St Andrew's Primary School Blog

The Primary 5 children have been learning about Changing Materials in their Science focus this term. Initially they tested different solids to see if they would dissolve in water, next they experimented to find out if it was possible to separate those substances again.

The children were set a “Kensuke’s Kingdom”, Desert Island Dilemma, where, just like Michael in the novel, they found themselves stranded with only sandy or salty sea water to drink – could the children plan ways to clean the water so that it was safe to drink?

We called on the expertise of 10 science ambassadors from St Joseph’s College, and last Wednesday, transformed our classroom into a science laboratory to test out the children’s theories.  Here’s a snapshot of what they discovered…

This week we went on our Beat the Street walk, we headed over the hill to Georgetown and Calside. This time we had 2 very important people with us, PC Ruairidh Matthews and PC Simon Gleave, they were helping us cross the road safely and had a chat with us as we walked. Thanks again to all the parents/grandparents/helpers.

 

On Wednesday 20th September budding K-Nex experts in P7 launched a K-Nex Club.  Luca and Toby came first in their school competition last year in P6 and in the regional competition they made an impressive fourth place.  Inspired by this competition and thinking ahead to the event for next year, they have used their own initiative to establish a club for P5-7 to practise their skills.  Along with Mikey, they organised resources and set a challenge this week for the pupils to design a car with steering.  An amazing 33 pupils attended the first round and had a great time.  Well done to Tomas and George in P6 who were named engineer champions of the first session!  Good luck to the 18 who have gone through to next Wednesdays challenge!

Our new Primary 4 topic is renewable and non-renewable energy, as well as doing lots of research the boys and girls have created super Wind Turbines using K’nex. For their challenge they had to build a model which stands on its own without support, it had to have blades attached which moved when blown and it had to be up to the height of the teacher’s knee. All the children successfully completed this challenge and were proud of their effort, they enjoyed showing the end product to the parents at soft finish.

 

 

The boys and girls in Primary 4 enjoyed a fun filled morning at Park Farm, they engaged in a variety of activities and finished off with a short rugby match. All the children participated well in all activities and didn’t mind getting dirty, it was nice to see the children get competitive whilst displaying good sportsmanship skills.

On Friday we went to the woodland area to do our maths work.  We have been copying and creating patterns so decided to look outdoors to see what we could make.  We found a number of different things to create our patterns including leaves, stones, sticks and pine cones.   Here are some of our brilliant patterns:

 

As part of our ‘Keeping Safe’ topic, PC Trosh visited our classroom today.  He told us about the different jobs the police do which help keep us safe.  We got to ask lots of questions and even got to try some of the equipment the police use.

P2 and P6 were out yesterday afternoon to Beat the Street, we managed to get nearly 2000 points for our school team. We had a lovely walk along the river and because we were super fast walkers we managed to head up to the Lorburne Centre to hit another box before heading back to school. We are out again next Thursday afternoon then again in a couple of weeks! Thanks again to all the helpers, it was nice to see so many people joining in our walk.

 

Over the last few weeks we have been looking at patterns in our maths work.  Mr Parkhouse has linked our Art lessons with this.  Last week we printed to make patterns of our own.  This week we looked at the work of the artist Mondrian and his use of pattern, line and colour.  We used this as an inspiration for our own art work.

 

 

 

 

Today Primary 1 used our investigative skills to look for patterns outdoors.  We know a pattern must repeat and we found lots of repeating patterns in our playground. We took our own photographs of patterns we found.