanish fitness challenge. We have been using it not only to keep us active in class but also to help us pracitse left and right in Spanish and to learn the Spanish vocabulary for up, down, forward and backwards.

Have a great weekend.

Mrs Currie.

P5 mapping the way for learning.

Maps, maps all around. The children have all embraced our new topic this week with enthusiasm and interest. They have seen how we are joining up our learning and developing skills, in particular through our imaginative writing. The children have been asked to write an imaginative story about finding a treasure map and then the adventure which follows. This week the focus was the planning and introduction of the story. We then used our learning from our Social Studies lesson about the features of a map to design and create our own treasure map to accompany our story. Here are some of the maps which have been started,

IMG_0598[1]

Our Success Criteria is to ensure that we include a TITLE, COMPASS and KEY. We will then used a tea bag to create an aged staining effect on our map, tune in next week and there will be more photographs of the finished products.

In preparation for next week the children can continue to think about their adventure story and the events which will occur. We have discussed having a “twist in the tale”, perhaps the treasure is not money, gold and jewels…it might be something completely different! Get thinking, I can’t wait to read some of your ideas.

Our Maths next week will involve us using measurements and scales from maps to work out distances. The short video clip (which can be accessed by pasting the below address into your search engine) from the BBC will help the children link their learning in class to real life application of these Maths skills.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/clips/z3rd2hv

Alongside this we will begin to look at different types of graphs and charts through data handling. To prepare for this you can look at this website, you need to make it full screen and you can differentiate what level you want to work at. This game will form part of our carousel fruity groups smart starts. Good luck.

http://mathsframe.co.uk/en/resources/resource/51/bar_charts

The Daily Mile has also been launched this week. At the minute some of us are finding it quite difficult (especially Mrs Currie). In improving our general fitness and improving our growth mindset we hope to achieve” healthy bodies and healthy minds make for good learning!” Next week we will use our Big Talking Book in class to record our own thoughts on the Daily Mile.

Have a lovely weekend, and if you manage a daily mile over the course of the weekend you can post a blog reply telling me all about the route you took (this could link with our Mapping topic if you can draw or mark on a map the route you took!)

Mrs Currie

Run P5 Run!

P5 will be completing a block of work on cross country running for the remainder of the term. This will involve being outdoors (we hope!). They need to bring suitable PE clothing and shoes on Mondays. Today the daily mile…tomorrow the Edinburgh marathon!

P5 Round Up

This week we have been rounding up our topic of Wallace and Bruce. For our Literacy work the children completed an imaginary interview with William Wallace where they had to adopt the character of Wallace to answer the questions. This really put our knowledge and understanding of the topic to the test. We discussed what made a good question and the difference between and open and closed question. Here are some examples of the questions we asked,

“Why did you want to fight against the English Army?

“What battle was your most successful and why?”

“Did you have any help from anyone?”

To answer our questions we used our core text “The Wars Of Independence” book and also this fun Horrible Histories song.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/music/p00hbbm9

Our next topic is based around Maps. The children have been asked to think about what they already know about maps,

*What are maps used for?

*Why are maps important?

*How many different types of maps can you name?

We have discussed how we can link our work to this topic. In Maths we are revising co-ordinates, scale and measure. In our writing we will create an imaginative piece of work about finding a treasure map. In Social Studies we will be learning how to build a mental map of Scotland and the main features of Scottish landscapes. We are also going to learn direction words in Spanish.

Get a head start on your Spanish directions by watching this link,

Mrs Currie

P5 are our bridge to the future!

What an amazing Technology Week. It started off with a super trip to see the Three Bridges at South Queensferry. During this trip we learned some amazing facts about the Bridges. It was explained to us how a bridge is constructed and the reasons behind the designs and features of a bridge. We even saw a new section of the motorway on the Queensferry Crossing being put in place! I won’t tire of telling people from now on that I was there when it was built. Ask your child to tell you which of these three bridge designs, suspension, cantilever and cable stay, each bridge is an example of.

This trip allowed us to develop our teamwork skills as we were split into groups and a group manager was appointed, a great responsibility comes with wearing the High Vis Vest! 20160208_133740

The first task allowed us hands on experience of how important Health and Safety is in a work place, through investigating different pieces of safety clothing, we now know the reason why each of these items are essential for the workers.

Our next group challenge was to use our knowledge of construction from the discussion and to build the highest tower possible using the least amount of bricks. Here are some of our examples.

When we got back to class we continued our group challenges by using technology to help us complete bridge research and then prepare a talk which we delivered to the class. There was some super group efforts, you could see collaborative skills in action with everyone managing to be successful individuals as well as effective contributors!

We used the theme of Technology Week to link with as many areas of the curriculum as possible this week, so in Maths we completed some practical work on measuring. We discovered during our Bridges trip and our group research how important it is for the engineers to use accurate measurements when designing and constructing a bridge, so from this real life Maths context we set about estimating and then measuring in millimetres, centimetres and metres. If you would like to impress your parents at home use our estimating trick of using our fingers to measure in cms and then check how close you were.

Our Social Studies homework presentations also took place this week. There was a lot of independent skills on display during these as well as a lot of technology being used too, here are just some examples of the work that was produced.

Well done P5 you have out done yourselves this week with work and effort.

Have a lovely long weekend.

Mrs Currie

Primary 5/6 News

This week in primary 5/6 we learned a lot about technology. Primary 6 had the opportunity to do the ‘RoboKid’ topic. We had to work in teams to build and test our robots. The teams came up with fantastic names like Robo, Wheelie and Bob. We also had to learn how to control and drive our robots round obstacle courses we created. On Monday, primary 5 went on a trip to the fourth road bridge education centre. They learned about different types of bridges and how they were built. They got to build their own mini bridges and try on safety clothes that would be worn when building the new bridge.

On Thursday a women called Jenny, from Scotch Beef, came and taught us about why eating red meat can help us grow, be strong and give us iron. She taught us how to make beef fajitas and some people in our class got to help prepare the fajitas. They were yummy. After our fajitas lesson we came back to class and took notes on what we had learned. Next week we will use these notes to help us write our own Beef fajitas recipe.

On Wednesday it was Ash Wednesday, Father Paul came along and led Mass, we received our ashes and reflected on what Lent is.

We have started our Money topic in maths. We have been learning how to solve different money word problems and we will continue this next week.

By Mark, Mikolt and James

P5 photo and maths

Here are the long awaited photographs of our Highland Landscapes class display. (Thank you Alistair and Neave for my reminder!) It was worth the wait!

Also there seems to have been a little problem with the Maths link I have given for homework, to find the game google “Funbrain perimeter” and hopefully it will come up. Here is an additional game address.

http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/mathgames/geometry/shapeshoot/PerimeterShapesShoot.htm

Good luck

Mrs Currie

P5

This week we have used the focus of Mercy through our Catholic Education Week work. Through this we learned about the parable of “The Prodigal Son” which Pope Francis also call the parable of “The Merciful Father”. We used our literacy skills to create a comic strip of the story which highlights the main points. To do this we engaged with the story of the parable in a variety of ways one of which was a short animated version of the story. Please use the link below to see the story.

We then designed our own snap shots from the story which told the main points. From this our comic strips were created. Some of these will form part of a Catholic Education Week wall display.

Talking of wall displays I commented last week that I would post a picture of our completed art display of our Scottish Waterfall Landscapes, my apologies as I have forgotten to take the picture. I will post first thing on Monday the photograph. I would be grateful if any of our class reminds me on Monday morning (perhaps a dojo if you do!).

In writing this week we looked at the story of Robert The Bruce and The Spider. We were writing the story from the Spiders point of view. We used a story starter which demonstrated good use of openers and connectives and the challenge was to continue the story trying to maintain good openers and connectives. We have not fully finished these yet but they are reading really well so far. We will continue this in next weeks lesson. Well done to our Golden Ticket winners from last week for their “Guide To Be An Awesome King”, James for up levelling his work, Reece for good use of WOW vocabulary and Emily for amazing explanations. You have not managed to get along to Ms Purdie or Miss Smyth yet but we will make sure that this happens at the beginning of next week.

In PE we are making full use of the apparatus this week. Some of the gymnastic skills are coming along really well and you can see how the children are individually progressing, well done and thank you Mr McCurdy you are doing a great job keeping the children and Mrs Currie right.

Next week is our Technologies week. I am really looking forward to it especially our trip on Monday to “The Bridges”. Please remember to bring a packed lunch as we will need to have an early lunch before we head off. Please remember our trip does not have us return until 4.15pm. Over the course of the week we will be focusing on Bridges, and designing and building bridges…not hard hats will be required as they will all be SCALE models.

In preparation for our trip on Monday if you can find out some information about the bridges (new and old) post one fact on this blog and earn a dojo!

Have a lovely weekend.

Mrs Currie

Primary 5/6 News

This week started with some disappointing news as our Primary 6 skiing and snowboarding trip was cancelled. After that we found out this week was going to be different as we were going to be doing a Growth Mindset topic! On Monday we discussed what we already knew about growth mindset and then in groups we discussed what we wanted to learn about growth mindset. Some of the suggestions were how does our brain work, how do we make decisions and how do we stay positive? These questions became our plan for the week .Before we learned anything more about Growth mindset we all did a quiz that told us if we had a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. It was very interesting to find that we only had two people in our whole class that had a growth mindset. We then learned who discovered the growth mind set theory and what growth mindset and fixed mindset really means. We then researched how our brain works and the different parts of our brain, which was very interesting! We worked in teams to create posters to show what we were learning over the week and these will be displayed in our upper area. On Thursday we thought about a time we had struggled and how we overcame our struggle by not giving up. We used these events to write a letter to future students telling them how important it is to have a growth mindset and overcome struggles. At the end of our letters we gave future students advice on how to develop a growth mindset. At the end of our topic we did an experiment to see if anyone in the class had developed a growth mindset over the week. We repeated the quiz we did at the start of the week and were amazed that everyone in the class had developed a growth mindset. We all found the topic helpful and it taught us to persevere even if we struggle as that’s when we learn the most. Have a lovely weekend.

Primary 5/6 & Miss Bell