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.

Blue Peter t-shirts

Some of the class have been decorating t-shirts for the Blue Peter 'Send a Smile' appeal. You can find out more on the Pupil Council blog here.

Lots of the girls decided that decorating the t-shirts would be a good way to spend Golden Time this week. They worked very hard and did some lovely designs.

They had to think quite hard first about what to put on the t-shirt. It had to be quite a simple design so it was easy to draw with fabric paints. They also thought hard about pictures which would make ill children who were wearing the gowns feel happy.

First they drew their designs in chalk, then used fabric paints to go over the design.

The boys were playing chess. They worked hard too.

At the end the boys thought the girls had done very good work. Mrs MacNab and Mrs Rendall though so too.

Do these designs make you feel happy?

Fun with water

We've been enjoying using our myth masks in Drama. We showed them to Miss Persidou who is from Greece.

Miss Persidou showed us how to write our names using the Greek alphabet.

In maths we've been measuring things again. We have been weighing things ...

... and we've also been measuring the capacity of lots of different containers.

We had fun using coloured water for it.

We estimated how much the container would hold, then measured it to see if we were right. We sorted containers to show which would hold the most water and which would hold the least water.

In problem solving, we worked together to fill in a table to work out the answer.

In PE we're enjoying doing gymnastics with Mrs Cromarty. We do some work on the floor and some on apparatus.

We love it!

Can you hang upside down like this?

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!