This week we’ve been busy practising our song for Celebrating Success which is on Tuesday at 9.30 a.m. We will be very pleased to welcome you all if you can make it!
In numeracy with Mrs Mackenzie, we are working on equivalent fractions. It’s a bit challenging for some of us but we are getting it!
In our topic work, we have been learning about the Arctic Tundra.
Hope – In the summer and winter the animals’ fur changes colour. In the winter it’s white to blend in with the snow. In the summer it is brown.
Jason – It’s very, very cold there!
Ben – The coldest place in the world is Antarctica with a temperature of -85°C.
Ela – The average temperature in the tundra is -28°C.
In literacy we are learning about reading, following and writing instructions. We made weather instruments – barometers, wind vanes and anemometers which measure air pressure, the direction of the wind and the wind speed. We made paper fish following instructions and started to write our own instructions for playground games. We are hoping to test these with our primary one pupils next week!

We started doing some work on Data Handling and had to think about the type of personality we have. We wonder if you agree with us?

In STEM at Golden Time, we started building our own marble run. It’s quite a tricky task and it’s not yet finished but it is fun!
We went into the hall for our Sports fundraiser. We had a circuit of activities to complete which were great fun!
Table of the week – with 670 points
Pupil of the week – Callum for enthusiastic participation in our celebrating success rehearsals.

It’s been a funny in and out week this week.
We enjoyed a bank holiday Monday and a surprise election Thursday.

In Maths we started looking at how to find the area of regular and irregular shaped by counting squares and working out how many rows and columns. With Mrs Mackenzie we are learning about fractions.

In our learning across the curriculum we made rain gauges. We are going to collect data about the rainfall across the gardens of Bathgate as part of our topic on weather.
We learnt how to hold a cricket bat and hit the ball, whilst still protecting our stumps. It’s harder than it looks!

Lots of people had really fun days out on Thursday and enjoyed the lovely weather.

In STEM at Golden Time we investigated what happens when we pick up jelly with chopsticks. It became much trickier when olive oil was poured onto the jelly because the friction was decreased between the chopsticks and the jelly cubes!

We are enjoying practicing our song for celebrating success on the 16th May – we hope you will be able to join us!
Table of the week – with 360 points

Article 28 – the right to an education

As we end a busy term we have been thinking about everything we have learnt and the things we have been challenged by in class.
Dani – I enjoyed learning about the Viking Gods
Katie – I enjoyed making the Viking shields
Callum – I liked learning about the Viking longhouses
Louie – I have enjoyed making my Viking shield
Elliot – I enjoyed making and eating the garden of Gethsemane biscuit
Jack – I enjoyed learning about Autism yesterday
Lucy – I enjoyed making a Viking shield
Guy – I liked making the Autism ‘a’
Ela – I enjoyed learning the bus stop way to complete division sums
Charlotte – I was challenged by the quickfire tables competition
Isaac – I was challenged by writing in the Furthark, Viking language
Hayley – I enjoyed doing the times tables
Hope – I enjoyed the challenge of the hard times tables in maths
Emily – I enjoyed making the Viking shields
Jay – I really, really enjoyed making the Viking shields
Luke – I was challenged by the quickfire times table challenge
Emma – I was challenged by the code breaker in the Viking runes
Maisey – I have been challenged by writing about Viking burials
Rayen – I have enjoyed having new friends at the school
Jason – I was challenged by writing in Viking language
Ben – I was challenged when we used the compasses in Maths
Rose – I enjoyed making the Viking runes
Nathan – I was challenged learning my lines for the assembly
Jaime – Lee – I have been challenged by writing Viking reports

On Thursday we celebrated World Autism Day. We thought about what we know about autism. We watched a video clip which helped us to understand autism and how like can be for people who are autistic. We think it helped us to understand a little more about Autism and how it can affect people’s lives. We made ‘A’s for autism which are all different, much like all of us.

Table of the week with 520 points

Pupil of the week – Emma for being a kind and supportive friend
Class achievements
Nathan was awarded a yellow belt at Taekwando
Article 28 – the right to an education

This week our class talks were completed with Hayley and Callum telling the class about Viking Gods and a general talk about the Vikings.
Dani –I liked Callum’s talk because it didn’t give us too much information all at once. His information was well separated out.
Elliot – Hayley had a really good, loud voice.
On Tuesday we went to a Benchball Festival at the Sports Centre. We were put into 4 teams and played a lot of other schools. It was fun. We won a lot of our games and got a certificate to show that we had taken part in a fair and sporting manner.
On Thursday we made Viking bread and Viking mead (non-alcoholic!). The bread was made with two different types of flour, water, salt and butter but no yeast so it was a bit more like an oatcake. The mead was made with water, apples and honey.

Jack – The mead was nice.
Luke – The bread had a weird texture and tasted of nothing.
Maisey – I liked the bread because I liked the taste of it.
Elliot – I liked the bread because it was different to normal bread.
Jason – I liked the drink because they added honey into it. The bread tasted a bit like porridge.
Jacob – warning do not smell the bread!
Dani – I might try and make it at home.
Luke – I liked the drink because it tasted of apple juice.
Pupil of the week
Isaac for his enthusiastic approach to our Viking context for learning.

Table of the week – with 790 points (it was very close this week with blues winning by 10 points!)

Other Achievements
Elliot got his orange belt in kick boxing.
Jaime – Lee is going to a dance competition on Sunday.
Guy achieved his red belt in karate.
Ela, Aryan and Dani reached the Golden Club.
Callum achieved his black belt in karate.

Article 28 – the right to an education

This week we enjoyed class talks by Emily, Rayen, Ela, Aryan, Guy and Hope.
Louie – I liked Guy’s touch and feel on the chain mail.
Ela – I liked Emily’s PowerPoint. I liked how she had notes to help her and the screen had everything else on it.
Emily – Rayen did really well with his reading on his talk.
Aryan – I liked Ela’s talk as she had a good model and the quiz was also good.
Dani – I liked Aryan’s talk because he had a lot of information about the Viking longships.
Hayley – I liked Hope’s talk because she was loud and clear.

We wrote Viking diaries this week thinking about daily life in Viking times. We found out that the Vikings only had 2 meals a day, breakfast and dinner – no lunch! The children and the adults worked very hard on the farmsteads looking after the animals and growing the crops. They didn’t have a lot of time for fun or relaxation but when they did have a bit of time off, they played hnefatafl, with long ships, nought and crosses, the men and boys wrestled and the adults enjoyed stories and songs around the hearth – party time!

In numeracy with Mrs Mackenzie we are learning to use the bus stop method to divide. In maths with Mrs Collings we are learning about compass points and using these to follow directions. We used our knowledge of compass points in the playground, first of all with Mrs Collings giving us instructions and then we gave our partner instructions to move.
(Pictures to follow)

In P.E. we made our final preparations for the benchball festival on Tuesday. We are looking forward to competing against other P4 classes.

Our pupil of the week was Jay for being polite and having good manners.

Our table of the week is to be confirmed…….

This week Lucy, Emma, Katie, Maisey, Jacob, Ben, Elliot and Nathan did their class talks.
Louie – I liked Ben’s pictures on his PowerPoint.
Ela-I liked the video on Nathan’s PowerPoint. It was the top ten facts about Vikings.
Ben – I liked how Emma asked us to get our Smartpacks out for our class talks.
Dani – at the end of Emma’s talk we had to write down answers to her questions.
Jason – I liked Elliot’s PowerPoint. He had good pictures about Viking towns.
Rose – I liked Katie’s class talk because the pictures were picked carefully.
Callum – I liked how Lucy gave us some information about Viking houses and then we learnt about them in class.
Skye – I liked Maisey’s PowerPoint because the pictures were nice and she had loads of detail.
Luke –Jacob’s PowerPoint had really detailed pictures on Viking food.
Jacob – I liked Maisey’s PowerPoint because the background had a nice pattern.
We finished our first Viking class story and are looking forward to our new Viking story adventure.
We learnt about the Viking alphabet, the Furthark, and wrote our names in runes. We also made rune stones with our initials on. Although some of the letters are very different (or don’t exist in the Futhark) some are quite similar. Can you write your name in runes?

We are continuing to prepare for the Benchball festival on the 14th March at Bathgate Xcite with the help of some students from West Lothian College.

In Health and Wellbeing we are exploring our emotions and we drew emojis of different emotions and we had to guess which emotion each one represented.

In French we learnt the names of parts of the body and learn to do ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’ in French. You can enjoy it here…….

Pupil of the Week – Jason for multiplying a 2 digit number by a single number and explaining his strategy really well.

Table of the week- with 620 points

This week has been a short week but busy!
Luke did his class talk this week on Viking weapons.
‘I thought it was great’ Elliot
‘I liked his powerpoint’ Louie
‘I like the facts he had’ Jaime-Lee
‘I liked that he had notes to help him and didn’t look back at the powerpoint’ Dani
‘I think he made a lot of effort for it’ Ela.
In language we wrote about our trip to the Museum. We had to write in chronological order – the order that events happened. We had to write in the first person as it was about our trip and write in the past tense because it had already happened. We had to use time connectives to link our paragraphs together. We tried to use adjectives to describe the things we saw and what we did. This was the hardest part for lots of us!
In outdoor P.E. we are preparing for a Benchball festival. We are learning some ball skills and how to pass and receive the ball in spaces.
In Maths, we created symmetrical patterns for our partner to copy. Some of them were quite intricate and complicated. We also enjoyed playing this game about symmetry.
http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Flash.aspx?a=activity19
In French we watched a song to learn about the French names for our family members. You might enjoy it too!

This morning Dani told us a bit about her diabetes. We watched a video about what diabetes is and what happens in the body of a diabetic. Dani explained about taking her bloods and her insulin. We hope that the class have a better understanding of her condition and why her monitoring is so important. Thanks, Dani.
Table of the week – 580

Today P4b showcased their learning on Vikings to the school, parents and carers. The children had great fun preparing and learning the songs and scripts and were really proud of their efforts. We really hope you enjoyed it as much as they did!

Callum –The assembly was excellent but my favourite song was Valhalla tango and my favourite part was the gods
Jacob – I liked saying my lines because I think I’d like to be a blacksmith.
Elliot – I liked being a Viking Earl and I think we put so much effort in!
Skye- I had so much fun at the assembly and I was valkyrie.
Rose – I enjoyed the Valhalla tango and being a Valkyrie.
Guy – I liked the songs and the music in them.
Hope – I liked doing the Valhalla Tango dance.
Rayen – I liked everything musically.
Maisey – I enjoyed the singing.
Ben – I liked saying my lines as Odin because it was fun.
Jason – I liked our singing.
Charlotte – I liked being Brunhilda and doing the dance to Valhalla tango.
Katie – I liked saying my lines and my extra line!
Isaac – I liked saying my lines as Thor because it was fun.
Hayley – I enjoyed saying my words.
Nathan – I liked the song Valhalla Tango because it was great.
Luke – I liked being an archaeologist.
Emily – I enjoyed singing.
Louie – I liked my line because it was catchy and about a spoon!
Jamie – Lee – I liked being an archaeologist and finding a sword probably made by a blacksmith.
Ela – I liked learning my lines.
Emma – I liked playing my part because it was really fun.
Lucy – I liked doing the music.
Dani – I liked the biscuits and juice at the end!
Aryan – I liked the music. I liked singing chain mail.

Special thanks to Mrs Mackenzie and Mrs Innes for all the preparation of the songs, script and the amazing props!

We also enjoyed learning about the Viking raid on Lindisfarne and even launched our own attack on the island.
See how good a viking raider you would make using this link…..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/vikings/launch_gms_viking_quest.shtml

Primary 4 MVP for the month of January – Lucy. Well done, Lucy!

Pupil of the week – Hope for her excellent approach to Home Learning.
Table of the week – with 590 points

This week we have been practicing for our assembly which is on the 3rd February. We hope you will be able to join us as we are really enjoying preparing it for you!

This week we had a taster session from a street dance instructor. It was great fun.

We started learning about the Viking invasion of Britain. They arrived over 1000 years ago from Denmark, Sweden and Norway. They came in longships to get treasures such as gold and silver and to settle on the land to farm it.

Viking fact of the week – the Viking warriors didn’t have horns on their helmets. The Gods were the only ones who had horns!

Maisey discovered that she has Viking ancestors – we are checking she doesn’t have a sword and shield in her bag every morning!

We continued learning about symmetry and made some symmetrical patterns for our friends to complete. Some of them were very intricate.

Ela and Maisey are looking forward to competing in the Scottish Poetry Competition on Monday.

Pupil of the week – Elliot for being an excellent step 5 role model.

Table of the week – with 530 points

Blog post guest edited by yellow group
This week we have been making Christmas stuff. This is what we liked this week

Charlotte-I liked making the Christmas stuff
Hope-l liked making the Christmas stuff
Luke-l liked the p.e obstacle course
Nathan-l liked making the shape snowmen
Jacob-l liked making shapes
Jack-l liked p.e
Emma- l enjoyed my yummy Christmas dinner
Katie-l enjoyed making my square based pyramid snowman
We made these 3d snowmen from shape nets.

Isaac-l enjoyed making the snowmen shapes
Emily-l liked p.e
Rose-l liked doing p.e
Lucy-l liked doing p.e
Aryan-l liked maths and learning about 3d shapes
Aryan made this dodecahedron from regular pentagons. We think it is pretty awesome!

Maisey-l liked doing the tables tests and doing the cards
Dani-l enjoyed decorating all of the Christmas things
Louie-l liked decorating my folder
Hayley-l liked the book report
Jaime-lee-l liked practising my spellings
Elliot-l liked making cards for my family
Callum-l enjoyed doing 3d shapes
Special person is… Katie
Pupil of the week – Hayley
Table of the week – blue table with 430 points

From Mrs Collings – It’s been a busy week and the children are very much looking forward to the weekend. We hope it is restful and peaceful for you all!
Article 31 –the right to an education