Listening, talking, reading and writing

We regularly practise our language skills.

In Drama this week we had to pretend to be aliens from another planet - when you were in the "hot seat" you were an alien and you had to answer questions that people asked - like "What is your favourite food?" or "What does your house look like?"

In RME we had to talk in groups to work together to sequence the Easter story.

We enjoy going to the library and sharing books with each other.

We did listening skills ...

... and in maths we need to talk, listen, read and write to practise our times tables.

We finished writing our star myths this week too, and we recorded more traditional tales which can be heard here. We hope you enjoy them.

Tree planting

Last week we went tree planting at the Peedie Sea.

International Education in our class.

We made a display about international education in our class.

We made a slideshow about our display.

Sport Relief

We've had a really fun day. We started off with the Just Dance challenge on the Wii. We made Mrs MacNab and Mrs Scott do it too. Can you believe it was the first time they have ever had a shot on a Wii? We took about 7 photos of Mrs MacNab dancing! Mrs MacNab says this is the worst photo, but we chose it to go onto the blog because it's funny!

We'll hopefully have a slideshow of more photos from the Just Dance challenge up later.


** NEWSFLASH ** 23rd March. Here is the video now.





We also bought Sport Relief socks...

... and we designed funky socks too.

We don't know yet how much we've raised, but we'll try to post the total when we find out.

Star myths

Our topic this term has been Our Solar System. As part of it we've been looking at the night sky - we've watched the moon changing and we've spotted some constellations, like Orion and the Plough. We made our own constellations and wrote myths to explain how they got into the sky. We hope you like them. Maybe, if you look very hard, you'll spot our constellations in the sky....

Shargeth the greedy dinosaur!

Shargeth was a dinosaur, the only dinosaur left after the snow came. Shargeth managed to find a good enough shelter. He had lots of food but he was that hungry he ate everything. Then he had no food left and he went to bed. When he got up he decided to go out and look for some tasty food but it was all hidden up in the snow. Then he saw the moon. He said “It looks like cheese. Cheese will make a good meal.” Shargeth stood up on his back legs and jumped with his mouth open and tipped up and ate the moon. When he swallowed the moon millions of birds lifted him up to the sky and he turned into a constellation. The moon dropped out of his belly and it managed to escape back into the sky. Now when you look to the sky you can see him still trying to eat the moon with his mouth wide open.

by James, Magnus, Rosie & Kaitlyn

Asim the warrior

Once there was a warrior called Asim. He was a brave and strong man. He won all his battles and he was rich. Then he decided to make an offering to the Gods, a big tree. So he went to cut the tree with his axe. As soon as he got the axe into the tree, it started to fall and the top of the tree got him on the head and he die. Then the Gods decided that he was so nice they took him into the sky and made him a constellation.

by Ashleigh, Joe, Amy & Jessica

The Hero’s Sword

Once upon a time there was a hunter called Linke who saved the King three times. He had the sword since he was 16 and now he is 40. It was a big and shiny sword that could cut through anything except for gold. Once he was hunting a massive monster and he pulled his sword back but the monster killed him. The Gods picked up the sword and threw it into the sky to remind people of the great hunter.

by Dani, Lee, Reid & Ewan

Mariah the Swan

Long long ago lived a swan called Mariah. She was white and she lived in the Peedie Sea. She liked to fly up in the sky. One day she flew up high in the sky. She was so excited that she went so high that Orion the Hunter could see her. Orion thought that she was beautiful and he was lonely so he pulled her up into the night sky and now she is up in the sky beside Orion for us to see her beauty. Every time Mariah had a good thought a shooting star comes out of her eyes.

by Alanah, Abbie, Martyna, Molly & Molly

Parcel from Canada!

We had something very exciting happen this week - a parcel arrived from Canada! It wasn't from our link school (Outma Sqilx'w Cultural School), it was from the Kwu Sukwna?qinx Canoe Family who visited Orkney last summer. We feel like our link is with the whole community in Penticton which is great.

We were excited to see what was in the parcel and people had turns of picking things out.

There was a book, so that Mrs MacNab can learn all about how the Penticton Indian Band and Syilx people got their own land. There were some cards and photographs of the Canoe Family. We enjoyed finding out who was who, and seeing them in the Spirit Dancer canoe in Orkney as well as in their own canoe in the Okanagan.

There was also chewing gum. We're all quite excited about it! We won't be eating the chewing gum in school but we'll be given it to take home. The chewing gum has pictures from the Winter Olympics on it as they were held in Vancouver, which is also in British Columbia (where our link school is).

We decided to write letters to the pupils in the school. Here we are working on that. We drafted the letters first ...

... then we got out the laptops and typed them so they can be emailed to the school. We hope the pupils enjoy getting the replies to their letters.

We decided to make a display all about International Education and our link with Canada so that everyone else in the school can see it. We put the display up in time for our Mums and Dads to see it on parents' night too.

We chose what went in the display, and even what colours to use for mounting the pictures on. We made a list to compare things we do in Orkney with what the pupils in the Okanagan do.

We like International Education and we're very proud of our display. Mrs MacNab says it's excellent, and lots of other pupils and staff have already been looking at it. Maybe they'll leave comments for us here?

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.

Storytelling

We've been doing some storytelling for our link school in Canada. We've finished the first story - Tam Bichan. You can hear it on the wiki we created to give the pupils in Outma Sqilx's Cultural School information about Orkney.

You can find the link to the wiki in "Class 3/4's Links" on the right of this blog, or click here to be taken direct to the Orkney storytelling page.

We hope you enjoy listening to our story.

We're hoping to add more stories as we get them recorded.

We love books

We celebrated World Book Day this week. We watched a live broadcast with Michael Rosen - he was really funny!

Then we had our own World Book Day event in class. Everyone brought in their favourite fiction book and their favourite non-fiction book. We did book reveiews and then had time to share our love of books. Everyone got very enthusiastic about sharing their books.

Mrs MacNab and Mrs Scott had brought in books too - their books were older than us!

We enjoyed seeing other people's books, and we found interesting facts about space in a lot of the non-fiction books. We also looked at Winnie the Pooh in Polish.

We also had World Maths Day this week. Lots of people took part in live maths games against people from all over the world. We were very proud that Molly C came top of the school for Level 1.

The rest of the week work carried on as usual. Here we are doing drama. We are making plays about being honest.

This is us looking at newspaper articles to find the 5Ws - who, what, where, when and why. We noticed that you can always find the 5Ws at the start of an article. We wrote our own newspaper articles about the space shuttle. Some of them will be appearing on the blog before the end of term.

Problem solving in maths - we were working together on different strategies to solve a problem.

We had an exciting time on Thursday and Friday when Mrs MacNab said we all had to become teachers and teach other people in the class. At first we were a bit worried, but in the end we loved it!

We went into groups to research all about how astronauts live in space. Some people found out about what they ate, some researched how they sleep, one group found out about how they keep clean and the last group researched what astronauts do in space when they're not working.

Here we are doing our research and making and highlighting notes to use to teach our group.

We went back to our original groups to teach them, so that everyone learned all about how astronuats live.

Do you know what astronauts eat?

Did you know that astronuats wear nappies when they are on a space walk?

We had to speak clearly so our group could hear us.

Did you know there is a keyboard in the International Space Station (ISS)?

Mrs MacNab showed us a picture of an astronuat playing it and Ewan spotted that he wasn't sitting on a seat, although he looked like he was sitting down there was no seat!

We watched some astronauts being interviewed in the ISS. They had some apples and oranges but most of their food is dried and needs to have water added and to be heated up.

We would like to be teachers again.

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.