Base 5 Weekly News

Another busy week in Base 5!

In maths we started the week looking at 3d shape. I challenged the children to make 3d shapes from 2d pictures using spaghetti and marshmallows. We had to make sure we measured carefully and got the correct angles when putting the shape together. I saw some excellent engineering skills going on to strengthen shapes. And, although tempting, no-one ate the marshmallows! On Tuesday the children were challenged to find all 11 possible nets of a cube. I was really pleased to see perseverance from many children. Some didn't even want to go out to play until they had all 11 nets! We then moved on to investigate radius, diameter and circumference and continued to work on our reasoning and problem solving skills.

In Literacy we started work on persuasive writing. We read a newspaper article about the reintroduction of wolves into Britain. A great link to our Wolf Brother novel. The children picked out the for and against arguments form the article. We then looked at four samples of a persuasive text and the children unpicked the samples by annotating them to state what was good or bad about the way they were written. From this we have now got a success criteria for our own writing. The children are now in the middle of planning their own persuasive piece either for or against the reintroduction of wolves. In SPaG we looked at colons, sentences, clauses and phrases.

In History we investigated Skara Brae and the children made notes about all the information we had. After looking at the historical evidence available to us the children were all very keen to try to make educated guesses about what some of the houses were used for. As homework I have asked them to write a report about Skara Brae using the notes they made in class and any additional research they can do at home.

As next week is anti-bullying week we have been spending some time looking at bullying. The children have been working on putting together presentations to present to their house groups at the house assemblies on Thursday.

We have been continuing to practise the songs for Singfest in music, and we now need to make sure we are learning the words to all the songs so that we can sing without our sheets.

See you all on Monday!
Mrs McGhie