So many events and celebrations in one week!

It seems to have been event after event this past week with so much going on.  Here is a snapshot from the Queen's Birthday Celebrations last Friday, Sports Day on Tuesday and Growth Mindset week.  

Queen's Birthday 90th Birthday
Team Challenge to research facts and make a timeline of key events in her lifetime.  

 A wonderful lunch with families

We were treated to excellent country dancing by Class 2 

We enjoyed designing and making celebration coins and stamps.  It was lovely to welcome Mums, Dads, Aunties, Grandparents and Little Brothers into our class for the afternoon. 

Sports Day
I was so proud of everybody for their efforts and team work on Sports Day.

Growth Mindset Week
It has been a great focus for our learning this week.  We have had challenges which have really tested our resilience and we have been setting ourselves personal challenges.  I have also set the children a personal challenge to try at home for their home learning (sorry it has not come home in books yet - it will do tomorrow!)  Do have a look at the Growth Mindset Blog for more detail about things that have been happening at break times and assembly times too.  

Trying to fathom the 'impossible fold.'

Fun challenges to try and master

More survival skills - learning to tie different knots

Alongside this, we have been learning about angles in Maths, starting to write biographies in English, learning about survival in extreme environments around the world in Geography and Play Rehearsals are well underway too! So, it is fair to say it has been an very busy buy incredibly enjoyable few days in school over the past week.  Here's to an enjoyable Friday and a restful weekend Class 4. 

Mrs McMillan

Shape investigations and more beautiful art!

It has all been about shapes in maths this week in class 4.  We started by realising we needed to do some investigating and exploring of different quadrilaterals to help us identify and name particular shapes.  We used geoboards and elastic bands to investigate quadrialterals, we were challenged to see how many different quadrilaterals  we could make on a 9 dot grid.  After much deliberation and cooperation, we found all 16!

We then needed some further exploration of paralellograms to really understand the differences and properties of these shapes.  We focused on the importance of the angles.  We had a go at making and drawing paralellograms (which we discovered was actually quite tricky!) and then measured the angles. 

Later on in the week we moved on to 3D shapes and continued investigating.  We were challenged to find how many possible nets there are for a cube.  Team work again led us to find the 11 different nets. 

Learning conferences have happened this week and it has been really valuable time spent celebrating the many achievements of the term as well as reviewing targets and setting new targets to work through in our final half term of the year.  It really does impress me how well children articulate their feelings about their learning.  There will certainly be lots to celebrate with you all when we meet again at the end of the term.

Whilst learning conferences were happening, Class 4 have been showing off their art skills once again.  We have been learning about the art work of Andy Goldsworthy to tie in with our topic.  We were then challenged to create our own ‘real life’ Andy Goldsworthy prints using natural objects found around the school ground.  The outcomes were all brilliant!  What I loved most was that each was unique but each reflected the original inspiration of Goldsworthy’s work. 

Here’s now to a great day celebrating the Queen’s 90^th birthday and I look forward to seeing many of you at lunchtime and sharing time with us in class this afternoon.  Photos from our activities today will follow in a blog post next week.

Mrs McMillan