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:

  1. Adopt a Fairtrade Policy
  2. Review our Action Plan
  3. Embed Learning
  4. Use Fairtrade Products
  5. Complete 2 challenges – we choose Fairtrade cafe and promoting Fairtrade school uniform.
  6. 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.

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.

Scottish Assembly Jan 2019

Today we learned a little bit about Robert Burns.  We heard children reciting their Scottish Poems and the nursery sang us 3 Scottish songs they had learned.  Children from P7 entertained us with tunes on the fiddle and Irish dancing and P4 danced the fling and the sword dance.  Miss Walker explained that a long time ago the swords were taken to battle and at the end of the battle people would dance across their swords, if you touched the sword it meant that the next battle maybe would not go well.  Thank you to everyone who took part today,  Oor Wullie and our Penguin also got dressed up for the occasion and came along to assembly.

 

Drawing Max the Brave with Ed Vere

Primary 2 watched authors live.  Ed Vere read the story of Max the Brave and taught everyone to draw Max, following the instructions step by step.  Everyone was proud of their attempt and it was good fun seeing a real author and illustrator in action.

See the BBC authors live clip here

 

 

Merry Christmas from Woodlands Code Club

Our code club has been meeting on Tuesday’s from 3.20 – 4.20 in the P7 classroom.  Open to P5, P6 and P7 children, 10 children, (5 boys, 5 girls) have worked with Mrs Connor and Susan, our code club volunteer to use Scratch to write scripts using block programming, translating into animations.

Over the last 2 weeks the children have had free reign to design their own Christmas animations using the skills learned this term.  Please take a look at our animations.

 

Inspection Report

Our Inspection Report has been published and we are all feeling very proud.  We are proud of our children, our staff and our whole community.  Below is a copy of our report.  There are also links which take you to the summary of inspection findings which give more detail of the inspector’s visit and their findings.

28 August 2018
Dear Parent/Carer
In June 2018, a team of inspectors from Education Scotland visited Woodlands Primary School
and Nursery Class. During our visit, we talked to parents/carers and children and worked
closely with the headteacher and staff. We gathered evidence to enable us to evaluate aspects
of the quality of leadership and children’s achievements.
The inspection team found the following strengths in the school’s work.
 Staff have created a nurturing, inclusive learning environment, where children are
developing resilience for learning, and attaining and achieving very successfully. The highly
effective leadership team, led by the headteacher have a clear vision for the school and
give well-defined direction to staff. They involve stakeholders in the life and work of the
school.
 Children are confident, successful learners. They are motivated to do well, and are very
enthusiastic about their learning. They are very articulate, respectful and contribute well to
the life and work of the school.
 Staff work together very well to implement whole school approaches to self-evaluation.
They track children’s progress effectively, and identify priorities for improvement which lead
to improved outcomes for all children.
 Staff have taken forward well-planned improvements for learning, teaching and assessment
to raise attainment in numeracy and mathematics across the school. Sector leading
approaches to embedding a numeracy-rich environment for learning, which is leading to
excellent progress in early mathematics for almost all children in the nursery class.
The following area for improvement was identified and discussed with the headteacher and a
representative from Angus Council.
 As planned staff should develop further approaches for learning, teaching and assessment
for literacy, with the same rigor they brought to improving numeracy and mathematics.

Woodlands Primary School and Nursery Class Inspection Report

Summarised Inspection Findings for Woodlands Primary School and Nursery Class

Summarised Inspection Findings for Woodlands Primary School

Primary 7 News

Primary 7 have been very busy this term.  In maths we have been learning about algebra.  We have been collecting terms, simplifying expressions, expanding the brackets and learning new rules like the ‘change side, change sign’ rule.  We have also been adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing negative numbers.

In writing we have been preparing our pupil profiles for moving to high school using ICT to support us.  Recently we have worked with P3 to create imaginative characters and in MIE we have learned how the create atmosphere and a film trailer.

Our science topic has focussed on materials and how to conduct a fair experiment.  We have been learning about particles, the properties of materials and their changes.  In class we conducted experiments and looked at dissolving , predicting which materials would dissolve in water.

Primary 7 had a fabulous residential trip to Ardeonaig.  We had a great time staying away for 3 nights.  Our activities included hill walking, canoeing, high ropes, the pizza box, archery and team challenged.

We have now had our final transition days to our high schools.  We visited a range of classes and met some of our future teachers.  In chemistry we we conducted an experiment and used the bunsen burner and in home economics we made scones.

We are looking forward to starting first year.

Primary 6 News

Although we have learned lots of things in Primary 6, activity week stands out for us all.  We enjoyed canoeing, raft building, pond dipping, high ropes and much more.  Many of us were taken out of our comfort zone but, with the encouragement of our class mates and the teachers, we achieved success and were all so proud.

We have looked at many topics throughout the year, comparing Brazil and Scotland, looking at the World of Work and learning about Mary Queen of Scots.  We have created movies and made our own maths games.

Primary 6 has been a busy year and we hope that Primary 7 is just as much fun.

Primary 5 News

This term in Primary 5 we have had lots of learning opportunities.  We attended a STEM workshop in Arbroath.  STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.  We worked in groups to create a 3D model of a shoe and invited parents and carers in to school for our Soft Shoe Shuffle Showcase.

In maths we have been learning about bank accounts, credit/debit cards, scams and different currencies.  Miss Mullis’s dad came in to speak about his job and we found our more about the bank.  We have used ‘Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs’ as our stimulus for imaginative writing and worked on our drafting, editing and proof reading skills.

We completed personal projects for homework and presented these to the class and use adobe spark to create videos for our new teacher telling her all she needs to know about us.  We have had a very busy, enjoyable term, packed full of learning.