Our P4 Handball teams competed in the P4 Cluster Handball Festival recently. We have all been learning handball with Mr Muldoon in P.E. in P4 and the teams had extra practise sessions with some helpers from JYHS. All our teams did really well and won lots of games. We demonstrated good sportsmanship too!

The rest of the class took part in a Fair Trade afternoon workshop where we prepared for our P4 Cluster Fair Trade service which is next week. We split into groups to research Fairtrade products using I-Pads and laptops and find out where they come from. Everyone had a different role in the groups – painting pictures and flags, making PowerPoint slides and writing words for the script. We presented this at the school’s Fair Trade assembly and we are now ready to do it for the other P4 children at the Lanthorn Centre on Tuesday 21st February (please return permission slips asap and parent helpers needed also).

Our Brown Trout are progressing well as alevins and soon they will turn into fry and be ready for release. We are continuing to chill the water with ice bottles twice a day and monitor the temperature.

In Maths, we are now focusing on division and linking this with multiplication and times tables. We have explored division using cubes, pegs, people (!) and other objects and we are developing our understanding by drawing pictures. We have also been using different types of calendars to find special dates and work out how long things are in days and weeks.

In Language, we had a reading assessment to test our comprehension skills in finding facts and opinions, identifying the writer’s purpose and point of view, and finding causes and effects. We studied the Robert Burns poem Willie Wastle and used Scots wordbank sheets , dictionaries and the internet to work out what the Scots words meant. We showed we had understood the poem when we drew a picture of Willie Wastle’s wife and cat. We then wrote our own Scots poems about a “beastie” or animal, again using the Scots wordbank sheets and dictionaries to help. We are also working on the presentation of our writing by re-drafting our work and learning to join letters.

We are busy preparing for Parents Nights next week. We have been setting and evaluating our targets and identifying our next steps in learning. We have also done lots and lots of I-JournAL filing! We look forward to sharing our I-JournALs with our parents and carers soon.