Primary 6 were very lucky to be given the chance to compete in the Dundee Active Schools Scottish Dance festival this year. We worked very hard to learn and practice the dances for the festival (there were 12 of them to learn!). On the day, we proudly waved the St Pius banners we made and danced very well in our groups. Some of us were even spotted on the STV news!

We had lots of fun during our January Fab Fit Friday. We had the opportunity to take part in two active sessions in the morning – aerobics and tennis. The aerobics session, led by Ms Graham, was fun and upbeat with some well known songs to get us moving. The tennis session involved developing our racket and ball skills, and was carried out in a “cardio-tennis” style. This meant that we were constantly on our feet! An enjoyable morning!

Our recent project in ICT has involved creating imaginative e-postcards from the jungle. We have had great fun adding details about an imaginary trek through the jungle and selecting beautiful images to match our postcards.

Mr Marra visited our school recently to talk to the P6s and P7s about a visit he had carried out to one of our twin cities, Nablus. We had the chance to learn lots about this twin city and how people live there. At the end of the presentation, we were much more aware of our place in the world and the benefits of twinning towns and cities.

We had a visit from two staff from the library, who came to tell us about an exciting project we are getting to take part in. The Dundee Picture Book awards will involve us in reading picture book stories to the P1s, developing a book display and organising a vote for our favourite story book from the 4 shortlisted books for the award this year.

To prepare us for this exciting project, we have received some training in story telling and using picture books.

We have had  very exciting week this week during Scottish Week. We have had lots of opportunities to learn about Scotland and the Scot’s language. Firstly, we all learned the Scottish poem “Michael” at home and recited this poem in class. Mr Lowden judged the recitals, and Connor and Dylan were both successful in getting certificates for their efforts. Well done, boys!

We held a Burns Supper in the hall for P4 – P7. Connor started the meal by saying the Selkirk Grace. We then had the chance to try a range of Scottish foods, including haggis, oatcakes and cheese. We had great fun sharing Scottish poems, songs and dances together.

We designed tartans and created Scottish art work this week. We also had the chance to learn some new Scottish words in literacy when sequencing our own mixed up Broon’s story and picking key Scot’s words to find out more about.

We finished our Scot’s week with a brilliant ceilidh on Friday 24th January. All of the classes shared the songs and dances they had learned in preparation for the ceilidh. We shared our “Gay Gordon’s” Scottish dance and our Scottish song “The World Must be Comin tae an End”. We heard Scottish music from visiting musicians and finished the afternoon with irn bru and shortbread in our classrooms. Overall, a ‘rare guid time’!

In numeracy and mathematics this term, Mr Sturrock’s group are working on decimal numbers. We will be learning about place value related to decimal numbers and how to add and subtract decimal numbers. We will also be learning about rounding decimal numbers and how to tackle word problems involving decimal numbers.

To support our learning in maths, we always carry out active games and activities to learn new skills such as loop card games, whole class whiteboard activities and sorting games / puzzles. Here we are carrying out some decimals games.

We have been learning about the story of Epiphany during January. We reflected on the importance of this event as part of the wider Christmas story and discussed the significance of the journey of the wise men and the gifts they presented. To apply our learning, we created lolly-stick puppets and made a small puppet show to explain Epiphany to a younger class. They loved our puppets and all of the facts we had to share!

As part of our learning in Health and Wellbeing about new beginnings and personal goal setting, we have been looking at the tradition of setting New Year’s resolutions at the start of the New Year, including the start of a new year in school! We recently made beautiful 2014 resolutions mobiles in class which set out our hopes and goals for 2014. Come visit our class to read all of our goals!

This term, we are learning about nouns in grammar. We will be learning to use different types of nouns in our writing, and Mr Sturrock will be checking our writing pieces to ensure we are using capital letters in the correct places (e.g. for proper nouns).

We started our learning about nouns by looking at proper and common nouns and ways to group common nouns (e.g. places, people, things, ideas). We had great fun carrying out a noun hunt using newspapers to cut out nouns and sort them into their correct noun groups.