Today we watched Abi Elphinstone at the online Edinburgh Book Festival. She is an author and told us all about the exciting ideas she uses for her adventures. We sent in questions and she answered a few.
Here are some of the things she told us…

Her husband is Norwegian and his great, great, great grandfather invented the fish finger!

Her favourite colour is blue.

It takes about a year to write a book; 6 months planning then 6 months drafting and writing.

If you want to be a writer then always carry a notebook with you.

She has dyslexia.

She was brought up in Scotland then lived in London where she had two sons and an ideas box in her writing hut. Now she lives in Scotland again.

Her favourite crisps are Wotsits and Twiglets.

Her first books were the Dream Snatcher series.

When she was little she wanted to be a unicorn!

Everdark is based on dark forests near where she grew up.

Here is her website

Welcome to my world

We are exploring the force of friction in class.

We had fun testing different materials to see which gave the most friction.

Friction is the force between two surfaces rubbing together.

Friction works in the opposite direction of the object movement.

Smooth surfaces create little friction.

Rough surfaces create lots of friction.

P2 have worked really hard this week and explored a lot. Our loose parts have been particulaly popular this week and used with great creativity.

We began our novel study on the book ‘The Boy Who Grew Dragons’ by Andy Shepherd. We discussed the pros and cons of having a pet dragon and had a vote on whether we would like to have one as a pet or not. We also designed our own dragon.

Numeracy; We have explored addition with different strategies to support working out. Learners are using Daily 10 each day to support mental agility, which has been engaged with very positively.

Literacy; P2 have enjoyed playing games to revisit their phonics and participated in small reading sessions.

I was very proud of the learning and effort put in to this weeks focus of being encouraging and supporting our class mates. They came up with super phrases for us to use within the class and to use with ourselves to support perseverance.

Fun with loose partsBefore finishing up for today we recapped our week and realised we have all been extremely hard working with our learning.

Well done Primary 2.

Hello, we have enjoyed our first full week in P5a and here are some of the things we have learned.

Last week we worked with p5b to create a playground game using any of the four operations; add, subtract, multiply or divide. We were very creative!

Our writing is learning about the features of descriptions so that we can plan and write our own piece. We also wrote a reflective poem about being in P5a.

In numeracy we are learning about numbers in 10000s and their place value. We worked in pairs to say, write and sequence large numbers.

We are listening to the class novel ‘Max and the Millions’ by Ross Montgomery and are about to discover the miniature kingdom that Mr Darrow, the janitor, created.

In art we learned about perspective and painted a scene showing the vanishing point. We looked at Paul Klee buildings too, and drew a similar scene.

Here are the spelling patterns we learned this week.

What a fantastic few weeks we have had. Everyone has settled into the new classroom routines and giving their all to the work in class.

Last week we spent time organising the classroom to suit our needs and we build shelves to house our books and also to provide us with a comfy seating area. We have also added a resilience station which we can access upon finishing our activities where we are given opportunities to focus on skills such as perseverance and team work.

We took part in some group work activities and had to design something to stop Humpty Dumpty (an egg) from cracking when dropped from a height. Mrs Smith was very impressed as not one egg was damaged even when we dropped them from an even higher height.

This week we have been focussing on the novel ‘There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom’ and we have thoroughly enjoyed reading chapters 1-6. We started our novel study by looking at the different front covers for the book and then making predictions about what we think will happen in the story. We have also been answering questions about the main characters and what they are like and also creating a picture based on the author’s word choice.

We have started our learning on place value and we have been competing against each other to create the biggest or smallest numbers from different digits.

We created a wonderful door display with our names in graffiti writing on top of a crumbling wall. We have had lots of compliments from others pupils and teachers about our display.

Well done P7/6- keep up the hard work.
Comment below with your thoughts on the week:
1.What are you most proud of this week?
2.What did you find most challenging?
3.What do you want to learn more about and why?

P7/6 Week Review 27.8.21

What a fantastic few weeks we have had. Everyone has settled into the new classroom routines and giving their all to the work in class.

Last week we spent time organising the classroom to suit our needs and we build shelves to house our books and also to provide us with a comfy seating area. We have also added a resilience station which we can access upon finishing our activities where we are given opportunities to focus on skills such as perseverance and team work.
We took part in some group work activities and had to design something to stop Humpty Dumpty (an egg) from cracking when dropped from a height. Mrs Smith was very impressed as not one egg was damaged even when we dropped them from an even higher height.

This week we have been focussing on the novel ‘There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom’ and we have thoroughly enjoyed reading chapters 1-6. We started our novel study by looking at the different front covers for the book and then making predictions about what we think will happen in the story. We have also been answering questions about the main characters and what they are like and also creating a picture based on the author’s word choice.

We have started our learning on place value and we have been competing against each other to create the biggest or smallest numbers from different digits.

We created a wonderful door display with our names in graffiti writing on top of a crumbling wall. We have had lots of compliments from others pupils and teachers about our display.

Well done P7/6- keep up the hard work.

Comment below with your thoughts on the week:
1.What are you most proud of this week?
2.What did you find most challenging?
3.What do you want to learn more about and why?

It has been a busy week in P7B and the children have been working hard and have been enjoying the sunshine.

A key focus has been on our Novel Study – Divided City by Theresa Breslin. We have explored a range of themes including prejudice, religion and poverty. We have completed a number of tasks based on the text.

Thinking about the week as a whole, comment below with your thoughts on the week:

1. What was your highlight of the week and why?

2. What are you most proud of?

3. What did you find challenging? How did you overcome these challenges?

That’s our first full week completed and it’s been a fabulous one for getting outside. We’re starting to get into routines again and are getting really into our novel study – Wonder.

One of the tasks we have completed this week was to create these Wonder inspired inspirational posters.  We used the Sketches App to carefully draw an incomplete self portrait, inspired by the novel cover and section illustrations. We also found or created our own ‘Precept’ (motto) and added this.  There are lots of good messages to motivate and inspire us and this way Mrs Little gets to have us all still in the classroom, even after we’ve gone home!

Click here to watch a short video of our posters in close up

Another big task this week was creating our door entrance and this year we went with an interactive Hollywood movie theme.  To do this we:

• Took photographs of ourselves pretending to hold boxes…in some weird and wonderful positions
• Filmed a short video presentation to introduce ourselves and created a QR code to link to it.
• Added the QR code images to our photos and then made clapper board displays.

We are really pleased with the overall display and really hope others will soon be able to come and scan our codes to watch the videos but for now, here’s a sneaky peek!

Comment below with your thoughts on the week:

1. What are you most proud of this week?
2. What did you find most challenging?
3. What do you want to learn more about and why?

It has been so nice to be back in school after the summer. The weather has been kind and we have been very busy in class.

Please comment below to tell us something you have really enjoyed since returning after the summer.

Mrs Brown

Welcome to Primary 2 !

Everyone in P2 is working very hard. We are enjoying being in our new classrooms and playing with our friends.

We have been having fun learning  about a boy who grows dragons in our novel study, “The boy who grew dragons” by Andy Shepherd.