Our box has arrived in Canada!

Our box has arrived in our link school in the Okanagan in British Columbia, Canada. The pupils have opened it and they liked all the things inside it. They left a message for us on our blog here.

They sent us some letters too and we enjoyed reading them. We're hoping to reply to them soon. We found out that they like a lot of the same things as us, but the wildlife they see is very different. They have bears and rattlesnakes!

Did you know they're getting a new school built? We saw photos of the place where the new school will be built. There's wild horses there just now.

World Maths Day

It's World Maths Day on Wednesday 3rd March. We've all got logins for the World Maths Day website (it's linked on the sidebar here too). The website is running now so we can practise - on Wednesday there will be real competitions on it all day.

Today we were practising and we played against other children all over the world. You have to answer as many questions as you can in a minute - so you need to think fast! We played people in Canada, America, Ecuador, Japan, China, Germany and more countries. The website shows you a map of the world so you can see where the people you are playing against come from.

Lots of people are planning to use the website at home while it's live for the next week. It's fun playing against children in other countries!

Good luck everyone.

Our Solar System and PE

Here's the constellation some of us created this week. We wrote a myth about it too - that will be appearing on the blog in a few weeks when the other groups have done theirs.

Abbie got a planetarium and brought it in for us all to see. We enjoyed watching the planets orbiting the sun and we discovered that they stay in the same order so Mercury is always the planet closest to the sun.

The first day the classroom wasn't dark enough to see the constellations on the ceiling, but Mrs Scot held a big piece of paper for us to see the constellations on. Then we got some curtains and put them up and shut the blinds and we were able to see the constellations faintly on the ceiling.

Can you find any constellations in the sky?

We're still trying to look at the moom every night. What shape is it tonight?

Here are P4 writing newspaper articles about the space shuttle. They watched some interviews with astronuats and took notes first. Taking notes was hard!

Here we are doing tennis in PE. We learned how to play tennis rounders!

In RME we've been learning about Hinduism. This week we learned about reincarnation and karma and we made a game. Do you know what karma is?

This was our last week of gymnastics with Mr Berry and we were showing off how much we have improved, especially at balances.

In Golden Time some people were making aliens, others were using the techno lego to build things. We're hoping we get to use techno lego again next week.

Do you like our models?

What would you make?

Lots of fun

We've been having lots of fun again.

Here we are in drama, acting out scenes to show good ways and bad ways of responding to people. We had lots of ideas of good ways to act and we are trying to remember good ways to deal with things in the playground too.

In PE with Mrs MacNab we have started doing tennis. It's great fun!

In PE on Fridays we're doing gymnastics with Mr Berry.

Here we are doing listening skills.

In our topic we've been finding out why the moon looks like it changes shape. Do you know why?

Some people pretended to be the Sun, Earth and Moon so we could act it out.

In our topic we've been finding out about stars and constellations and some groups have made their own constellation and written a star myth about it. Here is one group working with Miss Persidou (who is from Greece).

We made 'pinprick pictures' of 2 constellations - Orion and The Plough - to help us find them in the night sky at home. Do you know what they look like?

In maths we've been working hard at multiplication and division. Here we are doing loop cards and trying to get a new record time.

P4 learned lots of 'magic tricks' to do with the 9x table.
Did you know you can use your fingers to help with the 9x table?

Tables practice - with different people taking turns of being 'teacher' and leading the tables.

P4 were challenged to teach Mrs Scott the 9x table ausing as many 'magic tricks' as possible. How many different ways do you think they used?

Divison is fun!

Fun in Golden Time - blowpainting aliens ....

... colouring in (these are Rangoli patterns. Do you know what a Rangoli pattern is?) ...

... and chess.

Who's winning?

Another fun week in P3/4.

Storytelling and a Pyjama Party!

We are working on storytelling and Tom Muir came in to tell us a story. P1 enjoyed hearing him too.

We're working on our own stories now - we'll be recording traditional Orkney tales and sending them to our link school in Canada. We're looking forward to hearing some of their traditional tales too.

When the canoe family were in Orkney in the summer Tom Muir paddled with them in the canoe to Hoy and he told them some stories. They all used to be pupils at Outma Squilx Cultural School. Some of them went to Outma and read the pupils there some stories from Mr Muir's book. We're excited to find so many links to our Canadian school.

We had storytelling in drama as well. Miss Persidou told us a Greek myth. She told us about Perseus and Medusa.

Then we went into groups and acted out different scenes from the story so that we retold the whole story.

In language, P4 had fun making up headlines.

They were enjoying themselves so much that they didn't want to stop for lunch!

On Tuesday we had a pyjama party and bake sale to raise money to send to Haiti to help the children there.

Tuesday was the last day we had to go to school this week as it's the mid-term break now. Have a good holiday, everyone!

Our land art

Last week we looked at some land art made by Richard Shilling. We're hoping to make our own land art when we do some beach visits next term, but the snow inspired some of the girls and they spent break time making their own land art, and lunchtime repairing it!

Team work.

Reaching high to put the final pieces on.

Look at it - isn't it high?

"It's even higher than Mrs MacNab".

The rest of the class went out to see it in the afternoon when we went out to look at how our shadows had changed.