Literacy

After Christmas, in writing, our focus was functional writing. We all became more skilled at report writing and produced reports on giant pandas, submarines, and lions to name a few examples.  Some of us also learned how to write persuasively, for example: ‘For Mobile Phones in School’ and ‘Against School Uniform’. We had to include features like a rhetorical question, capitalised word, and arguments with points to back up what we were saying. The rest of us learned about exposition writing which is where you expose the facts about things.  Out titles were: ‘Television is Educational’, ‘Spain is a great Place to visit with Families’ and ‘Dogs make Great Pets’. We had to make sure that we got the structure of our writing right, and this includes a ‘statement of position’ and ‘concluding statement’. For the rest of the term, we will be practising our skills in all writing genres and making sure we know how to use speech marks correctly.

Last term we finished our book ‘Why the Whales Came’ and we enjoyed it a lot! It’s about two best friends called Gracie and Daniel who live on Bryher, they’re told to stay away from The Birdman but don’t obey this rule. Lots of exciting things happen but we’re not going to tell you in case you want to read it for yourself!  We have also been looking at non-fiction texts like newspapers. One of the articles we read was about a thirteen-year-old boy who camped every night for 3 years straight and another article we read was about a man who danced for 24 hours non-stop. Both people raised a lot of money for charity. We did our solo talks in February which was fun. A good one was Darrel’s (it was about sloths) and he brought a project he had done at home in. A lot of the solo talks were great, and everybody talked clearly about their subject. We all had a free choice on what we wanted to talk about which made it even better!

Mazie and Kay

 

Numeracy

At the start of the term, we did lots of fun math topics like long multiplication, complementary and supplementary angles, 3D shapes, simplest form fractions and a bunch more. Before the Easter holidays we did lots of Data Handling. We surveyed all the classes about their favourite pets, snacks, and number of siblings they have. Once we had all the information, we transferred it onto bar charts or line graphs.  We also learned about the mean, median, mode and the range. Just now we are learning about fractions, decimals and percentages and we are learning how to find percentages of amounts using a calculator.

Danielle and Kacie

 

French

In French we have been learning new vocabulary for family members. We have also learned the alphabet and we can spell our names using the French names for letters. For example, I (Kieran) would say the letters of my name sounding like this: kah, ee, eugh, err, ah, enn . Sometimes we have little conversations in French and play games to help us to speak and understand French. For example, we learned about adding and taking away numbers and saying if the answer was ‘vrai au faux’ (this means true or false). We have also learned new words to do with the weather such as ‘Il fait chaud’ which means ‘it is hot’.

Kieran and Eva

 

HWB

In P.E. we have been improving our skills in gymnastics. We go into groups and go round all the activities in the hall such as the climbing frame, high horse, and mats. In class, we have learned about different substances like alcohol, tobacco and caffeine and we know how to get out of tricky or dangerous situations.  Hazel Kelly comes in on Tuesdays to work with us on topics like friendship and trust. This term we will be preparing and cooking food and learning about careers and our bodies. We will also be doing transition things like visiting the high schools and should have visitors coming to talk to us in class too. We don’t have many weeks left until we leave Neilsland!

 

Kaiden, Tiaa and Stephen

Literacy

Last term we finished our novel, ‘War Horse’ which was a story from a horse’s perspective in WW1.  All chapters were brilliant but one of them stood out from the crowd and pushed through- it was Chapter 22!  This novel was amazing and we all 100% recommend it to all ages. It could also help a younger audience understand more of what happened in the war.

This term we are studying, ‘Why the Whales Came’ by Michael Morpurgo. We have no idea of what this book has to offer but were all excited to find out. We would like to share the blurb with you:

‘Gracie and her friend Daniel have always been warned to stay away from the Birdman and his side of the island. But then they find a message in the sand and discover the Birdman is not who they thought. They build up a lovely friendship with him, but when the children get stranded on Samson Island, they don’t know whether to believe the birdman’s story that the island is cursed.’

In writing, our focus has been imaginative writing  – especially our Buddy Stories that we were working on for 3 weeks. These are stories that we made for our Little P1 Buddies For example: Kye’s North Pole Adventure. Also, we wrote imaginative stories like ‘The Magic Ring.’ We made up our own stories about a ring that gives special powers, and most people chose to make the ring have different powers for example: flying, telekinesis, lighting, invisibility, and shapeshifting.  We also wrote group stories where we had to work in small groups to write each chapter. These were spooky stories, set in an old church. We have been thinking a lot about VCOP. VCOP stands for vocabulary, connectives, openers, and punctuation. Here is a good example of VCOP, ‘Her footsteps were soft as she crept lightly across the soaking grass’.  That is some of what we have learned in literacy this term but there is more to come next term so stay tuned.

Aaron and Kayci

 

Numeracy

Last term, we were very busy in math. Here are some examples of the things we learned more about: place value, multiplication, fractions and algebra.

We  created some presentations about famous mathematicians. Darrel did his presentation about John Napier and Aiden did his about Albert Einstein. They were all brilliant and we all enjoyed learning something new. Some of us had to do our presentation on a poster and others on PowerPoint.

Our favourite thing that we have done in maths recently was working with positive and negative numbers.

Here is an example. -4 + 2 = -2

We recently have been learning about quadrilaterals and triangles and our maths groups are named after different types of triangles. These are all the different types of triangles: isosceles, equilateral, scalene and right angled. All the triangles are different. An isosceles has two equal sides and one different,  an equilateral triangle has 3 equal sides, a scalene triangle has no equal sides, and a right-angled triangle has a right angle in it.

Kacie and Olivia

 

RME

Last term in RME we have been learning about Christmas traditions in different countries.  We worked in pairs to create a page (a bit more if need to) of information about a different country.  For example, Darrel and Kayci studied Germany and Kay and Collette studied India and so on .  Here are some cool facts we learned:

-In China, children send wrapped apples to their friends.

-In India, many people use mango and banana trees for a Christmas tree.

-Young people in Japan like to eat a KFC for Christmas dinner!

Aiden and Eva

 

HWB

In December we learned a dance called The Neilsland Circle which we did at our Christmas party, we also taught this dance to P4, P5 and P6!  On Monday we will be improving jumps, rolls and balancing skills in gymnastics.  Hazel Kelly is going to be coming in to help us P7s learn about going into high school and how to make new friends and learn about our feelings.

Kai and Kay

Literacy

Our class novel this term is War Horse by Michael Morpurgo. It’s a very good book and we all love it so far. It’s basically about a horse (a Red Bay called Joey) who gets bought by a man called Captain Nicholls to help him fight in the war (WWI).  We are using War Horse to learn comprehension strategies like metalinguistics, summarising and predicting. We predict that Joey’s best friend Albert (a teenager) is going to join him to fight in the war.

       

In writing, at the start of term, we wrote recounts of personal experiences. Our assessment was all about our years in primary school, and we included all the teachers that have taught us and all the trips we went on. We are currently writing in the style of a diary and as a soldier in the trenches in WWI. Soon we will be moving on to imaginative writing and writing Christmas stories for our wee buddies. We often annotate pieces of writing so we know all about metaphors, similes, onomatopoeia, and alliteration that we can use in our stories.

Sophie and Danielle

Numeracy

In numeracy we have learned about rounding, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percentages, time and money. We often play games like ‘I know that…’. They are double/halving games where you start by getting a partner and deciding on a number that you and your partner would like to start with and you either keep doubling that number or halving that number. You can go really high and really low.

We have learned about multiplying two-digit numbers by three-digit numbers.

For example:

264×40=?

First, multiply by ten (264×10), which is 2640

Now multiply 2640×4, which is 10,560 (so that’s how you do that!)

We know how to convert improper fractions to mixed number fractions and the other way round and we also know how to create other equivalent fractions and find fractions of amounts.

Kayci, Kai and Aiden

WW1

We have been learning about WWI. We know some of the reasons why WWI started, including the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. In WWI, some countries were friendly with others and took sides with them. The countries belonged to either The Triple Entente, The Triple Alliance or were Neutral (which means they did not fight for any side).  The Triple Entente were: Great Britain, France and Russia. The Triple Alliance were: Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary. We have learned about the use of propaganda in WWI and made our own propaganda posters.  We have learned the names for the different parts of the trenches and what they mean. For example, a sump was built to drain some of the water away from the trenches and sandbags were used to build walls to block water and bullets. Our class novel helps us with our understanding of WW1 too.

Kayci and Aaron

Music

We are learning to read music! We know: a treble clef, bass clef, stave, beats to the bar, bars and bar lines. We have learned the names of the notes and how many counts they get. For example, a crotchet gets one count, a quaver gets half a count, and a semibreve gets four counts. We can read the notes on cards and clap the beat. We are soon going to be learning the names of notes and where they are on a keyboard or glockenspiel.

Darrel and Mazie

Reading Schools

We (Aiden, Kay and Jayden) are our class reading champions for this year, and this year we are going for our Gold Award. We are going to start a club with Mrs Kennedy, getting the library ready for use for the classes. After we do that, we will be able to organise activities for the other classes. We have a Book Buzz area on our Google classroom and a Book Buzz library in our actual classroom.  Aiden is the DEAR time monitor for our class and he makes sure we all ‘drop everything and read’ on most days. Mrs Brock runs a lot of the things we do, for example she helps us run reading challenges and activities. Sometimes we have a Reading Schools assembly that the reading champions will help with or be involved in.

Kay, Jayden and Aiden

 

Literacy

We are currently studying the novel ‘The Thief Lord’ by Cornelia Funke.  It’s a story about a group of children living rough in an abandoned cinema in Venice.  They are being chased by a detective whose job is to find two of the boys (who are brothers) and return them to their cruel aunt.  The book is really adventurous and there are lots of interesting characters including Hornet, Prosper, Bo, Scipio and Riccio.  We have looked at different movie trailers and we are making our own ‘Thief Lord’ trailers just now.

Last term we wrote and delivered our solo talks to the class.  We covered topics such as ‘My Pets’, ‘Roblox’ and ‘Jack Grealish’.

We recently learned all about persuasive writing.  There are many things you have to include when you are writing persuasively, and here are a few examples:

• A title that illustrates your point of view
• Arguments with supporting points
• A rhetorical question

We also made a brochure persuading people to visit Venice.

Our writing this term is narrative writing and we are focusing on using direct speech.  Our first story was ‘What happened to Lulu?’ which was based on a poem that we had to turn into a story.

Grace N. and Ava B.

 

Numeracy

Last term in maths, we learned how to find the mean, range, median and mode in a set of numbers like the length of our arm or our shoe size.

We also learned more about percentages and we can find percentages of amounts. For example, if you have to find 17% of £253, first divide by 100 to find one percent, which is £2.53.  Then multiply that number by 17 to find what 17% is.  £2.53 x 17=£43.01.

We have started a ‘measure’ topic this week and we are learning how to measure angles accurately using a protractor.  Then we will be using our protractors to help us draw angles.

Kay D. and Sophie W.

 

P.E.

We have recently finished gymnastics.  Every week in our groups, we went round different stations such as the rolling station, jumping station and climbing frame.  We learned how to do different kind of jumps like tuck, straight and split.  We used the iPad to film our jumps then played them back to see where we needed to improve.  We also learned different partner and counter balances.  I learned how to do a roll on the high horse!

Miss Morrison from Calderside P.E. department came in to teach us a dance.  She split the class in two and we had to do the same routine but at different times.  You can see the final dance on Twitter.

The P6s are still enjoying their swimming lessons at Hamilton Water Palace. Here’s what Aiden and Kacie D have to say about their swimming lessons:

‘In my level, we’re learning how to swim on our backs. I’m getting better at it and we’re learning different ways how to swim on our backs.’ (Kacie D)

‘We’ve been taught how to use our arms and legs like rockets top help us swim better.’ (Aiden W.)

Callum B.

Transition

While the P6s have been at swimming, us P7s have been learning about our transition to S1.  We have learned about all the different subjects you get at high school, like maths, English, art, Spanish, tech, home economics, science and modern studies.

Jack S. and Kayleigh K.

 

Reading Schools Update

We ordered new books to freshen up the library a bit. We are all getting a chance to see all the new books before we choose which class book nook they should go in.   We have lots of different genres like animals and adventure.

Molly C. and Poppy A.

Literacy

In literacy we have been reading excerpts of books such as, ‘The Lottie Project’, ‘The Demon Headmaster’ and ‘Oliver Twist’. We use our reading skills of skimming and scanning, predicting and visualising to help us understand more about the text and what the author is telling us. We can easily identify similes and metaphors in what we read. This explains the difference between a simile and a metaphor:

 

 

In writing we wrote our own imaginative stories including ‘The Magic Ring’, ‘A Terrible Storm’ and Christmas stories for our wee buddies and friends. This coming term we will be learning how to write persuasively.

Mazie M. and Sophie McP.

 

Numeracy

Last term in maths, we learned lots of different things. We really enjoyed learning what integers are and for people who don’t know what integers are, they are negative or positive whole numbers. If a number is a fraction or decimal, it isn’t an integer. For example:

integer                     not an integer

-4                                4.5

200                          

We also have learned about the order of operations. When you get a sum that has more than one operation, you have to follow a rule.  BIDMAS it is a word that stands for the order that you do the sum in. B stands for brackets so you do that bit first. Then indices, division, multiplication, addition and finally subtraction. If you remember BIDMAS, you can’t go wrong!

 

Aiden W. and Kacie D.

 

Christmas Fayre

Last term we ran the Christmas Fayre! We had everybody in the school making different things for the stalls and we were all in charge of different classes. All the things that the classes made were sold at the stalls and we had other stalls too, like:  loom bands master class, recipe books, bottle stall, face painting, nails, tattoos, jewellery made of cereal, raffles and big popping rice balloons. We used the CCC room for Christmas games like find the elf, find the chocolate, cups game and Christmas colouring. We had a brilliant time and at the end of the day Mrs Kelly counted all of the money and we made over five hundred pounds!

Marcus M. and Callum B.

 

RME

We learned about Christmas in the Victorian times in RME. Christmas was not really celebrated like it is today until the Victorian times. The rich people in Victorian times had goose or roast beef for dinner, while poor people had rabbit.  Queen Victoria ate roast beef and swan for her Christmas dinner. On Christmas day, the richer people would wear dresses and suits and poorer people would just wear ordinary everyday clothes. Christmas trees were decorated with candles, sweets and fruits.

Nadine M. and Catherine D.

 

Reading Schools Update

Recently people have started to use the Reading Forests (upper and lower) more often and are enjoying regularly going to the Book Nooks to sit back and relax while reading with a friend, or alone! We have changed the books up so that everyone can explore different genres and types of books so that they can find a perfect fit for them. At our school we love reading so this has a great benefit for everyone.

Molly C. and Poppy A.

Literacy

Most mornings we have a spelling starter task to help us learn our weekly words. We have spelling homework on Google Classroom too.

Our class novel is Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo. It’s a very good book and we all love it. It’s basically about a boy (Michael) who gets shipwrecked on an island in the middle of nowhere. He has to survive storms and killer jellyfish and it turns out he is not alone on the island!  We are using Kensuke’s Kingdom to learn comprehension strategies like inferring, metalinguistics and predicting. When we predict, we learn more about the book and we expand our imagination.

In writing we are currently writing in the style of a diary and as an evacuee in 1939 at the start of WW2. We imagine that we have been sent away to the countryside and have to live with a host family. We have thought about the things an evacuee would carry in their suitcase, for example, a gas mask, clothes, a toothbrush, shoes and if you were lucky, a toy or a book. The diary has to show our emotions and thoughts so we have to really think about what it must have been like to have been sent away from your family.

Jack and Sophie W.

Numeracy

After playtime we usually have a numeracy/maths lesson. To help with our times tables we have been playing a game called ‘Shoff’. It’s basically the game ‘Around the World’ but when you get 5 people you put a shoe on their desk and once you get both shoes off you get a prize from the prize box! Another game we play is ’Pac-man’. You can play it outside or inside. Each person gets a different space and the teacher will say a times tables question and if you answer it correctly, you can move a space back or forwards. Once you get closer to a person you have to tag them, then they are out. But if you cannot tag them nothing happens to you or them. You cannot dodge while they tag you!

We have recently been learning about different types of fractions. The fractions we have been learning about are: proper, improper and mixed number. The numerator is the number at the top of a fraction and the denominator is the number at the bottom. In proper fractions, the numerator is smaller than the denominator, but in improper it’s the opposite, as the numerator is bigger than the denominator. Here is an example:

Improper                                             

 

 

 

 

Proper

 

 

 

Another fraction we know is a mixed number fraction. The fraction consists of a whole number and then a proper fraction, remember the fraction always has to be a proper fraction.

 

 

 

 

We have learned how to convert improper fractions to mixed number fractions and the other way round.

Aaron M and Catherine D.

WW2

We have been learning about WW2. We know about the axis and allied powers. If you don’t know what the allied and axis powers are then read on. The allied powers were: Great Britain, USA and the Soviet Union. The axis powers were: Germany, Italy and Japan. We have studied the evacuation process and we learned what evacuees took with them when they were evacuated to the countryside. People took a suitcase if they could afford one but if not they had to carry their things. We have started to learn about propaganda in WW2.

Kayci and Aaron G

RME

Stories from World Religions is our topic in RME. We heard some stories from the religions of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism and then discussed what the meanings were. All the stories had different morals, like mini lessons. Most religions say that is important to treat animals well, and as if they are human. This is because all creatures on earth are important.

Alex and Kai

Reading Schools

We (Molly and Poppy) are our class reading champions! We organise events and other activities for our school with the help of the reading champions from the other classes. We have a Book Buzz area on our Google classroom where we can complete reading challenges posted by our teacher and we also do some activities in class and every day we have DEAR time. We have also created some book nook areas around the school where you can take a book, sit down and relax.

Molly and Poppy

Hello, this is where class newsletters can be accessed.

Literacy

When we were in lockdown, we studied poems and news articles. We are becoming familiar with different features that poets use to make their work more interesting. For example: alliteration, metaphors, repetition, adjectives, similes and more.

Our new class novels this term are ‘Kensuke’s Kingdom’ by Michael

Morpurgo                           

and’ Letters from the Lighthouse’ by Emma Carroll.

Some of our writing this term will come from the books we are reading, and we will be looking at the features of persuasive writing too.

After the Easter holidays, we are going to be planning and delivering our solo talks to the class. We will get the instructions for our solo talks at the end of this month.

 

Numeracy

Before we broke up for the Christmas holidays, some of us researched famous mathematicians. We learned about their life and work and did a solo talk about one that we found particularly interesting.  Some of the mathematicians that we studied were: Alan Turin, Archimedes and Isaac Newton.

 

When we were learning from home, we studied prime numbers, number sequences such as Fibonacci and Pascal triangle, angles and more!

Next week we are going to be learning how to display information using different types of graphs and charts like scatter graphs and pie charts. After the holidays, we will learn more about fractions, decimals and percentages then move on to learning about coordinates and direction using the points on a compass.

 

 

HWB

We have been paying close attention to our emotions. We have been learning about the emotion cogs, and we have found out a lot. The first cog we looked into was the ‘body sensations’ cog, the second was the ‘emotion word’ cog, the third we researched was ‘behaviours’, and the last (so far) was the ‘regulation strategy’ cog. Each one of these is of equal importance and they all play a massive role in how our emotions work.

 

Expressive Arts

Right now, we are studying images of flowers and are drawing, painting and using different art materials to create the flower. Before Christmas, we did pictures of the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) using cut out bits of coloured paper and chalk.

 

We meant to finish our Sound Stories after Christmas but we are in the middle of doing this now. We can choose any instrument and we write our own lyrics to create our own pieces of music.

 

Transition

We have been talking about our transition to high school. We have been chatting about what we are worried about and what we are excited about moving up to high school. On the 25^th of March, we will be getting a visit from Mrs Campbell from Calderside Academy. She is the head of first year.

 

Bobbi, Riley and Peighton