Braemar School and Nursery

Both classes have been busy making all kinds of festive things this week, including making the lanterns for the reindeer parade on Christmas Eve. Many thanks to The Fife Arms and artist Stephanie Van Dem for involving us in this.

We all thoroughly enjoyed taking part in the Christmas show this year. Here are the photos from our performance in the village hall on the 12th December.

This week was a busy one for our Gardening Club who sold plants from the school garden and kindly donated by others. The total raised was £89 and funds will be used to support the Gardening Club in future improvements.

P5-7 were fortunate to have two of our regional MSPs to talk to this week. Mercedes Villalba (Labour Party) and Maggie Chapman (Green Party) met with the children, outlined their jobs and the priorities of their parties, as well as answering their thought-provoking questions. Next week we will have a visit from our Constituency MSP, Alexander Burnett (Conservative Party).

We also had our own elections this week with our P7s organising the voting station and ensuring that voting took place in a professional and fair way. Three votes was made by each pupil based on the individual candidate’s manifestos and these then became our preferred candidates for Class President. To help everyone decide which of these should be the final Class President, debates were held at the end of the week. These included all P5s and P6s and was an opportunity to put forward their policies and argue why other parties ideas may be less convincing or important. All children participated in the debates with our P7s taking it in turn to be the Honourable Speaker or media.

Our end of term Assembly took place on Wednesday and as well as giving the P7s a great send off (including lots of photos of much younger versions of themselves) we were also entertained by P1-6. This included ‘Sharing Memories’, a song that P5-7 had learnt to play on instruments, and created lyrics for, and a clever poem that included lots of chocolate! Last but not least all children sang a song from Matilda the musical called ‘When I grow up’!

Please see photos from the week by clicking the link below

Photos and videos

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This week we have been preparing for our Careers Week, due to take place next week in school. In Literacy, we created posters and leaflets to advertise the event. We used a new set of tools which we can access through Glow, called j2e. Everyone enjoyed learning how to use some of the tools this week. We even helped P1-4 log in and use it!
We made lanyard badges for each of the roles we will have to fill next week and used a table on j2e to make sure that everyone has a job each day. It was a really tricky puzzle to solve, but we persevered and managed to make it work in the end. Now we have our roles for the week- meet and greet, press photographer, journalist, welcome committee. Once the event is over we will make a short film about it.

In maths we completed a stand alone topic this week, as P7 are away at Loch Insh. We completed research about important mathematicians and number systems and their impact on the world. We used j2e to practise some of the skills we had just learned.

On Friday we paired up with pupils in P1-4 for paired reading. We enjoyed reading and listening to stories together.

Paired Reading

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This week began on Tuesday with Sports Day. It was a beautiful morning of weather and we were joined by Crathie Primary. All enjoyed the day and put a lot of effort into all sports and supporting each other.

Wednesday was an opportunity to catch up on Reading and Numeracy and Thursday was more running, jumping and throwing with the Potted Sports in the morning and lots of opportunities for house points.

This week we had a whole school trip to Aberdeen, visiting the beach and Aberdeen Science Centre. P5/7 took part in a Lego Mindstorm workshop. We had to write an algorithm to get the robot to move around a course. We needed to use our maths knowledge and coding skills and work as a team to complete the challenge. The final team to try their algorithm managed to successfully guide their robot to the end of the course. We think the cheer could have been heard back in Braemar! Click on the link below to see photos and videos from our day out.

We had an online session with a representative of the Scottish Parliament to learn more about how political systems work in Scotland.
We also had a visit this week from Caitlyn from Aboyne Academy, who told us about how her learning has progressed since she first attended Code Club in primary school. Now she is going into S5 and preparing to study a range of STEM subjects. She told us about how staff at Aboyne Academy help pupils to identify how their skills and interests might link to different careers. We asked lots of questions about the Academy and the kinds of subjects which are available. Over the coming weeks we will find out more about the world of work as we prepare to hold a careers week.

In Maths we were finding common factors and identifying multiples. We played a dice game to help us, created Venn diagrams in the playground and enjoyed using Sumdog to practise our maths. Well done to Eilidh, Lucian and Peter, with the highest scores in class this week.

Trip to Aberdeen Beach and Science Centre May 2023

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