This week we learned about Robert Burns. We learned who he is, what he did and why he is still remembered today. We made shortbread to celebrate his birthday. We learned about measuring ingredients in maths so that we could weigh out the ingredients to make the shortbread. We also designed our own tartan using Tartan Weaver. Why don’t you try? It’s great fun!
http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/interactive/weaver/index.html

Here is a picture of our shortbread – there was lots and lots of it!

I have enjoyed:

Aaron: P.E because we are learning ways to travel.

Liam: drama because I enjoyed watching the P7 show.

Alistair: P.E because we learned different things.

Holly: Making shortbread to celebrate Robert Burns Birthday.

Alfie B: Writing facts about Robert Burns.

Lewis: Making the shortbread. I enjoyed eating it and gave a bit to my mum.

Rory: I enjoyed Golden Time because I played with my Lego men.

Brooke: making shortbread because it was fun.

Annie: Making shortbread because I cut the shapes out.

Shaun: I enjoyed P.E because we did skipping and hopping.

With Succes at home, Orla achieved her Grade 1 Certificate in playing the piano – Well done Orla!

This week we got our Scottish poems to learn for the competition a week on Monday. We read through the selection and then chose the ones we wanted. We looked at the difference in words between Scots and English and tried to guess what they meant. We also used an online dictionary to help us. We tried to write our own Scots poem and found this to be very tricky.
We learned about Robert Burns and why he is still remembered today. In art we learnt about the history of Tartan and then wove our own tartan mats. We then used these mats to make our bagpipes.
Don’t they look great?!
In maths we were learning how to interpret data from bar graphs and have also started learning about subtraction. We are learning about different strategies and also sharing which strategy we used to work out our answer.
Enjoy the weekend.

Welcome back everyone!

We have had lots of fun this week. We started off by talking and listening about our holidays and what we got as presents for Christmas. We are very lucky because we got lots of things and had fun in the holidays. We used this information to make Bar Graphs of what we got and then asked and answered questions about the Bar Graph.

We have set our new targets for this term and are looking forward to learning lots about Robert Burns and the Ancient Egyptians. We have chosen our poems for the Scottish Poetry Competition and will begin learning them next week.

Have a great weekend!

This has been a busy week.

We learned about adjectives and how they are describing words. We were very god with identifying adjectives.
We built on our knowledge of 3D shapes to build 3D shapes using the ‘map’ for 3D shapes. These maps are called nets. We made cylinders, pentagonal pyramids, cubes, cuboids and cones. We decorated our 3D shapes and then hung them on our tree as baubles!

Don’t they look great?!

We have been learning about different styles of poetry and this week we were trying to write rhyming poems. This was very hard and we didn’t quite manage this task. We did learn how to rhyme words and could find lots of different rhyming words. We may try again later on in the year!

We had our Christmas lunch on Wednesday and our Christmas party. We had lots of fun and played different games. We had biscuits, popcorn, sweets and juice in between our party. The best part was when Santa came to Balbardie! We sang Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer and Jingle Bells and he gave us a present. We loved it!

We have been learning about Global Warming and how it affects all of us. We learned about recycling and the different bins we can use in school for recycling. We made special cards to put above the bins which show you what you can put in the different bins. They are colour co-ordinated to make it easier.

Youcan see the posters in action around the school!

Another busy week!

This week we have been learning about Global Warming and what causes it. Global Warming is slowly heating up our planet, melting the polar caps and endangering our plants and animals.

We can now find and draw lines of symmetry using special pieces of plastic. It was fun and quite easy to do! We also drew symmetrical houses – adding in extra details but symmetrically. Our butterflies were quite tricky to cut and we found it trickier than we thought to keep the pattern symmetrical. We had to remember that if we were writing our name that would make the butterfly unsymmetrical!

We have started recording data from our weather station and have recorded weather conditions all week. It hasn’t rained much but one day it was -1’C and two days later it was 14’C! What a difference in temperature!

Why don’t you check out some of these Christmas songs?!

Only one week to go! Bonne weekend!

What a busy week!

The Christmas Enterprise Fayre was a huge success – all the candles we made were sold out and we made a good profit for the school funds.

We have been learning about extreme weather and the damage it causes. We built a weather station which has a barometer, wind vane, rain gauge and a thermometer to record our weather daily. We had to learn how to read a thermometer and even made one in class! We also had to learn how to use the remaining equipment for recording data.

In writing we learned how to write shape poems – ours look like tornadoes! We have also learnt about symmetry and made our own symmetrical butterflies.

A special congratulation to all the children who got into the Christmas Golden Club. Well done boys and girls, keep up the hard work.

Enjoy the weekend.

We have some success to share from home.

Kyle Has won a medal and received a trophy for sparring and patterns in Tae Kwon Do.

Aaron has won lots of medals and trophies for Tae Kwon Do.

Orla was given a certificate for Amazing Vocal Projection in her Singing Club.

This week we have been very busy with making candles for the Christmas Enterprise Fayre. We decorated them and then made the candles. The candles have different fragrances.

We learnt about fire and candle safety. We also learnt how to make the candles and decorate the votives. It was hard work but they smell beautiful! Come and see them tomorrow at the Fayre!

The Fayre is at 10am – 12pm

We have great news in P3B!

Alistair won the ‘Star of the Month’ award in Drama in school and Olivia won the award for the ‘Most Improved Dancer’ at the Steps Dance School.

Well done and congratulations to both of you!

Here they are with their Trophies.

This week we have been very busy.

In maths we are learning about 2D shapes and had lots of activities to do based on 2D shapes. We are also learning to add numbers mentally.

As part of our topic on weather, we have been looking at seasons. We learned how to write an acrostic poem about Autumn. It was quite tricky as we had to write AUTUMN down the page and then write something about autumn beginning with the first letter on each line! Confused? Ask us, we’ll tell you how!

We also learned about high pressure and low pressure for LAC and then did different experiments to investigate air pressure. Our favourite was the Cartesian Diver experiment. First, Mrs. Ghafoor couldn’t get it to work. She tried lots of times. Then we watched a video together and worked out what was going wrong. It finally worked! So we all got turns at making the Cartesian Divers. Other experiments involved trying to blow a ball of paper into a bottle – we couldn’t do it even though it looked so easy. Then we created wind by forcing air from a pressure area to a lower pressure area.

We got a visit from |The Scottish Theatre and had an interactive story about Hairy McLairy. We also got book bags from Read, Write & Count. In assembly, we learned about Remembrance Day and held a one-minute silence to commemorate our soldiers who fought for us and still fight to protect our country.

This week we have been learning about the different seasons and how they affect us. We also learned about air pressure.

In maths we learned about 2D shapes and had fun with trying to make them on an online site, we were also sorting them according to their properties.

We learned about Adam and Eve and how the Bible story tells us they came to be sent away from Eden.

This week we also held auditions for the Balbardie Factor. We voted secretly to choose one final act that would go forward to the finals. Congratulations to Charlotte and Brooke who will be performing a dance.

Bye for now.

This week has been short but action packed!

We finished our towns, which we made as part of Our Community project, then painted them. We then got to take them home. Not everyone wanted to take their building home so some of us took more than one building home! We have started our new topic which is all about the weather.

In maths we learned about the four compass points and did different activities to make sure we understood directions.

We have also started to look at bible stories and this week we learned about ‘How God Made Everything’ and on which days he made the things.

Enjoy your weekend.

This week we had our shared start. Some parents were able to come and see what we do in maths. We had a game for finding coordinates and Co-ordinate Battleships. We also had a direction game on our floor grid and finding treasure on a grid. It was great fun.

We have been learning about buildings and people who help us. We also looked at a Bird’s Eye View. We went around the school and then inside the school to see if we could map the school. We came back and did a Bird’s Eye View of the whole school’s layout.

We went out into the playgrounds again and were disappointed to see so much rubbish was thrown on the ground and not in the bin. Next week we will go to all the classes and stress the importance of not littering and keeping our community clean.

Please help us keep our school clean!
rubbish-rounds

As an update on our last post, here is a picture of all the rubbish we collected in the back playground.

On a more positive note, Rory won a medal for being the season’s best player in the Linlithgow Rugby Team!
Here he is proudly wearing his medal.

In Maths we have been learning about making turns. We looked at quarter, half, three-quarter turns and moving forward a number of steps. We pretended we were robots and had to reach a place in the playground when our partners gave us directions. Some ‘Robots’ got stuck against walls when we got our instructions wrong! it was still fun though.

As part of ‘Our Community’ topic, we have looked at problems in our community. We decided to clean our playground and were absolutely shocked at the amount of rubbish we picked up. We know and understand that it is our responsibility to throw our rubbish in the bin. We then made posters which we will put up around the school to remind everyone that we need to keep our school community clean. One of the problems is the wasps around bins. This means that some of us are too scared to throw the rubbish in the bins as that is where the wasps are, but with cooler weather coming soon, this won’t be a problem. (A picture will follow to show how much rubbish we collected.)

In Literacy we have been learning how to write letters. This is not as easy as it sounds. We have to remember to put key information in our letter and write it so that the format is correct. We will need practice to get it right!

Enjoy your weekend.

Well done to Owen Houstin!
Owen took part in the ‘Subway 5k Family Run’ on Sunday 25th September. He had great fun but was very tired! Here he is with his medal.

This week, in Maths we have been learning about Grid References and how they are useful for finding where things are. We played different games including Battleships, an Interactive Board game, our Floor Grid as well as completing our maths booklets. If you would like to play at home, follow the link!
http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Flash.aspx?f=coordinates

In topic, we are learning about what makes up a community and how we belong to different parts of the community. We have been looking at some of the problems that occur in Bathgate, our community, and will see how we can improve the situation.

We looked at speech marks and where they are used. This was quite tricky because speech marks only go around what is being said.

Enjoy the long weekend!

We have been learning about lots of different things in class.

In maths:
Brooke: We have been learning about Big Maths. We are trying to get all our answers in 30 seconds.
Ellie Rose: We have been learning about numbers 1 less than and 1 more than a number.
Rory: We have been learning numbers up to 1000.
Olivia: Some of us have gone on to even harder questions for maths.

Health & Wellbeing:
Charlotte: Some of us have made our way on to step 1.
Shaun: We use our Class Dojo for collecting points to go up to step 5 and the Golden Club.

Science:
Orla: We have been learning how air is all around us and doing science experiments.

Expressive Arts:
Anna: In art, we made a puddle using different shades of blue paper.

What a busy week!
This week we learned about how water has a skin. We added soap to ‘stretch’ the skin so that we could make bubbles. We had lots of fun playing with our bubble mixture outside. We made bubbles using our hands, straws and loops.
In maths we are learning to improve our mental maths by using Big Maths. The questions are really easy but we found it was a lot harder to do them all in 30 seconds!
Bye for now.

We have had great fun in our first week back.
We have been learning about our rights and responsibilities and how these affect us and how all children around the world have the same rights as us but don’t always have access to theses rights. Like the right to education, good, nutritious food and clean water.
We have also looked at how to clean water as an experiment in class. Although the water was cleaner, it was still not safe to drink. Perhaps we could wash the car with it?!
In maths we are learning how to improve our maths facts by using the Big Maths Beat it tests.
We are looking forward to learning lots more in the coming year!