Fun with science

We had great fun doing science experiments on Thursday afternoon! We were investigating rocket propulsion.

Here we are trying to prove that there was gas being created in a bottle.

We talked about the experiement and then wrote reports on it.

We did drama outside this week. We went into groups and made up plays to show why it's good to be honest, then we acted them in front of everyone in the courtyard. It was fun. Mrs MacNab said that was the best acting we've done yet - we made up the plays ourselves and most people remembered to talk loudly so the audience could hear.

We also did more maths this week. It's getting difficult now. One group were dividing by 3, another were finding out about remainders and the other were using strategies to help them multiply numbers that aren't in the times tables (like 36 or 120). We'll be doing more practice of that next week.

Did you know there's games online where you can practise maths? If you click on the 'Class 3/4's Links' on the right of the blog you can find maths games to play.

In RME we've been doing the Easter story and practising our songs for the Easter performance. Next week we'll be finding out about how they celebrate Easter in Greece, and we're hoping to teach Miss Persidou about how we celebrate Easter in Orkney.

Snow closures and science

It was a funny week last week. Some days we were at school as usual, one day school was closed because of the snow, and one day school got shut early and we all got home to play in the snow! Even the teachers.

In school we were getting on with our work. Here we are doing spelling and using the dictionary to help us.

In drama we were role playing lots of different scenes (scenarios) where we had to show what we thought would happen next. Then everyone talked about whether the characters had acted in a good way or whether they could have done things better. This helps us to try to respond appropriately to other people.

We got some new games for the smartboard - they're VCOP games and we're really enjoying them. We've only played 2 so far but there's lots more we can try. This one is Victor Van Cleef the Punctuation Thief.

On Wednesday Mrs MacNab took us outside to do music. We loved it! We recorded lots of different sounds that we could hear or make in the snow.

We went into the courtyard to listen to find out if the sounds here were the same as the sounds at the front of the school. It was very peaceful in the courtyard. If we were very quiet we could hear birds singing. We saw a starling on the roof. When we listened carefully and concentrated hard we realised the snow made a different sound when we walked in the courtyard than when we walked on the grass.
Do you know why that was?

We did some science outside too. We looked at people's shadows. They were very long.

We went back outside later and looked at our shadows again. They had changed. We're going to be thinking about this more over the next few weeks as part of our Solar System topic.

We did some other science too. Here we are doing an experiment to try to find out why rockets have to carry oxygen as well as fuel. The oxygen isn't just for the astronauts to breathe - the engine needs oxygen too.

Did you know that? Do you know why?

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.

Week 4 - almost half way through the term ....

We've been working hard again this week. We've been learning about Greek temples and Greek theatres. We learned that the words alphabet and theatre come from the Greek language. Here we are designing a Greek temple on the SmartBoard. We were pleased with the finished temple - it looked really good.

In Drama we were playing a game - you had to show your emotions by walking with no speaking and the other people in your team had to guess to win the card. We really enjoyed it.

This is us peer assessing the myths we have been working on. We are trying to help everyone make theirs as good as possible - and peer assessing helps us to learn what good work is and how to improve our own work as well.

Our spelling strategy of the week is writing our words in alphabetical order. If we are good at that, we can write them out in reverse alphabetical order so the word that's last in the alphabet goes first.

In music we were doing experiments with the instruments we made. It was a scientist from Ancient Greece who discovered that the noise strings make changes when it is a different length or tighter. There is a Greek instrument called a bouzouki - we don't have one, but Frank let us look at his mandola which is a bit similar.

In PE we are doing dance with Mrs Cromarty. We were working on celebration dances in groups. With Mrs MacNab we are practising for our class Olympics.  This week we worked on standing long jump and running games.

Here we are helping each other with long jump - and reminding each other to bend our knees and use our arms.

We enjoy the dictionary challenge game.

We often use whiteboards to work on.

We were really pleased when one of our class got a Head Teacher's Award for a really good piece of work he did at home. Mrs Bleakley said he had brightened up her day.