Health Week - 4 & 5 February 2013

It seems a long time ago now but we had a special two days earlier this term, where all the classes were mixed up and spent time in different classes.  Primaries 2, 3 and 4 were mixed up so Mrs Kirkness, Mrs Dass and Ms Rendall had completely different classes!  The theme of the two days was friendship and we did a variety of activities to help us understand this better.  It was fun to have everyone working together and helping each other.  Some of the activities we did were:

• working in groups to make our own Punch and Judy show where Punch and Judy had a fight and someone helped them become friends again;
• everyone writing one nice thing about everyone else which meant we all had a very long list of nice things about ourselves;
• working together in small groups to solve problems, for example we all closed our eyes and held hands and then had to work together to untangle ourselves and make a circle.

Click on the link to see our slide show which will let you see some of the things were were doing:

Slideshow - Health Week 2013

Book reviews

We were writing our own book reviews this week.  This was new for us and we found it a little bit tricky!

These are the things we had to think about when writing this:

• the author - who wrote the book?
• the characters - who were the people in the story?  Did we like them?  How did they make us feel?
• the plot - what happens in the story? 
• our opinion - did we like the book?  What was our favourite part of the story and why?  Were there any funny or scary bits?  Did we learn anything?
• recommendation - do we think someone else would like to read the book?  Why do we think this?

Are there any books that you have read that you especially like?  If you have read any books you would like to recommend, please leave us a message!

Puppets!

We have been doing our reading differently in Primary 4 this term.  We have been choosing our own books to read at home and doing different reading activities in school.

When we are doing our reading in school, we do this in three different ways:

1) we work in our groups to read the story together and discuss what has happened so far and predict what we think might happen next.  When we have all taken a turn to read we ask each other questions about what we have read.  Before we finish, we also have to think of something good that we did when reading aloud and think of something we could do better next time.  This is called 'a star and a wish'.

2) we talk with Ms Rendall about the book and discuss what has happened so far and then read it together.

3)  we do different activities that link directly to the story we have been reading.  The activities include making a comic strip of the story, writing book reviews, writing new beginnings and endings for the story and designing our own book covers. 

This week we made puppets of the main characters from the books we have been reading.  It was lots of fun!

3D shape investigations

We have been investigating 3D shapes this week.  We have been learning more about cubes, cuboids, cylinders, spheres, prisms and pyramids.  We have been learning about the edges, faces and corners of these shapes, and were able to use what we had learned to build our own 3D shapes.

                                      

It was tricky to get our shapes exactly right but we managed it!  Now we know much more about 3D shapes.