Storytelling and a Pyjama Party!

We are working on storytelling and Tom Muir came in to tell us a story. P1 enjoyed hearing him too.

We're working on our own stories now - we'll be recording traditional Orkney tales and sending them to our link school in Canada. We're looking forward to hearing some of their traditional tales too.

When the canoe family were in Orkney in the summer Tom Muir paddled with them in the canoe to Hoy and he told them some stories. They all used to be pupils at Outma Squilx Cultural School. Some of them went to Outma and read the pupils there some stories from Mr Muir's book. We're excited to find so many links to our Canadian school.

We had storytelling in drama as well. Miss Persidou told us a Greek myth. She told us about Perseus and Medusa.

Then we went into groups and acted out different scenes from the story so that we retold the whole story.

In language, P4 had fun making up headlines.

They were enjoying themselves so much that they didn't want to stop for lunch!

On Tuesday we had a pyjama party and bake sale to raise money to send to Haiti to help the children there.

Tuesday was the last day we had to go to school this week as it's the mid-term break now. Have a good holiday, everyone!

Solar System

In music we got the last 2 Greek tunes recorded. Mrs MacNab is hoping to put the tunes onto the blog at some point for parents to hear them.

In PE we are still inventing games. Every week Mrs MacNab adds in a new challenge - this week it was a team game again, but it had to be something to do with space.

P3 made a game with 'planets' as targets. Mrs MacNab was very pleased that they remembered which planets were big and small and used big hoops for the big planets and small hoops for the small planets. They did very well with changing the rules so more people could play and had lots of good ideas for making the game easier or more difficult.

P4's game had spacemen in their space rockets (space hoppers) and aliens throwing asteroids (soft balls) at them to capture the space rockets.

At the end everyone played both games and enjoyed them.

In maths some people are doing dividing. They used cubes to help them and they have been sharing things out and making groups.

In topic time we learned about the different layers which make up the Earth. We all made models to help us remember. The layers are inner core, outer core, mantle, crust and atmosphere.

Do you know what each layer is made of?

We did another science experiment. This time we were finding out about gravity.

First we talked about what we thought gravity was.

We had to make sure the experiement was fair, so we had to drop things from the same height at the same time.

We listened to them hitting the tray to see if they landed at the same time.

We found out that gravity pulls things at the same speed even if they are big or small or heavy or light. But very light things like feathers drift around and don't fall straight down. That is because of air resistance.

Mrs MacNab asked what would happen if we did the same experiment on the moon using a hammer and a feather. We had lots of ideas. Most people thought maybe the feather would drift down but the hammer might go up because we didn't think there was any gravity on the moon.

Then we watched a video of men doing that experiment on the moon.

We were very surprised that the feather and the hammer hit the ground together!

Mrs MacNab explained to us why that had happened.

We thought it would be good to go to the moon to do experiements.

On Friday we thought about what we could do to raise money to help the children in Haiti.

You can find out more on the Pupil Council blog here.

In Golden Time some people were making winter pictures.

Magic potions, science experiments and more.

We learned a new game in Drama. It was like rock, paper, scissors but we had to pretend to be people from Greek myths and do actions. Can you guess who we are?

We used the myth masks again. We asked the minotaur if he liked pizza.

Mesuda said she liked her red eyes but if she wanted a different colour she could paint them a different colour each day. We thought that sounded cool.

Zeus and Daedalus were asked lots of questions about their favourite food and what they liked doing. Everyone was good at pretending to be the different characters and improvising (quickly making up) answers.

We did a science experiment. We had to get water, containers, apples and marbles. We used maths to help us because we had to measure water and weigh things.

We found that when an apple floated in the water it made water spill out of the container - and the water that spilled out weighed the same as the apple.

Some groups tried the same experiment with marbles in a yoghurt pot and found that the weight of the marbles in the yoghurt pot floating on the water was the same as the weight of the water which spilled out.

We were quite surprised to find that 1/2 kg of water was the same as 1/2 litre of water and 1kg of water was the same as 1l of water!

We did another experiement with marbles as well and then we had to write a report about it.

We were interested to find out that the first experiment is to do with our Ancient Greece topic from last term because a man called Archimedes worked this out years ago. He was Greek and he had to find out if the King's crown was really gold. He got into his bath and water spilled out and he realised he could do an experiement like the one we did to find out whether the crown was gold. He was so excited that he jumped out of his bath and ran down the street shouting "Eureka! Eureka!" (it means "I've got it! I've got it!"). The funny thing was - he didn't put on any clothes before he ran down the street! We wondered what all the other people thought of him?

In maths we are still practising our times tables. Sometimes we do a table square and try to beat our time from the week before.

P3 had more practice at measuring capacity and used it to solve problems.

P4 made their own magic potions. They had to measure small amounts like 50ml very carefully.

Here we are with the finished magic potions.

What do you think the magic potions can do?

In PE with Mrs MacNab we are making up our own games and learning to change the rules so that other people can join in or to make the game easier or more difficult. We enjoy it!

P3 are teaching P4 their game here.

In PE with Mrs Cromarty we are still doing gymnastics. We love it too!

How high can you climb?

Here we are doing craft in Golden Time. We were making recycled winter pictures - using things like old wallpaper and pieces of string. We thought that was very environmentally friendly.

Myth masks

We spent quite a few weeks last term working on making myth masks in small groups. We had to be able to work in a group with other people which some people found very difficult at first,l but everyone got much better at it the more we did.

First we had to draw some designs for the masks.

Then we started to draw out the masks and stick cardboard, bubble wrap and rolled up newspaper on them - do you think they look good?

Then we built up papier mache ...

... we painted them ...

... and then used darker colours of paint to make them look better.

Last we used things like feathers, wool, fur and even goats' hair to  add decoration to them.

Here are the finished masks. We're going to use them in drama next term.

Do you know who they all are?