Happy New Year everyone! We have had a busy start to the year and the term.

In Literacy, we have been focusing on the Scots language, learning lots of new vocabulary. We have been reading Scots poetry and even wrote our very own poems using the Scots vocabulary that we have learnt – this was lots of fun! We also explored The Tiger Who Came to Tea and used this as a basis for writing our own narratives.

We have begun our new topic, Scottish Wars of Independence and we are working hard to plan, rehearse and eventually perform a class assembly all about our topic in the coming weeks. We hope to see lots of you there!

In Maths, we are learning all about time, including the days and months in a year, the seasons and reading from an analogue and digital clock – we have really enjoyed this topic so far.

In Numeracy, we are moving onto multiplication and division and we are really enjoying learning our times tables through active games, including Around the World, it’s one of our favourites!

It’s Languages week soon and we have lots of exciting lessons to look forward to including decorate your door competition… France is our country of choice and we can’t wait to get started on planning and decorating next week!

P4s had an excellent end to term 1. During STEAM week we spent time researching the impact of plastic on the environment and learnt about ways in which everyone can help keep our planet as healthy as possible. The class brought in plastic items from home and we spent an afternoon upcycling them into new and exciting products. P4s created bird feeders, Halloween and Christmas decorations, handbags… we even made some new storage containers for the classroom!

Following STEAM week and the conversations we had, P4s felt that they wanted to do their part around the school to help keep plastic off the ground. Many of the children chose to give up their break and lunch time to litter pick around the playground – very well done to you all!

The beginning of Term 2 will be spent rounding off our Egyptians topic and finishing our first class novel, The Wild Robot. We have two new class novels to read before Christmas – which we are very excited about 🙂

We have been working really hard in P4s since returning from the long weekend.

In Maths, we have been continuing to practice column addition and subtraction and we have been working really hard to improve our jotter presentation.

During our Literacy lessons we have been writing recounts. Last week we entered a fantastic writing competition whereby we wrote about our adventures in the Bathgate Hills. Each class submitted three entries into the competition and we can’t wait to find out if someone from P4s has been successful. We also spent some time learning about homophones, playing fun and interactive games to make it exciting.

In IDL we have started a new topic, Egyptians! We have really enjoyed exploring our new topic through Art, and have already filled our classroom with some wonderful creations…

In P.E. we have been continuing to learn lots about gymnastics as well as going outdoors to participate in weekly team building games.

Two very exciting things have also been happening in class recently:

1. We have been learning sign language. We have been using this video clip (we absolutely love the song!) and have really, really enjoyed working together as a class to develop our skills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r25auE4eC2o
2. We made our very own class scarecrow! 🙂
   During our Vertical Learning lessons we were given a bag of resources and asked to use our creativity and imagination to create a scarecrow. We worked together in small groups, communicating well and listening to one another to create our very own scarecrow over two afternoons… we love it!