Almost half way through the term.

We spent some time researching lifeboats this week. We need this information for our class assembly. We found out that there are 3 lifeboats in Orkney - one each in Kirkwall, Stromness and Longhope on Hoy. The Kirkwall lifeboat is a Severn class boat.

 

We've been investigating how sand is formed. We made our own sand from stones and shells. We then looked at it using the microscope. We'll be adding some photos of what the sand looks like in the microscope.

We enjoy practising our spelling using different strategies. Here's 2 of them - back writing and newspaper search. It was quite difficult to find our spelling words in the Orcadian and Orkney Today - but we tried.

Mrs MacNab made some people do money problem solving in maths. It was really hard! We were very pleased when we finally managed to do it! We had to use 2 different problem solving strategies together to work it out.

We did a 'team memory' challenge. It was quite fun, and it's helped us to think about what information is important - and that we don't need to learn the exact words from books, we can just remember the important facts and put them into our own words.

We're still enjoying football. Mrs MacNab is very impressed with how good people are getting at dribbling the ball now, especially the people who had never played football before.

Can you guess what we're making here? It's something that lives in the sea. 

Mrs MacNab was very glad that nobody took a photo of her trying to blow up the balloons!

Class Olympics begins

Here are some of the P3s having fun practising their spelling in the sand tray.

P4 were using the loop cards to practise their times tables. P4 are all now working on the 6x table but still practising the 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10. Some people have even started working on the 9x table and teaching themselves the 11x table!

In RME we talked about peace and then designed peace windows. Everyone says they look really good on the classroom window.

In maths, P3 were still working on length and P4 were doing area.

Here are P3 trying to measure the length of things using cubes. They soon realised that a ruler was much easier to use when the object they were measuring was bigger.

They got so good at measuring that they moved on to measuring tapes and started comparing people's head, wrist and waist sizes!

 

 We started the finals of the class Olympics. First we had to light the Olympic flame and carry it to the gym with us. It will stay burning until the Olympics have finished.

This is the Boccia final, with a very sporting audience watching. The competitiors were very sporting too.

The javelin final started as well. Next week we will be doing the mini marathon and long jump and finishing the javelin final.

Some people played 'sticks' outside with real sticks.

In Art we are still working on our myth masks. Watch out for a special blog entry about them when they are finished. 

Do you think they look good so far?

Time flies

The term seems to be passing very quickly - that's the first 3 weeks of 2nd term over already!

For some reason this week the camera was only used to record maths and health - and one slightly blurry photo of us doing drama. Next week we'll all try to remember to take more photos to show what we've been doing (Mrs MacNab was very pleased that Alanah took lots of photos of maths groups working when she had finished her work this week).

In drama we walked tall, small, wide and narrow.  Can you guess which one we're doing here?

Then we then investigated using the way we walked to show emotions. 

We played a team game where we had to use the way we walked to show different emotions like happiness, sadness and anger and we could catch people from the other team and they had to join our team.

In maths we are still working on time. Primary 3 can tell the time for o'clock, quarter past, half past and quarter to using both analogue and digital clocks.

Primary 4 are working on telling the time in 5 minute intervals (5 past, 10 past, quarter past, 20 past ... 10 to, 5 to) and we can also work out how long something lasts for - that's called duration. The duration of our lunchtime is 40 minutes (from 1 o'clock to 1.40pm or 1:40 or 20 minutes to 1) but P3 get longer, they get 1 hour and 10 minutes (that's 70 minutes) from 12.30pm (half past 12) to 20 to 1.

Molly went to Turkey on holiday and brought back some leaflets which showed the different things she could do each day like cinema, Boccia, craft, basketball and what time breakfast was. Mrs MacNab made us answer questions about the times in the leaflets and how long things lasted. We could tell the time and read real times to help us plan what activities Molly could do on holiday. Mrs MacNab was very pleased because she said that meant we could tell the time properly and not just do pages in the maths textbook!

We do problem solving in maths too. P4 are learning lots of different strategies like guess, check and improve or make an organised list or act out the situation. We are enjoying the problems which are shown on the smart board - we can choose which strategy to use to try to solve the problem. Some people do it in their heads, others use paper and pen, some act it out, some use small whiteboards and some like drawing it out on the big whiteboard in the classroom.

Sometimes we work on our own and sometimes we work in pairs or groups to help each other.

 

In health this week we have been thinking about what helps keep us healthy. We talked about it and drew pictures of healthy people last term. Now we know more so we can add more information. We did arrow diagrams to show how healthy we thought we were just now - Mrs MacNab wonders if we (including her) can make ourselves healthier and change the shape of our arrow diagrams by the end of term.

Here we are thinking about how healthy we are and trying to give honest answers - the answers aren't right or wrong, they're what we feel about what we do.

Mrs MacNab did an arrow diagram too - how healthy do you think she is?

We predicted what shape we thought a very healthy person would have - we thought it would be a circle but it wasn't! We thought it looked like a speech bubble - it says "I am healthy."

We worked in groups to 'diamond sort' statements about health - that meant we sorted them into a diamond shape with the most important thing to make us healthy at the top and the most unhealthy thing at the bottom. Mrs MacNab noticed that every group had chosen a different order for the statements but she said that was fine because there wasn't a definite right and wrong answer - as long as we could explain our answers!

Some groups thought that eating 1 sweet a day was more healthy than watching tv because a peedie treat makes us feel good so we feel happy and if we are happy we are healthy. Other groups thought that watching tv might be healthier than eating sweets because we might lean about how to keep healthy from a tv programme.

In PE this week we did dance with Mrs Cromarty. With Mrs MacNab and Mrs Stanger we played Boccia again and did some shuttle runs and did standing long jump.

In RME we started learning about Hinduism - we thought the 'Aum' ('Om') sound was funny! Maybe Molly will have do make the Aum sound when she goes to a wedding in India. We learned to draw the Aum symbol too.

It looks like number 30 wearing a hat!

In Golden Time some people worked in teams to draw pictures with light. Do you like our faces?

We were typing in ICT. We are learning to use Microsoft Word and save our work and then go back to it the next week and add to it. We are writing about Orkney for our class wiki that our link school in Canada can read about.

Our spelling strategy of the week is using whiteboards. It's fun! One person writes one of their spelling words on a whiteboard. The other person rubs out 1 or 2 letters and you have to try to work out which letter is missing and write it back in. We will try to write about a different strategy on the blog each week to help with our spelling.

Next week we are looking forward to learning more about Greek gods, doing more work on time and getting on with writing our own myths.