Today we enjoyed a fabulous day outdoor learning at Aberdour beach, exploring the landscape safely and having fun in the sand. We had plenty of exercise, made sandcastles in the sand, collected shells, pebbles and paddled in the sea. Tomorrow we will use this experience in our writing lesson to describe the beach.
This week in Woodmuir literacy hour we have been very busy working together on our new class novel Turtle Moon. Children were predicting what the book is about, reading character descriptions and designing their own book cover!
This week we were very lucky to have the chance to go to the book festival with our all of our friends in school. We started the day off attending the Eco – adventurer workshop with Hannah Gold! Hannah Gold is the best selling author of the last bear. Hannah told us all about her life as an author and how she gets inspiration for her stories! We all received a free book, Turtle Moon, from Hannah and even had the chance to meet her and have our books all signed. We had a fabulous day.
This afternoon we joined the University of Edinburgh online to participate in the Internet project involving the sensors. We had a chance to read lots of data and then to investigate 4 different readings and where they might have come from! Lots of great discussion, thinking skills, creativity and collaboration. This was exciting and we are looking forward to the secret sensor challenge next!
The investigation analysis
Reading data
Secret Sensor Challenge
This week as part of our Outdoor learning, we had fun decorating our journey sticks. We used a variety of collections from outdoors, arts and crafts and memorabilia from home. We worked together to share ideas and collaborate before getting creative! The next step is to share our journey sticks with the class reflecting on achievements, memories, challenges and growth experiences they have had this academic year.
On Wednesday, P1-3 explored the importance of using our voice to stand up for fairness. Building on our Health and Wellbeing topic of relationships, we discussed how we should treat others – with kindness, respect and inclusion. We read the book All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold to help us understand the importance of celebrating diversity and equality. We had a thoughtful discussion about what fairness means and how we can speak up when we see someone being treated unfairly.
We created posters for a competition on the theme, ‘The Power of Our Voice’. We used our collaboration and communication skills to work together in small groups to create the poster and share our ideas.
Here is what we have created so far:
This week we were practising for our Burns supper through animation. It was very easy to animate our characters and record audio using Adobe Express on our GLOW account. We found our Scot’s poem from the library online and then recorded our poem. We had fun selecting our character, background and video size. The first poem we recorded was ‘To a Mouse’ and the results were amazing!
After our outdoor learning session yesterday, we used our ideas to inspire our writing in IDL. We started with a basic poem starter, to help us write our own version using rhyming pattern.
We have been exploring the poetry of Robert Burns over the last two weeks. After many discussions and learning our favourite poems we went outdoors today to observe the nature in our playground and take some time out to reflect, on how Burns drew inspiration from nature. We will then use our own observations to create our own poems and focus on simplicity, structure and descriptive language.
This week, Primary 1-3 looked closer at the language in The Ugly Five by Julia Donaldson, with Primary 1-2 focusing on how authors use rhyme to create fun and engaging stories. The lesson began with an opportunity for the children to share their prior knowledge through discussion about what they already knew about rhyming words. Together, we revisited the story, carefully analysing the text to identify rhyming pairs; some rhyming words that we found were “spotty” and “grotty”, “see” and “tree”, and “pink” and “stink”. They worked collaboratively by sharing ideas and supporting each other to uncover the rhymes within the text.
During this time, Primary 3 focused on developing a new skill: using an online thesaurus to find synonyms. The children enjoyed this task, as it allowed them to discover new words they hadn’t encountered before. Using an extract from the book, they selected specific words and found 2-3 synonyms for each one. This activity helped them build their vocabulary and improve their research skills, as they practiced navigating a digital resource.
Here is some examples of what they found:
