Today we had a lesson with our Mandarin teacher to teach us about the importance of Chinese New Year. It was interesting to learn about how the festival is celebrated. We have also entered a competition to design posters celebrating Chinese New Year. This year is the year of the horse. Those born in the year of the horse are believed to be energetic, independent and have an adventurous nature. Below you can see some of our competition entries.

Well done Primary 5 for making such a great effort to take part in Crazy Hair Day! We had lots of people with a change of hair colour including red, green, purple and blue. We also had a few mohawk styles, crimped hair, glittery hair and even some Christmas lights! Well done to all who took part and thank you for the generous donations.

We had a special visitor in Primary 5 this morning. Mr Paul O’Kane our local MSP visited our class to announce a runner up in his annual Christmas card competition. Well done to Eva Kenny whose card was selected as a winning entry! 👏.  Eva’s fantastic artwork is displayed on Mr O’Kane’s Christmas card to be sent out to many across the country.

Well done Primary 5 for putting in a great performance this evening taking us back to the 1960s. It was fun to see everyone looking so colourful! Well done to all the speakers, dancers and of course the singers. Hopefully we helped our audience feel a little more festive. 🎄

Earlier in the day we had a lovely visit from Santa’s reindeer. It was great to welcome them to our school once again. We enjoyed having the chance to pat them and feed them carrots. 🥕 They should be very well nourished for their important role later in the month. #15moresleeps!

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Christmas Music Lesson 🎅🏻🎄🔔🎶🎵🎼

Today we had our last Music lesson of the year with Mrs Carey.  It was a very festive session with everyone singing along to Jingle Bells and having the opportunity to play some musical instruments. Below you can click to hear a little sample.

November is proving to be a busy month so far. We have enjoyed celebrating the 1960s as part of the school’s 60th anniversary event.  We have also been learning about the significance of Remembrance Day and had another session with our Buddies in P1. Children in Need was also a fun event where we helped to raise money for a great charity. Lastly we have now started our rehearsals for our Christmas Concert which will be happening in December.

1960s 🎸
We spent the morning researching and learning about life in the 1960s. We worked in trios and used the Chromebooks to gather our facts and then displayed our information on posters and then presented them to the class. We also enjoyed a silent disco in the hall and took part in the slosh with the whole school!

Remembrance Day

We have been thinking lots this week about Remembrance Day and why we have it. We have been learning about the traditions our country upholds to respect those who have been injured or killed in conflicts around the world. We have also been learning about the significance of the poppy and learning that as well as the red poppy poppies are sold in other colours too such as purple ones to remember animals who have been used in wars.
We took part in a whole school silence to remember the dead and we made infographics to display our knowledge. We also worked with Primary One and shared with them some facts about Poppies and created some poppy art with them.

Children in Need

Finally on Friday 14th November we enjoyed wearing our pyjamas to school. We took part in some fun activities in the hall and visited the toy sale in the ICT Suite to grab some bargains.

Spooky Stories

This week we have been celebrating Hallowe’en by writing spooky stories. The children were tasked with making Mrs MacDougall shudder and they certainly did by coming up with lots of spooky settings and scary characters for their stories.

Buddying

We got together with our Primary One Buddies in the playground to teach them some active games on the theme of Hallowe’en. We enjoyed teaching the little ones games such as Zombie Tig, Unlock the Spell and Ghost Tag! 👻

Afterwards we worked with our Buddies  in the classroom to help them create some Skeleton Art since they’ve been enjoying the story Funny Bones in class. We always enjoy spending time with the younger children.

Hallowe’en Art
We were learning to blend chalks and pastels to create a Hallowe’en sky. We added silhouettes of bats to our moon  background. The final outcomes were very effective.

We started the month of October by celebrating National Poetry Day. The day is held every year on the first Thursday of the month which this year fell on the 4th. We enjoyed listening to and reading poems in class. We also created a class poem on the theme of play and played some word association games. We took our message of celebrating poetry into the playground and also shared what we had been learning at Assembly to inform the rest of the school about this special day.

Since returning from the October holiday we have started our Mandarin lessons with our specialist teacher. We have been revisiting the numbers we learned in Primary 4 and revising greetings and colours in Mandarin. We enjoy collecting stickers for giving answers which we will be able to trade for prizes.

This term in PE we have been practising our football skills. We have done lots of possession drills such as King of the Ring and Crabs. We’ve also practised shooting, passing and dribbling. Finally we finish each session with some competition in the form of a game. It has been great to see everyone improving their skills over the last few weeks.

Thank you to everyone who managed along to our first open afternoon of the session. Our open afternoons allow you to see a snapshot of the children’s experiences at school and it was great that so many families were able to make it. A big thank you to Mrs Carey for leading our Music session, too, and managing to get us all up on our feet participating in the songs. Please click on the videos below to get a taste of the fun.

Afterwards we were designing our own Coat of Arms having learned about them as part of our work on the Scottish Wars of Independence in Social Studies. Below you can see a few examples of the finished artwork. I’m sure you will agree the children did a lovely job.
Don’tworry if you didn’t make it along this time as we will be having a second afternoon later in the session.