This week in our writing we had to think of at least 3 facts about the life of a pirate or facts about pirate ships. Some of the facts that we wrote about were:
-Eva’s fact was that pirate ships had jolly roger flags on them
-Jodie’s fact was that the sailor drove the boat
-Farrah’s fact was the scrubber or cabin boys cleaned the deck
-Lewis’s fact was that the jolly roger flag was put up to scare other people on their ships
-Max’s fact was that the anchor was thrown out the ship to stop the ship like a break on the car

This week we also made pirate portraits. We drew a picture with pencil first of a pirate’s face and then added detail. Some pirates had eye patches, some had bandanas, some had gold teeth! Once we drew our pictures with pencil, we then painted them to add colour and more detail. Once our pictures had dried we stuck on a border. On the border we wrote some pirate sayings! Some of the sayings that pirates said were:
“ARRRR!”
“Ahoy me maties!”
“Land ahoy!”
“Shiver me timbers!”
“Arrr me maties!”
“Walk the plank!”
When writing all these sayings we discussed using a punctuation mark. We talked about when we would use this in our writing and a lot of boys and girls have been impressing Miss Wilson by using this in their writing lately.

Another exciting thing we did this week was starting to make our very own treasure chests! We have only started painting them so far, but we will hopefully finish them soon and add gold, jewels and many other things to make them look interesting!

We are loving learning about pirates and are looking forward to learning more.
-Lucas wants to learn more about what pirates eat and drink
-Eva wants to make some more pirate food
-Maisie wants to learn how to make a pirate hat
-Jodie wants to learn how to make pirate jewellery
-Holly wants to learn more about mermaids

Have a lovely weekend! Don’t forget that next Thursday is the Art Exhibition. It will be held in the new hall from 3:30-6pm. We hope you received your invites from the children and look forward to seeing everyone there!

-Miss Wilson & P1w

We have been very busy this week adding lots of things into our floorbook on Treasure Island. We have also been asking questions and writing them in the book so we can think about what we want to learn next. It is exciting that we get to choose what we want to learn!

On Monday we made hard tack biscuits! These were made by pirates on their travels and were easy to make as there were only 4 main ingredients. These were:
1. Flour
2. Milk
3. Butter
4. Sea salt

Eva – I ate mine. It was good!
Donna – I thought it was great.
Archie – I ate some of it, but my dad wanted to eat the rest.
Hannah – I ate mine and it was soft.
Tamsyn – I didn’t like mine, but I put jam on it and it tasted nice.
Aaron – It was fantastic!
Maisie – I liked it because I put jam on it.
Dylan – I didn’t like it so I put it in the bin.
Shaun – I thought it was fantastic and I took a big bite of it!

There were lots of opinions on the hard tack biscuits, but I think we all agreed that eating the same things every single day on a pirate ship would not be very nice. We talked about foods we really disliked and how that would be to eat those foods every single day.

Yesterday we were learning about all the different jobs you could have on a pirate ship. Some of these were:
-Master Gunner
-Captain
-Chef
-Cabin boy
-Boatswain
-Carpenter & surgeon
-Rigger
-Master Sailor

We looked at what all these jobs entailed and then we got into groups of 3 and we had to perform actions in front of the rest of the class. The class then had to guess what job we were performing just by looking at our actions and what we were saying. This was really fun and everyone did a fantastic job in this role play task.

We have also started learning about coordinates and this will help us to create our own treasure maps! We have made one in class and here are some pictures of us pointing to coordinates and telling the class what they are:

Next week we want to learn more about pirate language and what they drank on the ship! We are excited to learn more 🙂

Have a lovely weekend!
-Miss Wilson & P1w

This week P1w have been playing games to help solve problems. We think that working with a partner or in a group will always be good for helping each other. We have also decided that if we are stuck doing something, we know that we can always ask a friend to help us!

Some of the games we played that helped us work together were:
-Sitting and standing. We had to find a partner and go back-to-back and link our arms together. Then we had to try and sit down without breaking the link! It was really funny!!
-Snap. We were all given a card each and then we had to try and find all the people who had the same card as us and get into a group. It was really tricky, but we all worked together.
-Shape writing. We worked with a partner and drew shapes on each other’s hands and the other person had to guess the shape we were drawing.

We have also been playing group games with our buddies and learning how to share and take turns. Miss Wilson has been so impressed with how well we have been working together this week 🙂

Class Dojo winner this week: Lucas Kean!

This week we made nature pictures! It was very fun and we all impressed Miss Wilson so much.

FIRST we looked at pictures of what we were going to make outside using parts of nature like sticks, stones and snow!
THEN we went outside and collected lots of materials.
LASTLY we created pictures of ourselves using the nature materials we collected.

Here are some of our pictures:

Our final challenge outside was to get into groups of 3 and create a whole body picture of a person using the nature materials.

Here are some of our pictures:

We hope you have a lovely weekend and enjoyed reading our blog.

PUPIL OF THE WEEK: Shaun for making a super number bond raindbow and knowing all of his number bonds to 10!

This week, we have been reading a new story in class – “The Gruffalo” by Julia Donaldson. Our whole class loves this story and finds it really funny.

Declan Detective wants to know what happens next in the story. We drew a picture of what actually happened at the end, then we drew a picture of what we wanted to happen. Here are some of our made up endings:
– Lewis changed his ending so that the mouse would eat the gruffalo
– Katie made the gruffalo squirt a water gun onto the mouse’s face!
– Lily made Rapunzel and Ariel arrive and save the mouse from the gruffalo
– Lucas drew a picture of the gruffalo kicking the mouse into the air and then eating him
-Donna made the gruffalo very kind, then the mouse kicked the gruffalo down a hole!

As you can tell, all our Primary 1s have very good imaginations!!

Next, we talked to Christopher Character who wants to know more about the characters in the story. We drew pictures of the gruffalo and then thought of describing words that we listed next to him. Some of the words to describe the gruffalo were:
-angry
-prickly
-scary
-ugly
-mad
-spikey

We are looking forward to reading the Scottish version of this story soon 🙂
Have a lovely weekend!

Happy New Year to everyone! We hope you had a lovely holiday and we would like to share our favourite moments from during the holidays with you…

Max – I enjoyed the tai-kwon-do Christmas Party
Arran – My brother got me a new Playstation for Christmas
Erin – I got a go-kart
Katie – For Christmas I got lots of Sylvannian Family toys
Lewis – My big sister got me an Xbox 360
Farrah – I got a pink robot dog from Santa
Jodie – On Christmas we had a big family party
Eva – I got a toy Anna for Christmas
Archie – I got a police station lego
Anna – I got a Peppa Pig story
Donna – I got a Frozen scooter off of my grandma and grandpa
Maisie – I got to go out for lunch with my mummy, daddy and brother during the Christmas holidays
Lily – I went out for dinner and saw my Uncle Jimmy

We are very excited to be back at school and are looking forward to all the fantastic learning planned for this term 🙂

This week we have been learning a lot about 2D and 3D shapes. We know that 2D shapes are flat and 3D shapes are fat!

At the start of the week we cut out the net shape of a square-based pyramid and made it look like a Christmas tree. We then cut out shapes that we drew and stuck them on our Christmas trees. After we had finished sticking on all of our shapes, we counted them and recorded it on the bottom of our trees.

This week we also did a very exciting Shape Hunt! We were put into shape groups and given magazines to search through to find our given shape. We found lots of shapes in the magazines of real objects and our finished shape boards look fantastic!

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We have had lots of festive celebrations this week in school.

We have performed TWO nativities in front of parents, friends, grandparents, and many more! We have also had our Christmas lunch (YUM YUM!). Lastly we walked down to the Regal Theatre and watched the Christmas pantomime. It has been lots of fun and here are our highlights of the week:-

Lucas – I enjoyed the pantomime
Katie – I also enjoyed the pantomime
Hannah – I liked performing The Nativity Party in front of the mums and dads
Jodie – I enjoyed singing this week
Eva – I enjoyed speaking into the microphone and going up on the stage
Dylan – I enjoyed doing the Christmas Hokey Cokey and speaking through the microphone
Lewis – I liked going on the stage
Alfie – I liked making a Rudolf picture in Art this week
Max – I enjoyed my Christmas lunch. The macaroni cheese was yummy, but the ice cream was like coloured cream!

If you have bought your Nativity DVD, we hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it!

Thank you!
-Miss Wilson & Primary 1w

We have had an extremely busy week in Primary 1w! We have had lots of visitors to our class and we were lucky to have Miss Henderson visit us during our writing lesson.

We wrote our letters to Santa Claus. We had to:
-introduce ourselves
-say 3 things that we would like for Christmas
-sound out our letters and ‘have a go’ at writing ourselves

Some of the things we have asked for from Santa are:
-an iPad (Lucas and Donna)
-Planet of the Zombie warfight game (Lewis)
-Hello Kitty (Anna)
-a train set (Arran)
-a robot pink dog (Jodie)
-Monster High Dolls (Lily)
-a guitar (Erin)

We are looking forward to maybe hearing back from Santa Claus in response to our letter!!

*Well done to our Class Dojo winners of the week – Jodie, Farrah and Katie :-)*

This week we have been learning about High 5 steps that we can use in and out of school with other boys and girls.
These 5 steps help us be kind to others and it helps us stay safe.

1. Ignore:
If somebody is being nasty to you, you don’t look at them and pretend you don’t hear them.

2. Speak friendly:
Tell the person nicely that they are hurting your feelings and maybe ask questions as to why they are acting this way.

3. Walk away:
If Step 1 and 2 still do not help, you can walk away from the person with your head held high. Don’t look back.

4. Speak firmly:
Ask them to STOP. Tell them you will tell an adult next if they do not stop acting unkindly.

5. Report:
Tell a teacher, a PSW, an adult or your buddy if you are still not happy.

We coloured in pictures of helping hands with a list of 5 people we can go to if we are feeling unhappy with the way somebody is acting towards us. Next week we are going to put in order these steps so we can remember what to do.

High 5 and stay safe! 🙂

-Miss Wilson and Primary 1w

This week we played outdoor PE games with our buddies. We first got into 5 groups and we had to play at least 2 games. Some of the games we played were:
Lucas – What’s the time Mr Wolf
Hannah & Katie – I sent a letter to my love
Anna – Duck, duck, goose
Max – Banana Tig
Jodie – Duck, duck, dinosaur
Kaycee – Duck, duck, tail
Erin & Donna – Banana Peel

We had a lot of fun playing these games and it was nice to learn some new ones. We love spending time with our buddies and look forward to spending time with them every week 🙂

Congratulations to Lucas – OUR PUPIL OF THE WEEK – for creating a fantastic and eye-catching Nativity poster! Well done 😀

This week we wrote our invitations for our Nativity Party. Miss Wilson made a template where we had to include:
-WHO we were inviting
-WHERE it is going to be held
-WHEN it will be and what time
-WHAT you are invited to

Everybody made their own invitation and we are going to send them home really soon!
Our Nativity Party will be:
-WHERE -> at Balbardie Primary School
-WHEN -> Tuesday 9th December or Wednesday 10th December
*A letter will be sent out nearer the time*

Here are some of our Nativity Party invitations:

Pupil of the week:
Aaron Tennant for working well with a partner to produce an excellent Venn diagram 🙂 Well done!

This week we have been learning about fire safety. On Wednesday, it was Bonfire Night! We all talked about being safe if you were going to watch a firework display.

Some safety tips are:
-Stay far enough back from the firework display – Dylan
-The fireworks might explode and burn you! – Hannah
-Don’t run back to a lit firework – Lewis
-Don’t go too near the fireworks – Aaron
-Keep your pets indoors so they don’t get scared – Lucas
-Keep the fireworks you are not using safe away in a box – Alfie
-Don’t let your cats go outside – Farrah
-Keep babies inside if they are scared too – Erin

We also made pictures in class of fireworks
-I liked making my picture – Jodie
-We used chalk, pens, pencils and tissue paper. We scrunched up the tissue paper to make small fireworks – Katie
-We used black card so it looked like night time and used coloured chalk so it looked like bright fireworks – Lucas
-We used crayons as well to make swirly fireworks! – Erin

Our new topic this term is “Toy Story” – Katie

We started our “Toy Story” floorbook and our challenge this week was to ask mums, dads and grandparents what their favourite toy was when they were younger – Alfie

We have been learning about each other’s favourite toys. My favourite toy is racing cars and jets – Max

We talked about taking care of our toys and being safe with them. My favourite toy is Buzz Lightyear – Aaron

My favourite toy is Monster High dolls- Hannah

*Just a special reminder that we are beginning to work on our P1 Nativity Production. Please could you help your child learn their words. These have been sent home or will be sent home next week and are in their school bags. Thank you*

-Miss Wilson & P1w

This week we have been learning new sounds that are in Inky’s Vowel House!

We decided to go outside and draw our own Vowel Houses using chalk in the playground. Here are some of our fantastic houses.

We even did one together using the playground house outside!

Once we came back inside, we looked at our pictures and discussed the story again. Miss Wilson is so impressed with how well we have remembered the story of Inky’s Vowel House!! We have remembered all of the characters and all of the sounds they make.

The Vowel House story is:
The donkey lives on the top floor and he says “ee”
The old man who lives underneath is hard of hearing who says “ai”
The old lady who lives underneath who cracks eggs says “e”
In the basements lives some ants “a”
We don’t like the ants! So we run upstairs to turn the light on “o”
It won’t switch on! So we say “oa”
Then we run to the top and there’s a ghost “oo”
The ghost scares Inky the mouse and he knocks over the ink “i”
It’s okay because we put up the umbrella “u”

Here are some pictures of our fabulous chalk drawings as well of Inky’s Vowel House:

For all Primary 1 parents, a letter was sent out inviting you to attend a session held by Alison Paterson to tell you more about Vowel House and Colourful Consonants. If you would like to attend it will be held on October 30th from 9:00-10:15am in school. We hope you can make it 🙂

Have a lovely holiday everyone!
-Miss Wilson and P1w

This week we have been learning about numbers 0, 1, 2 and 3 and counting within these numbers. We have all been impressing Miss Wilson very much!

We have all been learning about the letters and sounds s and p. We have been making wonderful displays in the class with our work.

We have been learning the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears and discussing the story. We created WANTED posters for Goldilocks as we felt that she did some naughty things! We thought it was quite naughty that Goldilocks went into the cottage when she didn’t even know who lived there and we had a discussion about how to stay safe.

With our buddies we tried using paper mache and balloons to make bowls for porridge to go in! We really like working with our buddies and are looking forward to seeing how our bowls turn out.

Farrah moved up to Step 3 this week! Well done, Farrah 🙂

We have had a very busy week in Primary 1w! All the boys and girls were in for a WHOLE day every day this week and nobody has fallen asleep yet 🙂

Some of the things we have learned so far are:
Farrah – We have been learning to write and use 0, 1 and 2
Katie – We have been learning how to stay safe. Don’t talk to strangers!
Alfie – We have been learning about the sound and letter “m” and “c”
Eva – We have learned to say “Hello” in Spanish which is “Hola”
Lily – We also learned how to say our name. Me llamo Lily!
Maisie – We had lots of fun in Drama too!
Kaycee – Mr Jeffries takes us for P.E. We were learning to exercise and play games
Lewis – I have made a new friend this week. His name is Aaron
Jodie – Me too! Holly is my new friend
Erin – Lily is my new friend too

Pupil of the week – Alfie Brand

This week has been an extremely busy week for P3w! We have had a lot going on and we have a lot to tell you about. Some of our highlights this week have been:
Alanna – We have been learning how to tell the time this week and we played a really fun game on Education City called ‘Wakey wakey’ and ‘Stig on the bus’
Ty – When we were playing these games, we had to guess what time it was on the screen and Stig would do something funny if we got it right
Lennox – We have been learning about the hour, half past, quarter past and quarter to. I’m finding it really fun and I want to do it for a long time!
Eva – On Thursday, we went up to the gym hall and there was a man named Alexander and he did lots of tricks and he was really funny! This was the surprise for people who were in The Golden Club
Sophie – We did some dancing after which was really fun. They were handing out prizes and then we played a game
Noah – The game we were playing was ‘Bridges’ and if the music stopped we had to drop down. I got tickled!
Harvey – I got to do one of the tricks with Alexander. He made the wand float and I found it really easy!
Cole & Kirsten – On Tuesday we took part in the baton relay run which schools in Bathgate took part in. We ran with some teachers all the way down to Bathgate West Nursery with our baton we made in class and then we got to have a drink.

Liam – Another exciting thing we got to do this week was make stovies and soup. They were really tasty!
Caitlin – We made stovies and soup because we are learning about farming and how different foods come from farms
Rory – I liked making the stovies because I liked chopping up the sweet potato. I was one of the first ones finished
Alanna – The stovies and the soup were delicious!
We got to sit in class and eat our stovies and soup at the end of the day and we all had a taste! Some of us had never tried stovies or carrot and potato soup before so this was something new that we tried.

This week has been just as fun as Week 1! We have all really enjoyed the range of sports we have taken part in and thank all of the organisers and coaches for such a wonderful time.

The exciting sports we took part in this week were:
-Modern bowls
-Skip-a-thon
-Ball wrestling

Everything has been very fun and very interesting, but Miss Wilson’s highlight was seeing us all having such a great time at Sports Day. She is very proud of us!

Day 1
Football:
Today was our first day of Health and Fitness fortnight and it was lots of fun.
This morning we went outside in the front playground and we did dribbling with a ball and we also did dribbling in a race – Eva
We played some games when we were doing football. We played banana tig, toilet tig and ‘here, there, anywhere, nowhere’ – Caitlin
We had partners that we had to follow with the ball – Brooklyn
When we were playing ‘follow the leader’ we had to pass the ball and part of the game we had to touch the ball with our foreheads and they got dirty – Cole

Funky Fitness:
We did a dance and we had to learn lots of different moves and it was really fun – Sophie
We went to the hall and learned a new dance move called ‘the body ripple’. We can show you this at home – Tom
At the end there were people being the audience and the other people performing. Then we swapped. We were being a quality audience – Ty
When we went to the hall to do a dance, it was called ‘street dance’. My favourite part was learning the beginning – Eva
I liked it because it was similar to the street dance I already do and I also liked that some of the moves were exactly the same – Rory
I liked it when we were performing in front of others – Liam

Day 2:
Kurling:
Today was our second day of health and fitness fortnight. Mrs Wilson took us to the TA hall to learn more about kurling.
Kurling is when you have a stone and you slide it along the floor and you try to get it into the target. It is fun – Sophie
Sometimes adults play kurling and they get a stone to roll it along the ice – Caitlin
On one of my shots, my stone was almost in the middle – Liam
You don’t actually use a real stone. You use a plastic one that slides – Rowan
I enjoyed shooting the stones across the floor to try and get them into the target. I kept missing it – Eva
I enjoyed when we threw the stone and I almost got it into the middle as well – Ty
When it was my turn I just about got it into the target – Cole

Day 3:
Sports Day:
Today was our Sports Day in Balbardie Park. Primary 1, 2 and 3 went over together and the boys raced the boys and girls raced the girls.
I won 2nd place in the overall competition – Megan
I came 3rd place in the tattie and spoon race and I got a sticker – Cole
The races we did were the tattie and spoon race, the running race, bean bag race and a lap run – Eva
I came 1st in the tattie and spoon race and I also won 1st place in the overall competition – Lucie
I came 5th two times in the races – Sam
I won a big medal and I won gold for the sprinting race – Sophie

Day 4:
Gymnastics:
There was a beam that you had to balance on and it was scary because you had to walk backwards – Sophie
At gymnastics we did crocodile kicks, three rolls and we jumped over two yellow pads – Samantha
At gymnastics we were having lots of fun and we had to do crocodile kicks and go through a tunnel – Alanna
We had to jump over bean bags on a little beam – Jennie
When we started jumping over the bean bags we had to do a forward roll. Then we went through a tunnel and we ran and jumped and touched the mat – Eva

Day 5:
Fun fair:
We had a fun fair in the front playground to celebrate Mrs Waddell’s retirement and the success she’s had in the school – Lennox
It was really fun and there was some ice cream, a bouncy castle and there was a bouncy castle slide too! It was fun with the hook and the boats too – Ross
I went on the slide and I couldn’t get back up because I couldn’t find the step – Brooklyn
When I went up the slide I thought I was going to fall off because the steps were slidey and quite steep – Jennie
I went up the slide and there was a traffic jam and I fell down backwards and was on my back – Rowan
I got a tattoo and it’s like a bird in roses – Abbie
I went on the slide and I thought I was going to do a forward roll because I was leaning forward – Sophie
When I came off the slide I jumped up because I thought it was hard ground and I scuffed my heel – Megan