Advent Wreath

We have started a new RME topic which is the Christian celebration of Christmas. Today we learnt a bit about what Advent means to Christians. We found out that the word 'advent' means 'coming,' as Christians wait for the arrival of the day Jesus was born. 

We spoke about the circular shape of the wreath representing the never ending love that God has, while the green leaves stands for the hope of new and eternal life.

The four coloured candles symbolise the four Sunday's of advent and stand for 'hope', 'peace', 'love', and 'joy. The fifth, white candle represents the day of the birth of Christ.

We made our own Advent Wreath and wrote on our leaves the various things that we are doing in preparation for Christmas - what a helpful lot they are going to be! Lots of people going to help decorate the Christmas tree and help their parents shopping!

                                      

After each Sunday of Advent, the first being Sunday 30th November, we can add another candle to our Advent Wreath. We also have a class advent calendar which we will take turns opening, reading part of the Christmas story (and having a chocolate!).

Our Pharaoh Lessons

This week we have been learning all about Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs. We reversed roles for the afternoon and the children became the teachers! Each group was given some information about a different famous Pharaoh and the task of teaching this to the rest of the class. A concentrated 15 minutes was allowed for groups to prepare their lessons in any way they chose.

Our first group created a poster to help them teach us about Cleopatra; the last Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt. They told us about her famous husbands - Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Ptolemy. We also heard how she allowed a snake to bite her with poison which killed her!!

This group taught us all about King Tutankhamen, the 'boy king' who was only 9 years old when he became Pharaoh. They acted out the discovery of his tomb by Howard Carter in 1922.

Ramesses II (the Great) was explained to us by our third group. They told us how he was married to Nefartari and is believed to have had over 100 children!!

Our final group taught us about Hatshepsut, a very successful female Pharaoh. However as we found out, she used to dress up as a man so people wouldn't know she was a woman.

Children In Need 2014

We have had such a fun day raising money for Children In Need today. Lots of super heroes came to school, we had everyone from Batman to Thor in the class.

Primary 5 entertained us with their Children In Need assembly in the morning; they had us in stitches with their tricks on Mr MacIntosh! Christy took part too and showed us his impressive uni-cycling skills!

In the afternoon P5 and P7 organised a bake sale, games and a Super Hero Hoe Down in the hall. We ended the day with a whole school Cha Cha Slide.

 

A brilliant effort by the whole school today, we raised a fantastic total of £570.22!!!! 

Today we were extremely lucky to have Mara Menzies, an African story teller, come and visit our class. Mara is half Scottish and half Kenyan. First she taught us how to say 'hello' in Kenyan...'Jambo' which you MUST say with a huuuge handshake.

Then she told us lots of African stories about animals; we listened to a story about why the chicken and the eagle aren't friends any more, one about the hummingbird who helped as much as he could and one about the sparrow who could fly higher than the eagle. They were very interesting and we had to help out in a few stories...

She also got us singing lots of songs and dressing up in traditional African Leso's; Mara showed us 3 different ways to wear the Leso.

We tried to jump as high as the Massai tribes men

 Finally she took out some other objects she had from Kenya

 A fly whisk, with the tail hair of a cow

 A thumb piano (mbira)

A calabash, made from a dried, hollowed out butternut squash.

 They have added a zip and use it as a purse!

We had a super morning with Mara!

Egyptian Collar Necklaces

This week we have been learning all about daily life in Ancient Egypt. As part of this we looked at the jewellery they wore and made our own collar necklaces.

We started by drawing a plan; deciding what colours we wanted, what materials we were going to use and what our pattern would be. We agreed that most Egyptian collars had a repeating pattern using lots of bright colours.

After this we created our collar necklace by cutting a circle out of a paper plate, making sure it would fit around our necks.

We painted our necklaces gold or silver (or silver and gold) as these were the materials the Egyptians used, then added lots of decoration. The more decoration, the richer the person!

We think they look brilliant!