St Bartholomew's Class Blog

What a busy week we have had! Everyone has worked hard and behaved well yet again.

Here, you can see that we have been writing sentences dictated to us by the teacher. Using our sounding out and blending skills, we are able to write the words that she says. Some of the words we just know because we have been learning our common words since starting school. Look how neat our writing is too! Everyone has found it hard to write “p” and “y” correctly by hanging them on the line in our jotters – but with lots of practice this week…we think we’ve got it!

When we are reading our books, we practice making sentences. By looking for the word with the capital letter and the word with the full stop we can give ourselves a head start. Everyone makes a jumbled sentence, then reads it aloud to the group to check it makes sense.

Now that we can add, we are practicing our skills in different ways – using numicon to make our own adding sums, playing adding games with a friend and using addition apps.

Besides all of this….we are counting down to Christmas. This lucky girl got the golden coin on the 7th!

As if this wasn’t enough, we had an absolutely fabulous time at the pantomime on Thursday. It was bright, dazzling, glittery, filled with singing and dancing and larger than life characters. We are sooooo grateful to Mark Millar for this wonderful Christmas gift. Here is a little picture of everyone in Primary 1 at the panto!

We have been beyond excited and enthusiastic about our Christmas Writing project! For the month of December, we are working on our own Christmas Books which we need to write, proof-read, edit and improve. We don’t want to give too much away as we’re hosting a Book Launch just before the Christmas break in our lovely new library. Look out for the invitations everyone!

Here’s a sneak peek at what we’ve been up to…

We can’t wait!

We have come to an end in our Solar System topic, but not before we investigated the relative sizes of the planets. This was a huge task and a great team effort!

First, we watched a video about the size and scale of the planets. Then we extracted relevant information from the internet and recorded what we found in a table…

Next, we learned about scale in maths and used the internet again to help us scale down the planets to sizes we could work with. Then we calculated their scaled down diameters (this is how a circle is measured). We found out that the radius of  a circle is half the diameter and we needed to know this measure to be able to draw our planets. Again, we recorded our measures in a table and rounded the numbers (using our rounding decimal skills!) to make them easier to work with…

After all that, it was time to get hold of a maths compass! We found this VERY tricky to start with however, by the end of the lesson, most of us were able to draw at least one planet to scale, using the maths compass…

Next up, we cut out our planets and painted them…

Then we lined up our planets to compare their relative sizes. Look how tiny Earth is compared the Gas Giants!

You can see our model Solar System outside our classroom!

Last week, we found out lots of information about St Andre. Then we talked about what we had learned. After this we used our thinking skills to make up a question that we would like to ask St Andrew.

It was tricky and we really did have to think hard….but it was worth it. Some of our questions are great!

We also started to get ready for Christmas and put up our tree. We think it looks brilliant.

In our Spanish lessons we have been learning the colours. We also know how to sign the colours using British Sign Language.

Our Spanish bear, Pablo has been helping us learn about Spain. We wanted to find out more about the festivals in Spain because we are learning about “Feasts, Festivals and Celebrations” at topic time.

In RE we have changed our altar colours to purple for the season of advent and are now looking at ways we can prepare for the coming of Jesus at Christmas time.

If you come into our school, you will see our wall display has changed. Now that the weather is colder, we have put our collage snowmen on display. You will be able to read our winter sentences too!

Last week, we learned all about the Apostleship of the Sea which will be our schools advent charity this year. We then went on to make clay fish dishes in art. Most of us hadn’t used clay before, we loved the cold feel of it under our fingers and liked the way we could squish it up and start again.

Also last week, we learned to add! How amazing we are! Look at us making up our own number stories to explore what happens when we add 1 more.

On Thursday, we did some music, learning to keep the beat using musical instruments. We sang songs in Spanish too.

Our writing is improving every day. Now we are learning to write sentences.

Here is our RE display from last week when we celebrated the feast of Christ the King. Each group worked cooperatively to write a prayer and make a crown.

Look out for more excellent experiences soon!