Tag Archives: art

Trees, Bees and a Highland Fling!

This week was another busy week for us. In number work we have been completing some pages in our new Check Up booklets. These are our new workbooks which are very special because they give us lots of questions and let you teachers know how we are getting on. We have been showing how much we know about subtraction and we know a lot! Mrs Mackay and Mrs Munro are very proud of us!

Everyday we have been practising our addition and subtraction using our Activexpressions and a Self -Paced flipchart. These are lots of fun and we all like to see how well we are doing at the end. It also lets our teachers see how were are getting on and we have gotten so good that we have moved up a level! Two of us have now completed training to become Activexpression Experts. Well done to Corey and Magnus who got their certificates at assembly this week.

In art this week we have been making beautiful cherry blossom art pictures. The skill we were learning was printing. First we got out the paint we needed. We decided that we needed some brown paint for the tree and then we needed pink paint for the cherry blossom but Mrs Mackay said that she didn’t have pink paint and could any of us think what we could do to make some. George and Maddison pulled on their thinking hats and said that they thought we should mix red and white together to make pink so we tried that and it worked! Next, we got some empty water bottles to print with. We got long pieces of paper and made our beautiful pictures.

In ICT we are building on our skills using programmable Beebots. We worked in teams and each had a different activity at each station. At the first station we had to programme the Beebot to go to the letter our name starts with. At the second station we had to programme the Beebot to go the money that out team picked . At the third station we had to programme the Beebot to go the number our team selected on the mat and finally, at the fourth station Mrs Mackay gave us a challenge to move the Beebot to a picture on a Beebot mat and she assessed us. It was lots of fun and we enjoyed moving around and trying to programme the Beebot.

In health we have been learning all about different food groups. This week it was the turn of the Yellow Builders. These foods are things like potatoes, pasta, rice and  bread. We tasted lots of different types of bread ( and none of the ones we tasted were like the bread we get on our sandwiches!) The most popular was the pretzel bread and the garlic bread. We also got to use some of the foods from the yellow builders to create pictures. We were very creative. Kaitlyn made a picture of a sailing boat and Chamseddine created a dinosaur using the pasta, rice and noodles.

On Friday we had two special events. We had our Gym lesson but instead of Mrs Mackay, Miss Davies or Mrs Paton teaching us it was two proper gymnasts. They were really nice and played lots of fun warm up games and cool down games. They wanted to teach us how to move our bodies in lots of different ways and using lots of different equipment. We had to balance, use forward rolls and pencil rolls, jump and hop around a circuit. Billy was very good at balancing, Wren was brilliant and bunny bouncing, Lara was super at leaping on the vault,  and we all amazed Mrs Mackay at doing forward rolls and pencil rolls. The ladies told us about a club they are running and we will take a leaflet home on Monday to show our grown ups.

In the afternoon, we had our Highland Games. It was lots of fun and we all found out what house we were in. Some of us were in the blue house called Baxter, some were in the yellow house called Dudhope, some of us were in the green house called Caird and the rest of us were in the red house called Camperdown. The house we are in will stay the same all the way through to P7 until we leave Dens Road Primary. We had to cheer our team on, most of us were supporting our teams but some us were chosen by our house captains to take part in the races and events. Billy and Edyn were on the Caird (green) team, Leyan was on the Dudhope (yellow) team, Kayla was in the Baxter (blue) team and Michael from P1 in P1/2 was in the Camperdown (red) team. They all did really well at games like toss the caber, hurl the wellies, leap the burn and lots more. In the end the Primary 7’s added up the scores and the Dudhope Team won! They got certificate and a team trophy. All the other teams did so well so they got a certificate too and we all had a great time!

As part of our homework this week we had three challenges to choose from we could write or draw things which make us happy, we could write a dragon story or book just like the Chopsticks story we heard or we could  draw or make our own Chinese dragon. We all really come up with some amazing homework and we wanted to share it with you so here are some samples of what we did with our families.

Week Beginning Monday 25th February

  • Remember to bring your filled, named water bottle with you every day (no juice please).
  • HOMEWORK – Please send it to school every day but any tasks should be completed by Wednesday. The teacher will collect in the weeks work on Wednesday. Each week there will be a Yellow Book Challenge to do but you can pick which challenge you want to do from a list of 3 each week. There will be no homework on a Wednesday night.
  • Gym is on a Monday and Thursday. Please remember long hair will need to be tied back and no jewellery. This means all earrings must be removed. Thank you.
  • Fruit money for this term is £1.40 please place in a named envelope.
  • Please return your child’s trip form and money  as soon as possible (these do not have to be sent in together).
  • This week we will be learning about Time (numeracy), Lost and Found (literacy) and throwing skills (healthy and wellbeing).
  • You won’t believe what’s in our hat!

    Well what a busy week we have had. On Monday we were very sporty. We had gym with Mrs Paton but in the morning we had a special treat, we all got a taster lesson in Judo. We were all fab and we had so much fun that some of us said we would like to try joining a Judo club on our Folio sheet.

    In language we have beenlearning more of our Jolly Phonics sounds. This week we learnt the sounds l, f and b. We were really good at thinking of lots of words which started with our sound of the day and we are getting really good at applying what we know when we sound out a word in reading or spelling- so good infact that lots of us now have books with words in that we can read! These might be tricky but are all doing really well.

    We have also been learning all about invitations because we remembered that in the story of Sleeping Beauty some of the books had a party at the start because the King and Queen we so happy to have a baby but in other stories the Prince and Sleeping Beauty had a party because they fell in love. First of all we looked at our promethean board to see what WALT and WILF said we were learning about.


    Next we saw that the fairy in the Lotte Reiniger film was reading an invitation and we talked about what the invitation could be for. We heard that it was because everyone in the castle had woken up after being asleep for 100 years and we learned that there was going to be a ball (that is the name for a posh party not a football)!


    We all thought very carefully about what it might say on the good fairy’s invitation. We thought that it would say that there was ball and it was going to be in the castle…. and do you know- we were right! Then we decided that we should try to write our own invitations. We did really well and lots of us said that we were proud of ourselves because we didnt know how to read or write a few weeks ago. We tried to sound out most of the words we wanted and Mrs Mackay helped us with the ones we weren’t sure about. Our teachers are very proud of us!

    In number work we have been learning all about pattern. We had lots of fun making patterns with different things in our classroom. We used cotton reels, buttons, pictures, peg boards, cubes and shapes. Some of us managed to make a pattern on own and some us made super patterns with the help of an idea card but we all got there in the end.

    After we made all these patterns we used what we had learned and been practising and we completed a sheet for our folios. We had to think carefully to colour a pattern and then we had to look at a pattern and think what shape might come next. After all that we then had to think how to make a colour pattern in the shape pattern that we made. Our teachers’ said “Wow”.

    Lucy did a beautiful pattern

    We were enjoying learning about pattern so much that we had to see if we could find any patterns at home for our homework. Some of us found them on our clothes, on our carpets and rugs and on our beds. Kyra took a picture of patterns she found on her cushions and on the wallpaper. Edyn took a picture of a pattern she found in a game. What lovely looking and clever concentrating to find them! Well done.

    Another part of our homework was practising putting lots of details in our artwork. We had to draw a detailed picture of our family. There were so many fabulous artworks that here are just some of them…

    We are really good at recording what we are learning using our digital cameras, easy speak mics and flipcams. Here is a wee look at some of what we recorded. Sameer made a letter link of all the sounds he knows. Josh drew a castle on the aquamat. Rayyan drew some numbers on the blackboards. We get a chance to do lots of different activities so watch the space and we will put some more or our fun photos.

    In the Active Learning Zone we have been busy practising our three letter words. Cat in the Hat has been helping us. There are lots of three letter words in the Cat in the Hat story. We have been trying to read this book with Mrs Munro in the Active Learning Zone on the iPad. We have been so busy we are only half way through!

    We do have a Cat in the Hat display and have been writing down lots of three letter words.

    We have been making Cat in the Hat hats at the creative area too. We have to draw the hat, cut it out and then paint on a pattern just like Cat in the Hat’s hat. We have had a great time making our own hats.

    We have been  making patterns at the shaving foam with lots of different tools to help us. We used the wheels on the cars to make some patterns.

    In ICT we have been practising our skills with Textease. In the Active Learning Zone we can practise using Textease Paint and using the tools to create things. We were using the pen tool, colours, shape tool and fill tool.

    We have been continuing to find punctuation in books. Especially the Sleeping Beauty books. We love looking through lots of books to see if we can find question marks, exclamation marks and full stops. We have found lots!

    We have been using the Sleeping Beauty story on the iPad this week. We also have to find our name on our class list and score it off once we have listened to the story. This helps us organise our time and makes sure everyone gets a turn to listen to the story.


    This weeks star of the week was Billy. He has been doing super sound work when thinking of words to match our sound of the day and when matching pictures to a sound. Well done, Billy and keep it up!

    Week Starting 1st October 2012

    • Remember to bring your filled, named water bottle with you every day (no juice please).
    • THERE IS NO HOMEWORK FROM WEDNESDAY ONWARDS THIS WEEK DUE TO THE HOLIDAYS. HOMEWORK WILL RESUME ON THURSDAY 25TH OCTIBER.We will send homework out on a Thursday. Please send it to school every day but any tasks should be completed by Wednesday. The teacher will collect in the weeks work on Wednesday. Each week there will be a Yellow Book Challenge to do but you can pick which challenge you want to do from a list of  3 each week. There will be no homework on a Wednesday night.
    • Gym is on a Monday and Thursday. Please remember long hair will need to be tied back and no jewellery. This means all earrings must be removed.
    • ICT is on Wednesday afternoons.

    Our project is Sleeping Beauty.

    This week we will be learning ;

    • how to use, read and create a graph
    • how to  select good and bad characters from the story of  Sleeping Beauty
    • Jolly Phonics sounds j and z

    School ends for the holidays on Friday 5th October at 3.15pm. We come back to school on Monday 22nd October at 9.00am.

    Have a great holiday and well done on such a fabulous start to primary school boys and girls, it has been a super term!