This afternoon, we went on a tour of Townhead to find out more about the amenities in our local area. Although many of us have lived in Townhead for a long time, there were still things we didn’t know. Oscar said he didn’t know there were two high schools in Townhead and Luca didn’t know the community centre had moved. Amy had been past the clinic before and didn’t know what it was. No one had known what the new council offices were for so it was interesting to find out about their purpose. We are going to use some of the information we’ve gathered to make information leaflets for our display. Paul and Rhian were our photographers and we are going to use some of their photos in our artwork this week. Many thanks to Adam and Jennifer’s mums for coming along to help.

Today we celebrated the feast of our patron saint, St Bartholomew. We watched a video clip about the life of St Bartholomew where we found out he was one of the apostles and was known in the bible as Nathaniel. When we looked closely at our school badge, we found lots of clues about his life including the crossed simitars which represent how he was martered. We made cards depicting our school badge and we went to mass at St Bartholomew’s church. It was a special day and it was lovely to share the mass with some of our parents.

What a fabulous first week we’ve had in our new class! Our maths has been so much fun Stella couldn’t believe we’d been doing maths. Our focus this week is learning about place value to 1000. We’ve had lots of opportunities to do number challenges in our new maths jotters, we’ve used number fans, played bingo and we played some great maths games in the gym hall. We took some photos of us playing which corner?, hundreds islands and we even worked in groups to form hundreds numbers using our bodies!(look at the photos to see if you can see us making 100 and 700).

On Friday, Pr4 and Pr5 had a fantastic day at the Primary Games. We worked in teams with children from other schools on a variety of sports and activities such as athletics, football, basketball, golf, dance, boxing and hockey to name but a few. We were exhausted and famished when it came time to have our picnic at lunchtime and we were entertained by some Brazillian dance tunes by the St Aidan’s High band. Just before hometime, we go a big surprise when the judges announced the winners of the banner competition- ours came 2nd out of the 42 schools who were there! What a perfect end to a perfect day!

Today we had a wonderful morning when we had sports day. We participated in the sprint, the obstical race, the relay, potato and spoon and the mini marathon. Lots of us won medals and stickers but Mrs O’Neill was most proud of the way we encouraged one another, even if we were in different teams. Well done to all the good sports in Pr4/3.

OYesterday we had a very healthy day in school. As part of our topic about the commonwealth games, many of us took part in Pr1’s Cycle to School Day. It was amazing to see the bike parade in the playground.

Last week we talked about healthy diet and lifestyle choices the athletes make. We decided it would be fun to design and make some healthy snacks to share with Pr3. We chose to make healthy wraps and voted on three fillings. Then we made up a shopping list and priced the items we’d need.
We talked about food hygiene and before we started to prepare the food, we tied back long hair, removed jewellery and washed our hands with anti-bacterial handwash. We even made little flags with cockltail sticks to let people know what each wrap contained. In the ICT suite, we designed some posters to tell people about our healthy wraps.
Primary three were very impressed with our buffet and we also enjoyed trying the salads they made too.
Today in maths, we are going to collect information about our wraps and plan to make graphs about our findings. In storywriting, we are also going to write a report about our health day.

On Sunday, 15 children from our class received the Holy Eucharist for the first time. It was a very special day for us and Mrs O’Neill was very proud of how reverent and prayerful we were during the mass. We all had an important role in the mass; some of us did the offertory procession, some read bidding prayers and some of us sang the psalm. We looked great, sang beautifully and shared the day with our families. Thank you to Fr Doherty for helping us to prepare for the sacrament, Mrs Morris for helping us in church, to Mrs Casey and her friends for decorating the church and presenting us all with rosary beads from Fatima, to Gabrielle’s gran for cleaning the church for us and for the ladies from the chapel house for their catering skills. We had a very memorable day and are looking forward to receiving the Eucharist each time we attend mass.

Today we had a wonerful visit to Summerlee Heritage Museum as part of our Victorian topic. When we arrived we put on our hard hats and went down the mine. It was very dark and damp and the two guides told us about the terrible working conditions the miners had to work in. If we lived in those times, we would have started work when we were only 6. After our trip down the mine we’re glad we go to school. We then had a chance to tour the cottages. It was hard to believe that poor victorian families of up to 10 people lived in one cramped room. Liam was shocked to see the tin bath, especially when he learned that the wholw family shared the same bath water! Indie spotted the chamber pot and said he’d rather use the outside toilet we saw. After a picnic lunch and a play on the amazing play area, we met Sandra who lead our Victorian workshop. Sandra was impressed with our knowledge about Queen Victoria when she showed us an interesting powerpoint. We woorked in groups to find out what real victorian objects were used for then we reported back to the class. Mrs O’Neill’s favourite part of the day was dressing in the teacher’s gown and brandishing ‘the belt’. Finally it was our turn to dress as victorian school children and we had a chance to play some victorian games and do copperplate writing with real pens and ink. We had a fantastic time and our visit really brought all we have been learning to life.

This week in RE, we have been studying the Passion of Christ. We watched a very moving video clip about Jesus’ final journey and then we followed the Stations of the Cross in our classroom. Afterwards, we thought it would be a good idea to share The Stations of The Cross with others so we worked together to write our own versions of each station in our WAC jotter. Later we typed these out in the computer suite. We are now planning to visit the oratory with our writing and we are going to lead the Station we each wrote about.
Jesus meets women of Jerusalem the 8th station
Jesus continues the road ahead after he fell. Then he sees some women crying because they feel sorry for Jesus because he had to feel all the pain and needs to die for us. Instead of thinking about himself he thought about them and how they must feel so Jesus said take care of others and take care of your families and then Jesus walks away.
By Rebecca

THE FOURTH STATION OF THE CROSS By Olivia
Jesus walked slowly thour the lumpy
Grounds of Jerusalem with the heavy
Cross on his shoulder. Just then a woman
Came over to him .It was Jesus’s mother
Mary. Jesus was too sad to speak and so was his mother.

Our terrific toilets were finally opened for use today. After a tour of the fantastic facilities, we wrote some revised rules for their use.(You may notice we’ve been using aliterations in language this week!)

1. Only 3 children in the toilets at a time.
2.Only press the tap once-it will go off by itself.
3.Don’t touch the mirrors.
4.One press of the hand drier is enough.
5.Treat our toilets with care and respect.