What an incredible final week it’s been for Term 1 – there is a lot to write about!
We’ve had a big STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics) focus this week to tie in with Maths Week Scotland which was last week. The theme this year was Maths in Motion which ties in well with the work we’ve been doing on forces. We’ve been conducting science experiments where we started to think about forces such as gravity and air resistance, and how they were acting on the different sized cones we were dropping. Our predictions about which cone would land first were correct but we had a few different ideas about why the smaller more pointy/angled cone landed first. We’ll continue to explore forces at the start of next term.
We were very lucky to have Jack from UHI visit us to help us learn more about forces and maths in motion. Jack is an engineer and has a particular interest in robotics. Jack set up a 3D printer at the start of the day and by the end of the day it had printed a 3D Easter Island Head! We also learned that there are different types of 3D printers including ones that can make pizzas in space (this has been funded by NASA) and really large ones that can even build houses! I wonder what you think the advantages and disadvantages of technology like this are? Jack also flew a drone in the classroom to help us understand the forces that move it upwards and move it around the room. We could feel the air being forced down by the propellers when the drone flew near us. We also got to see a gyroscope and a Newton’s cradle in action. If anyone is interested, you could have a go at building your own Newton’s Cradle at home! I wonder what questions you would have as you watch the balls move! Our final challenge was to try to develop our engineering skills by building the tallest tower using spaghetti and marshmallows! It was wonderful to see everyone thinking like scientists and mathematicians with the endless number of questions posed to Jack during his short time with us! One of my favourite questions was, how is it that there is enough gravity to make us stay on the ground (and not float off) but not so much that we can still move about and aren’t stuck to the ground?
We also had a huge amount of fun when we got our turn to contribute to our whole school Kapla construction. We worked together to construct two buildings and had to consider lots of ideas to do with shapes, position, movement (including rotation) and we also got to make use of our repeating patterns which made it easier to understand how to continue the building by ourselves after Jennifer had helped us to get started.
You can watch a video of the whole two day construction below
As part of our morning work we also explored some short activities from the Maths Week Scotland website to think about art and maths. We tried out some Geometric Dot Grid Drawings which involved connecting adjacent dots (dots that are next to each other) using vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines to create different shapes which created a picture. We also explored the wonderful world of Tangrams and how by rotating and moving a few simple shapes you can create an endless number of different designs. If you want more ideas to try at home, check out the Family Activities section of the Maths Week Scotland website.
We’ve also had some individual performances from the P4s who have been showing how far they’ve come with their guitar skills this term. The P4s have a slightly longer day than the P3s so we’ve been learning Baby Shark on the guitar! We’ve gone from not knowing how to hold a guitar to being able to play a recognisable tune that we can sing along too. It takes a huge amount of perseverance and patience to learn an instrument and the P4s have demonstrated those qualities in abundance while they’ve worked incredibly hard to learn a completely new skill! We discovered that this links well to our pattern work in maths too as by identifying the pattern in the music, it has made it easier to learn how to play the song.
Not to forget our other subjects, we’ve also been continuing our literacy work on recounts including retelling these and learning more about the structure of a recount. We’ve been using the story map we created in a previous week to help our oral retelling and then using our knowledge of the story to understand the features of a recount. This will help us when we write our own recounts next term.
Finally, our tag rugby skills are coming along nicely and we’ve moved on to playing mini tag rugby games. We are much more confident with throwing, catching and moving our bodies to try to tag others and avoid being tagged ourselves.
Wow, what a long post for just one week!
It’s been a wonderful action packed first term. We hope the children have made lots of new friends as we have had time to get to know each other better and have made lots of great memories with the experiences we’ve had.
Have a great holiday and we look forward to seeing you back in a couple of weeks.