Primary 4b - February 2024

This month has flown by in Primary 4b. We have been working really hard across the curriculum and thoroughly enjoyed learning about and celebrating Lunar New Year. Please read below to find out about what we have been learning this February! 😊

Lunar New Year 2024

We has so much fun celebrating Lunar New Year this month. A big thank you to our lovely A who taught us how to say the numbers 1-10 in Chinese, you were a super star with your confidence. We then had fun writing our own numbers 1-10 in using the calligraphy technique. A taught us her name in Cantonese too! We all learned so much, even Miss L! The Primary 7 Mandarin Club ran a lovely workshop with us to teach us about colours. Then, Primary 5 helped us understand the Chinese Zodiac story and we learned that 2024 is the year of the Dragon. We hope everyone that was celebrating at home had a great time. 🐉

World Thinking Day

Our Primary 4b children who attend Brownies and Cubs. How smart do they all look in their uniforms!

Numeracy and Maths

Our group has been doing area and perimeter of 2D shapes. The perimeter is the length of around the outside of a shape, and the area is the inside. You work out the perimeter by adding all of sides together, and you work out the area by using the calculation (A = L XB) this means the area is the length times by the breadth. We found this a little tricky to start but we got it in the end and didn't give up.

Written by Alasdair and Zac

Our group has been learning about squared and cubed numbers. A squared number is a number that is multiplied by itself, and it has a little 2 above it. A cubed number is a number which is multiplied by itself 3 times. We have been looking at function machines, we need to figure out the output, input, and the rule. We think we are getting good with this!

Written by Kani and Mayank

This month we have been learning to find the area of 2d shapes. We do this by counting the squares. At the end of area we need to write cm squared. We have also been learning to how divide using the bus stop division method. You need to know how to share equally. We also know that sometimes there is a remainder.

Written by Aurora and Fatima

HWB

This month we have been developing our Hockey skills. We know how to correctly hold the stick and pass the ball using control and accuracy. Lots of us are beginning to use these skills to dribble the ball too. We really enjoyed playing some matches to display the skills that we have been working on over the last few weeks.

Finally, our Primary 6/7 pupils worked very hard to deliver a set of lessons to us about Anti-Bullying. We really enjoyed being taught by the older children and we think they did a great job!

Literacy

During Grammar time, we have been learning about similes and recognising the difference between fact and opinion. We learned that a simile is a way of describing something by comparing it to something else using 'like' or 'as', usually in an interesting or imaginative way. For example, "as fast as a cheetah" or "as soft as a marshmallow". The girls and boys have been adding similes into their Literacy work to make it more interesting. Primary 4b have also made fact and opinion robots to show their understanding about the difference between the two.

We have been working so hard on joined up handwriting recently. The standard of handwriting in our class is fantastic, Miss Lees is very proud of us!

Finally, you might have noticed that we're REALLY good at persuading people. We've been working on using different writing techniques to persuade our reader. We have been using strong feelings, alliteration, repetition, and rhetorical questions. One day, we arrived at school and our chairs had gone on strike! They were tired of us treating them badly. We were asked to write them a letter to persuade them that we'll be much kinder to them. Thankfully, they were persuaded and came back! We really didn't enjoy having to work without a chair. We have started to think about using what we have learned to have a persuasive debate on homework. We will update you on this in next month's blog.

We are very persuasive writers in Primary 4b! Look at our amazing persuasive work.

Our 'Can Do' Curriculum

Primary 2,3 and 4 have been working together as part of our new 'Can Do' Curriculum. As a group we discussed and explored the Sustainable Development Goals and decided that we felt very passionate about 'Life Below Water'. Our Big Question for this block of work has been "How can Maidenhill dive deep to protect Scottish sea life?" We have had lots of in depth discussions about the ways that we can protect Scottish sea life, and thoroughly enjoyed a video call with a Marine Biologist who gave us lots of fantastic information. As well as this, we've all been working together in our Atrium to create letters to persuade others to do their bit for Scotland's Sea Life, some of us wrote to Mr McDonald, others wrote to Marine Biologists and some of us even wrote to famous people like Taylor Swift (She has lots of influence!). We are very excited to have some of you in to visit for our 'Under the Sea Showcase' very soon!