Hurlford Primary School and Early Childhood Centre

Hi everyone 🙂

Last week was a very busy week from performing at the Edinburgh Playhouse, bowling and rock climbing, learning how to play rounders to writing poems!

Firstly, I want to say a huge well done and express how proud we all are of both Primary 5 and Primary 6 showcasing their talents and all that they had learned over the last 8 months up at the Edinburgh Playhouse last Monday! It was an unforgettable experience and every single pupil did brilliantly. Unfortunately that is Disney finished for this year but it has been hugely rewarding for everyone involved. We would like to give a final thank you to all pupils and family members with their help and support with the production and a huge thank you for making the journey to Edinburgh to celebrate with us!

The fun continued for P5 last week on Thursday as we finally got to go on a school trip! We all had great fun at the climbing wall in Kilmarnock where the pupils tried new things out with their comfort zones, challenging themselves and their peers and demonstrated great team work together as a class. This continued at the bowling where there was some fun competition between peers and even had Miss Mair and I throwing some bowls! The great day was finished off in the sun with a game of rounders that we learned to play this week as part of PE, building on our team work and communication within different groups in the class.

Despite the very busy week we did still achieve lots of learning in class as well! We used the outdoors to collect information using our senses about summer time and used this to write a poem called ‘summer senses’. The pupils were able to use their rhyming knowledge and personal experiences about summer to write some fantastic poems which we will redraft this week. Within literacy we also spent a lot more time on our class novel ‘The Queen’s Nose’ which continued the theme of poetry in one task where the novel presented a riddle which we analysed together to solve. We also used our metalinguistic and inference skills to work out the meaning of tricky words and phrases to build on our comprehension skills and understanding of the book.

Within maths we came to the end of our block on expressions and equations which the pupils have really enjoyed. We have been using our already established knowledge on the four operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division to complete some algebra type equations and solve some missing number problems. We also used this knowledge in function machines and the pupils liked the different spin on ordinary sums and having an insight into some of the areas of maths that they will be experiencing as they move up the school.

Primary 5 also started an art piece on drawing a picture of themselves in a graduation gown which we will populate with their goals for next year moving into Primary 6. We aim to finish this during this busy week and pass it on to their new P6 teacher.

I can’t believe that it is the last full week of term! We have a lot of busy, fun activities planned for the next 8 days and I can’t wait to spend my last few weeks at Hurlford with Primary 5. They have been a pleasure to teach over the last year and I am so proud of each of them.

Happy holidays when they come!

Miss Gibson 🙂

Hello Primary 5 🙂 First of all, a huge well done to every single person that was involved with the Disney performance last Friday. I am so proud of the hard work and effort everyone put in and hope you are all excited to showcase your achievements at the Edinburgh Playhouse!

Maths
This week in maths we were continuing to explore percentages and finding out what it means to find a percentage of something. The pupils were able to make connections to their fractions work that we completed after Easter and understand that 50% of something was the same as a half, 25% was the same as a quarter and 10% was the same as a tenth. This allowed us to easily find percentages of shapes and numbers by using our fraction and decimal knowledge – well done! To round off our learning at the end of the week we had a ‘classroom sale’ where items in our class were priced but were on sale for certain percentages. We were able to choose 5 items and work out how much their new price would be by taking the percentage off. The pupils were able to make connections to sales in shops and I’m sure will enjoy trying to get some bargains! With Miss Steedman the class are also starting a topic of length and have been completing some fun activities with measure.

Literacy
This week we took some time to finish our discursive writing piece arguing about the advantages and disadvantages of wearing a school uniform and up-levelled our sections using a new ‘burger strategy’ layout. The writing was very well done and next week we will re-drafting our marked writing into a final piece for our fab files. The pupils also focused on their summarising skills this week with Miss Steedman when completing a book review on the ‘The Hundred Mile An Hour Dog’ which I know they all really enjoyed. We had a very busy week with literacy this week and also completed a lot of work on the grammar of apostrophes. We were looking at how apostrophes can be used to show that something belongs to someone, particularly looking at plural owners this week and the pupils completed a finishing worksheet to round off their learning. On Thursday they were able to take their literacy outside for an outdoor learning literacy scavenger hunt where they searched for items which rhymed with certain words, items that might contain their phoneme this week and used the outdoors as a stimulus for alliteration and similes. The pupils really enjoyed this activity and it was great that they were able to get outdoors and use the environment to stimulate their learning.

STEM
On Tuesday this week, the class had STEM input with Miss Steedman and they looked at Thomas Edison as a start to their learning about deaf awareness. The pupils were learning all about sing language and many were showing me how to say particular things they had learned in sign language and even communicating with each other! On Thursday they looked a bit more at sign language after asking Miss Steedman and it is great to see that they are keen to learn it and understand and are respectful of the differences of other people.

TOPIC/Interdisciplinary learning
As we are coming to the end of our ‘My Body’ topic, we were looking at a famous scientist who had made a huge contribution to how we are able to keep our bodies fit by fighting infections. As a class we found out lots of information about Alexander Fleming who invented penicillin and whilst I was talking about his life and invention the pupils were taking notes in an information sheet. Each pupil had one of three information sheets which were then combined into groups to make a poster. This meant that the pupils were working collaboratively to gain different information and then pulled it all together to make an informative poster. The posters that were created were fantastic and a huge improvement from posters that we created at the start of the year.

Happy weekend everyone, see you next week for a short week and some Jubilee celebrations 🙂 !

Miss Gibson