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Staff training – Miss Andrews and Mrs Connor, GSuite

Miss Andrews and Mrs Connor travelled through to SSERC in Dunfermline on 19th September to find out all about GSuite in Education, a bank of apps developed by Google. The aim of the session was to look at ways that GSuite can be used to support and extend learning the classroom, we had lots of fun and are very excited to share our new knowledge with the teachers and children in school.

Today we have investigated Glow with some of the P6 children and have looked at placing tiles on their launchpad to give them access to the apps they will be using.

The apps we looked at on our training will promote collaboration, creativity and provide timely and focused feedback. We hope they will motivate and engage the children and we look forward to receiving our chromebooks that we have on order, P6 will become our ‘Digital Classroom’.

Nursery – People who help us in our community

The nursery children have been interested in learning about people who help us in our community. We had a visit to nursery from two police officers on motorbikes and the children who wanted to had a turn sitting on the bikes and then had a chance to ask the police some questions. Mary, our lovely lollipop lady came into the nursery to tell us all about what she does, and the children asked lots of questions. We were able to sing Mary a road safety with Ziggy song that we had learnt. We also had Mrs Grieve who is a nurse, and one of our mums, who came in and showed us what nurses who work in theatre wear and the children tried out some of the equipment. This week we went down to the local Fire Station for a visit and the children got to try on helmets, sit in the fire engine and learn all about what fire fighters do! Through these real-life experiences and imaginary play, we are learning how local shops and services provide us with what we need in our daily lives. Also, by exploring our local community, we are learning about the different roles people play and how they can help. Who knows what the future brings for these little people. We are having a visit from our local Coastguard soon to learn about all the work they do for us.

Healthy Lifestyles in Primary 5

In Primary 5 we have been participating in some sports taster sessions. We were joined by members of staff from Caledonia Gym who put us through our paces during a boot camp fitness session. We really enjoyed the plank challenge and the sprints. We were also lucky enough to have a visit from James from Cricket Scotland. We were shown how to play cricket correctly through a variety of different activities. Our favourite part of the session was the pressure circle where we had to use hand eye co-ordination skills to stay in the game. Phoebe and Aaron, our Sports Leaders have also been leading warm-up drills and stations during our class P.E lessons. We are looking forward to participating in the taekwon-do session later this week.

Primary 6 Activity Week

P6 activity week was over the course of 5 days, each day we took part in a different activity. Creative Comics visited our classroom from Dundee and we learnt how to write comic strips. We had lots of trips out of school to Botanic Gardens, Crombie and Monikie parks. Take a look at our photos for a taste of our activities.

: On Monday Creative Comics from Dundee came in and we made characters and comics about the characters

: My character was called Hobo Siwa, He travelled on the side of a train and met Rich Richard.

: Raft building at Monikie on Thursday

: Learning how to use our paddles.

: We co-operated and built a raft – will it float?

: Moving our raft and co-operating was hard work. It was really wobbly, we could have used more barrels.

: I found the high ropes very challenging and scary but am proud of myself that I managed.

: The climbing wall was easy, we climbed up the wall wearing our harness.

: At the Botanic Gardens we looked at exotic plants. This is a pitcher plant which had lots of dead flies inside.

: More pitcher plants. We looked at was inside, – black, mushed up insects.

Sports Day 2019

The sun came out on Monday 17th July to allow us to hold our annual Sports Day. Infant sports consisted of potted sports where the children work in cross stage teams to complete a game for points and after playtime we have some races where the children compete against boys or girls in their year. Over playtime, as a thank you to our parents we have tea, coffee, cakes and biscuits.

Our sports day could not go ahead without a number of people:

Our parent helpers who do a tremendous job in helping set up the course, taking teams of children around potted sports and judging the winners in the races – not an easy job.

Our teachers for all the preparation ensuring the equipment is ready and explaining to the children what they have to do, while encouraging them to do their best and have fun.

Our children for having a ‘can do’ approach, supporting each other and understanding that not everyone is going to be a winner.

P2/3 and P3 Trip to Newton Farm

Last week P2/3 and P3 went to visit Newton Farm. We had a great time! Our favourite bits were feeding the baby kids and lambs. We made our own butter but we weren’t allowed to eat it so we are going to make it again in school so that we can eat it with some toast and jam. We also got to watch some sheep being sheared, it was really funny because afterwards they didn’t recognise each other and started to fight with each other. There were lots of other animals on the farm that we got to meet, there were chickens, a mirco pig, alpacas, cows, Highland cows and dogs.

P4 visit to Discovery centre

We visited the ship Discovery which Captain Scott used to sail to the Pole. Some of the Kids were allowed to dress up in costumes from the past and the present. We got to see how the sailors lived on the ship and what other equipment was used on the voyage. We also walked around the centre which had an exhibition of people and animals that live on the cold lands. We also got to watch an old fashioned movie from the time, showing the people living and working in the cold.

P1 STEM – cars

We worked as a class in small groups to make cars using a shoe box as the car. This was a STEM project as we used different aspects of STEM learning to help us be successful. We made our car for Teddy to go on holiday. We had to make sure the car was able to move.

Here are the steps below

First we had paper to plan our design
Next we designed our cars
We used the hole punch to make the holes for the wood to go through
Then we had to measure the stick for the wheels to go on
We used the junior hack saw to cut the right size
Then we had to sharpen the ends to put the wheels on
Finally we attached the wheels to the sticks and put them onto the car

After we designed our cars we went through to primary two to see their cars and talk about their designs. We drew a road on the carpet to see if our cars would move and they were all successful!

Some thoughts from the primary one pupils –

I enjoyed designing my car

I liked using the saw

I found using the saw difficult

I found it hard to punch the hole

I would have liked to paint the car

I would add more to my design

Focus on Digital Literacy

Have you seen our posts on twitter? A group of P6 and P7 code clubbers attended Angus Council’s very first Tiny Teach Meet and presented the work Woodlands have been doing over the past 2 years with Code Club.

We attended Inverbrothock Primary school and heard great things from all over Angus and Woodlands was one of 8 schools presenting. We have been running code club for 2 years at Woodlands and this year we ran it as an after school club for 1 hour a week which was really successful, giving our children time to engage with coding languages such as scratch, html and css. Through codeclub.org we partnered with Susan from the Bank of Scotland in Arbroath who came along each week to support us with our coding. In code club we learned about sequencing, repetition and variables and as we worked together we were continually problem solving, building our determination, critical thinking and computational thinking skills. Many coders continued tinkering their projects once they got home and built new projects to show their peers the following week.

We can confidently say that code club has been a success, the children are keen to run it again next year and many of them are keen to be code club leaders.

To find out more: #tinyteachmeet Code Club Scratch

Focus on Fairtrade

Our Fairtrade committee have been working very hard this year to re-apply for our status as a FairAchiever school. To do this we had to complete the following actions:

Adopt a Fairtrade Policy
Review our Action Plan
Embed Learning
Use Fairtrade Products
Complete 2 challenges – we choose Fairtrade cafe and promoting Fairtrade school uniform.
Complete both learner and teacher audits – our learner audit has showed us where we need to focus over the next 3 years, our teacher audit told us that Fairtrade can be taught in many subjects, Health and Wellbeing, Social Subjects, Maths and Literacy.

: 1. Fairtrade Policy signed by Pupil Council, Parent Council and Head Teacher

: 3. Some resources used with our classes.

: 3. Some resources used with our classes.

: 4. Fairtrade Products on sale at our cafe.

: 4. Fairtrade Football raffle held for children and parents.

: 5. A busy Fairtrade cafe

: 5. Making Fairtrade logo during our cafe

: 5. Fairtrade cake stall at the cafe

: 5. Working with Koolskools, we now offer a Fairtrade option for school uniform.

We also wrote to Tayside Contracts to ask them to use Fairtrade products whenever possible in the supplying of nursery snack and our school dinners, we had new cupboards installed in school and were given a donation of 100 white mugs, allowing us to be more eco-friendly when catering for events in our school. Thanks to Carnoustie/Panbride church. Many children painted the Fairtrade logo onto rocks at our cafe and the committee then hid them around Carnoustie for the public to find and to promote Fairtrade – we think ‘Fairtrade Rocks’ and we hope you do too.