We've adopted a dolphin!

We've adopted a dolphin. We weren't sure what animal to adopt so we split into groups and each group researched an animal that Mrs MacNab gave them.

We then had to do a short talk about our animal to persuade other people to vote for it. We used a Greek water clock to time the talks.

When we counted the votes the bottlenose dolphin had the most so Mrs MacNab has adopted that for us.

Did you know that we learned about democracy from the Ancient Greeks?

The Greek word demos means people!

Here is more information from Dani and Alanah.

Alanah wrote:

Our class is going to be adopting a bottle nose dolphin and we will be taking a toy one home. Its name is Rainbow and it has two or three babies. It lives near Inverness and she is a girl.

Dani wrote:

Our class is adopting a dolphin called Rainbow. She is a bottlenose dolphin. We will also get a little toy dolphin. You might see Rainbow if you go to Inverness and it also has a baby but we don’t know what it’s called yet but we might find out.

Here is Rainbow having fun. We think it is one of her babies with her.

Photo ©Charlie Phillips/WDCS

We will tell you more about our dolphin when we find out more. We hope when Rainbow's toy dolphin arrives it has some exciting adventures with our class.

Thanks to Charlie Phillips of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society for letting us use his photo on our blog.

Happy St Andrew's Day

P4 wrote an acrostic poem for St Andrew's Day.

St Andrew’s Day

Cool weather

Old castles

Towns and cities

Lovely countryside

Absolutely beautiful

Nice, friendly people

Do come and visit!



We hope you like it.

Walking the labyrinth

This week we were able to borrow a labyrinth which the pupils from Uyeasound School on Unst in Shetland made. We used it in Drama and we also explored other ways of using it. We had great fun!

Here we are, acting out scenes from Theseus and the Minotaur. Theseus has killed the minotaur and is making his way out of the labyrinth. Can you see Ariadne and King Minos waiting for him?

Another minotaur is killed after a fight with another Theseus!

Here we are walking the labyrinth.

We walked it to music.

We were all allowed to write our initials beside the labyrinth to show that we had walked it.

Here we are thinking of other ways of using the labyrinth. We think it could be used to have fun, keep healthy, show respect, ask for help, have quiet time, have thinking time - or even for sacrifices.

We used the labyrinth for maths as well - we estimated how long it was and then measured it to see if anyone's estimate was close. Some people got it nearly right.

Here are some of us showing last week's spelling strategy of the week - writing our spelling words in alphabetical order.

This week's spelling strategy of the week is to make a word pyramid by writing the easiest word once at the top, then the next easiest twice below that, then the next 3 times, and so on. It might look a bit like this:

april

large large

giant giant giant

magic magic magic

orange orange orange orange

vegetable vegetable vegetable vegetable vegetable

This is us in art.

Can you guess which person from a Greek myth this is?

In PE we started our Boccia competition. We have already managed to play quite a few matches and the semi-finals will be next week. We really enjoyed it. Mrs MacNab said we have already improved a lot and we can throw the balls a lot more accurately.

Here we are in maths. P3 were still working on time but P4 were doing length. We were estimating whether things like string, scarves and belts were about a metre, longer than a metre or shorter than a metre.

P3 will be starting doing length next week.

We had to measure lots of things - even the classroom and dinner hall.

Some people even practised maths at lunchtime!

This is us doing health. We have been thinking about what helps keep us healthy and this week we thought about healthy bodies and the food we eat and exercise we do. We have started keeping health diaries for a week, and we designed healthy meals. P3 let us play in their healthy cafe too so we served healthy meals to each other.

The Pupil Council had a meeting this week. Here are our representatives reporting back to the class.

Lots of people are looking forward to the Greek food tasting next week - and lots of people aren't because they don't want to try octopus! Mrs MacNab said that they don't have to try everything - they can choose what to try.

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.