Month: March 2022

It’s been a busy few weeks in P3. We all enjoyed a trip to Aberdeen Music Hall for a live performance of Gaspard’s Foxtrot by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. It was so exciting to see a return to school visits again. Watching the story being performed by author Zeb Soanes and brought to life by a live orchestra was amazing. And we also loved the bus!

In class we have been inspired by the story, “Say Something”. We created a display to share our views about what we love at HoB, and what we could do to make it even better.

And we have been developing our learning through Thinking Routines. We had a surprise visit from the Easter Bunny, who left us some carrots and asked our opinion on whether chocolate eggs should be replaced by carrots.  Our ‘Tug of War’ routine gave a really clear answer. The Easter Bunny was also delighted with the cards, notes and letters that the children created in response. The question remains – do the carrots REALLY smell of chocolate?

As part of our whole school IDL project, we had some big conversations about what we want people to say about our school and how we could make this happen.  We managed to narrow our ideas down to 4 words which we felt represented our discussion:

– Achieving

– Respect

– Responsible

– Inclusive

 

We worked in groups or on our own to create something which represented the word which we felt meant the most to us.

Both Primary 7 classes visited the Library at Banchory Academy last week as part of their transition.  The school librarian, Mrs Bird, had planned lost of activities to help everyone explore the different areas in a fun way.  Although there were some quiet and nervous faces leaving HOBs there were lots of smiles and laughter on the way back.

Springtime and celebrating our Mums!

We have enjoyed looking for signs of Spring on our daily mile and have been painting daffodils in the classroom.  We are taking our paintings home along with our Mothers’ Day Writing.  We have been focusing on using adjectives in our writing so we used lots of adjectives to describe our amazing Mums!

P6 Reading Buddies Session

This week we enjoyed our second session with our P6R Reading Buddies.   Our buddies read us a story and we read our reading books aloud to them, finishing with a five finger retell of our story.

Learning French with Camembear! 

We were learning about Camembear’s life in France this week and we practised sharing our names in French in our learning circle.

 

 

 

We have had a busy week in P6B.  The children have completed a fractions and decimals topic in maths and ended the week working out percentages.  In writing we are continuing our Talk for Writing programme and have been using the Elf Road story to practise making story maps, alliteration, adding dialogue and using interesting adjectives, verbs and similes to add detail and atmosphere to our writing.

We met our P2 Reading Buddies for the first time and shared a story with them, everyone enjoyed the experience and we are looking forward to continuing this in the summer term.

We ended the week completing our work on ‘Say Something’.  We were asked to think about what we wanted for our school and how we could achieve it.  The class came up with some great ideas to share and have made posters, mini film stories, adverts and news reports to share with the rest of the school.

This week P6R have been concentrating on some “short burst” writing as part of our “talk for writing” work.  We have been building a tool kit to support us in our writing.  We have looked at the “pattern of 3” to make writing more exciting, giving it pace and rhythm.  We used a “Making Thinking Visible” zoom lesson about a tiger to create a class poem and then our own poems, thinking about the use of adjectives, similes and verbs.  From this some of us went on to create some tiger pictures.  We used a silent clip from the film “Up” to concentrate on dialogue in writing, looking at how to use speech marks correctly and how to use alternative words to “said” to convey meaning.  Using photos of different settings, we created a descriptive scene using some of the tool kit that we have been practising this week.

We had our second meeting with our P2 reading buddies this week.  The P2’s get a chance to practise their reading books with their buddy and then the P6’s read their buddy a book of choice from the book box.  Both classes have been enjoying the experience and look forward to our Wednesday sessions.

It’s been such a lovely week of weather that we have taken our PE sessions outside to practise our skills.

In maths we have been ordering numbers to 100 and sorting odd/even numbers with Numicon.

We have combined art with science this week.  They experimented with diffusion using coffee filter papers, pens and water to create beautiful butterflies.

 

At the very start of P2, the children decided they needed to do something about the litter in the playground.  We still go on regular litter picks and recently introduced ‘Wrapper Free Wednesday’ to help reduce the amount of litter in the first place.  Everyone can help us do our bit for our school environment!

We have also had our very first session with our P6 reading buddies this week.  This is a great opportunity for the P2s to practice their reading and for the P6s to take on a responsible role – as well as being great fun!

 

Following on from our climate change topic, we have been learning about the importance of plants and wildlife. We have all created our own climate change pledges showing what we as individuals can do stop climate change! We have also been working hard to gather resources for our eco-garden to make it more environmentally friendly and of course beautiful. The class efforts have been rewarded by donations from the Raemoir Garden Centre, Greenspace and Woodend Barn. On top of this Drum Garden Centre have promised some plants for us to plant in April. We have been busy planting and preparing the eco-garden!

P5L are proud to have developed Fruity Friday with the support of Number One Charity and thank them as the project comes to a close. We hope to encourage the pupils of HOB to continue with fruit on a Friday next term.

Primary 1S have been enjoying using the Talk4Writing Approach to explore the story of ‘The Little Red Hen.’

We have enjoyed singing and acting out the story, drawing the Little Red Hen, creating story maps to re-tell the story and writing character descriptions!

We decided that the Little Red Hen is very hard working and determined.  We think we are all hard working too and determined to do our best!

Miss Sutherland is very proud of us for all our hard work.