Our new topic and a building team challenge

We started our new topic called 'Our Solar System' by writing down questions we want answered during the topic. Mrs MacNab said she was very impressed with our questions. There's so much we want to know we might not have time to find it all out this term, but Mrs MacNab is putting links to lots of space websites on our class learning links on this blog, so we can look some things up ourselves.

This is us looking at the tree octopus website.

Here we are learning about weighing things in maths.

On Thursday afternoon we did a team challenge. We had to make a stand that would hold a 1/2 kg weight for a minute without collapsing. Some people found it difficult to work in teams, but we are learning to listen to everyone's ideas and work together better. Mrs MacNab says we will be doing more challenges this term so we can practise working with lots of different people. We can work well with different people in PE but we find it much harder to do in the classroom!

Getting the materials we were allowed...

Good teamwork - helping each other.

All working hard on the task.

Nearly finished the stand and about to think about making it look good.

One team made a leaning stand! We couldn't believe it still managed to hold the 1/2 kg weight for a whole minute without falling over.

Mrs MacNab says that next time we do a challenge somebody in the group will be a quality checker so someone reminds everyone to check that the work is good quality.

Everyone managed to work well in a team by the end of the afternoon, and everyone's stand held the weight without falling over. At the end we all thought about the things we had done well and what we thought we could do better next time we have to work in a team. Hopefully the next challenge will be ever better!

Ancient Greece and lots of maths

We seem to have linked almost all our work to Ancient Greece and maths this week.

We had a Greek food tasting on Tuesday. Most people tried something new and got a sticker. One pupil tried everything! Mrs MacNab was very impressed.

Some people really didn't like some of the food, especially the octopus and olives. Mrs MacNab didn't like the octopus either! Mrs Stanger said the olives were the worst.

We had bread, white grape juice, red grape juice, black olives, green olives, figs, octopus, goat and sheep's milk cheese (feta cheese), Greek butter beans, loukamis (like Turkish delight but very very sweet) and honey sesame seed snaps.

Do you think they are enjoying the food?

In Drama we worked in groups. We used props to help us make up stories. The props all became characters - like a Scottish person (kilt), dragon (wings) and lots more and then we made up a story using all of our characters. It was fun.

Here we are hard at work writing.


In maths we have been learning about length. P3 have been estimating and measuring in metres and finding out if things (or people) are longer than about a metre, about a metre or shorter than a metre.

P4 have been measuring in centimetres and measuring objects with curved sides.

We did Ancient Greek maths and helped Pythagoras, a mathematician from Ancient Greece, prove his theory about right angles triangles.

In PE we are still practising for the class Olympics. We did javelin and Boccia this week. We had to measure how far the javelin went - so that was maths too!

We measured using a very long measuring tape.

Can you see what we are measuring with here?

P4 made the fish and they are all about a metre long so we could use them to measure the javelin throws.

 We used a measuring tape to see whose balls were nearer the jack (white ball) in Boccia.

P4 have been learning the 6x table - here we are practising it and testing each other (using timers).

We used Greek water clocks this week to time our talks (that's in a different blog entry). Abbie thinks we should use the 5 minute water clock if anyone loses 5 minutes of Golden Time next week. Mrs MacNab hopes we don't have to use the clock!

Here are some pupils using timers to test to see if the Greek water clocks are accurate (correct).

Would you like to use a Greek water clock instead of a watch?