As we were really busy preparing for assembly we did not blog last week, so this one catches up with both weeks!!

Our assembly was about Ancient Egyptians. We have learnt so much and still have lots more to learn about! For our Assembly, we performed a dance to ‘Walk Like An Egyptian’ and we will also be perforn=ming this dance at the Dance Festival next week. We worked very hard to learn the moves and put them together for the dance. It was tricky but worth it in the end!

What we enjoyed about assembly:
‘Singing the song because it had a catchy rhythm.’
‘The dancing because the moves were tricky to learn.’
‘When Rahotep and his assistant came out because they made us laugh’
‘Being a narrator.’
‘Burning my hand on the poker because I got to run around and it was funny!’
‘Getting to say “He started it!”‘

P3B would like to say a big thank you to Mrs White and Mrs Murray who made our costumes and applied our eye makeup.

We made all our props and accessories, including our necklaces, bracelets, cuffs, masks and headdresses.

As part of literacy, we were learning how to perform in front of an audience. This was tricky as there were many parts we had to remember! We had to remember to speak clearly and not mumble, to listen to others – especially as this was also the cue for us to perform different parts in our assembly, to understand and read how a script works and of course to have fun and enjoy ourselves when performing for our audience!

As part of our topic maths, we were learning about The Pyramids and we then built our own pyramids – from sugar cubes. We had to measure the pyramids in centimetres. They look great! They are a lot like the very first pyramid built which was known as a step pyramid and was built for the Pharaoh Djoser.
Here are some pictures including an aerial view!

In writing, we are writing a fictitious story about what happens when we time travel back to Ancient Egypt! We will hopefully be turning this into a book!

We also made Easter Cards for our troops.

We are now looking forward to our performance at the Dance Festival next week! Wish us luck!

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…….

P6B have been using VCOP to help support, develop and improve our writing.

We have begun by focusing on ‘V for Vocabulary‘.

Violet Vocabulary appears when we are being asked to consider the vocabulary we are using. This week, we have been learning to up-level our adjectives and we have had some very interesting describing words being used in our writing work. Here are just some of them –

Extinguishing  –  Noah      Petrified – Gabriel      Astonished  – Gary     Breezy – Casey

Devastatingly – Archie     Unique – Harry     Stunned – Luca       Mesmerised –   Fiona

We have learned that choosing interesting describing words in our story will help to hook the reader by making it more captivating.

Star Writer

Our Star Writer this week was Michelle who had written a fantastic story which not only included interesting adjectives but was also very organised and neatly presented.

World Book Day 

We celebrated ‘World Book Day‘ yesterday in school. This has been running for 20 years now and provides an opportunity for us all to share and foster our love of books. In class, we designed alternative front covers for our favourite books and we also had a special appearance in the form of our very own class ‘Hobbit‘!

Well done to you, Fiona!

Have a lovely March weekend!

This week we have been celebrating World Book Day, and have had an amazing time reading and learning about new books.  We have been talking about books and have told one another about our favourite books.  Here are our choices:

Teigan – “Zog is my favourite because Daddy reads it to me”

Marley – “Room on the Broom is my favourite because it has a lot of pages”

Breaghannon – “My favourite book is Paw Patrol because it has my favourite character”

Leila – “I really like Fairy tales”

Brandon – “George’s Marvellous medicine is my favourite book because it is fun to read. George puts stuff in Gran’s medicine bottle and she gets very tall, that is funny”

Regan – “My best book is Jack and the Flum-flum tree because they go on an adventure”

Millie – “My favourite book is the Magnificent Millie because people invent stuff and it is very fun”

Rio – “I like Owl Babies.  The best bit was when the baby owl said he wanted his mummy”

Max – “The Gruffalo’s Child is  a good book because I like all the Gruffalo books and I have them”

Ellie – “My favourite book is Hare and the Tortoise because the Hare thought he was fast but the Tortoise beat him”

Emily – “I like What the Ladybird heard.  I like this because all the animals tricked the thieves into the duck pond”

Cameron – “I can’t remember the name of my favourite book.  It is about a mouse that can’t fit his apple in his house”

Rory – “I like the book Owl Babies because when the wee baby owl says I want my mummy it was funny”

Jonah – “My favourite is Dumbo because he has big ears”

Leah – “I like the Princess Palace book because you can pop up bits of the book”

Keegan – “I like Jack and the flum-flum tree because the monkey stole the egg and they had to use a drum to get it back.  They also said some funny things”

Liam – “I like Star Wars”

Griffin – “The return of the Jedi is my favourite book because it has a boy with a lightsaber in it”

We have been doing lots of World Book Day activities, these are our favourite bits:

• Making Bunting with our favourite books on it (Teigan, Cameron, Rio, Ellie, Breaghannon, Keegan, Griffin)
• Hearing all the different stories that the boys and girls have brought in from home (Brandon, Regan, Rory, Leah, Jonah, Marley)
• When Mrs Mansfield and Mrs Aitken swapped classes to read to us (Leila, Max)
• Storytime at the end of the day with all the adults, choosing books was lots of fun (Millie, Emily, Liam)

This has been a very busy and exciting week for us!
Over the last few weeks, we have been learning a dance for the Dance Festival at Deans High on the 15th of March. It has been very tricky and we are putting lots of hard work into it and finally, it is beginning to come together! We will use the same dance as part of our assembly which is just a few days before the Dance Festival.
We are learning about Ancient Egyptians and the dance is Egyptian based. We have also been learning about the clothes Ancient Egyptians wore as well as the jewellery they had and wore. We have been making our own necklaces and bracelets this week, which we will hopefully wear at assembly.

In maths we have been learning about measuring in metres and half meters. We went outside to make a garden. Each group had to complete a different part of teh garden with different criteria. It was very hard because not only was it very cold but it was also very windy and our meter strips kept blowing away. We did manage to make the garden, although the snow covered it up the next day.

In writing we were learning how to write a description. We had to remember that the person reading the description could not see the picture so had to name the thing for them to imagine what the picture looked like.

At the weekend Owen entered a 5K run – here he is with his medal. Well done Owen!

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

Here at Balbardie our P4 stage are leading our learning about Red Nose Day, which this year takes place on Friday 24th March. On that day you can wear something red for our Dress Down Day and donate £1.00 to this great cause. The money raised helps to fund projects, in the UK and Africa, that have found effective ways to tackle poverty and injustice.

Order forms have been sent out for you to buy your very own Red Nose. Please complete the order form and return this along with your  £1.00 if you’d like to buy one. Pupils who have ordered so far have enjoyed opening the shiny wrapper to reveal which of the different designs is inside.

Our P4 pupils are awaiting the arrival of their fundraising pack and will update us soon with how we can get involved in supporting Red Nose Day. Check here for more details soon!

Last week was such a short week, but we got lots of topic work done!
We learned about Hieroglyphs – Ancient Egyptian writing. We found out that the Rosetta Stone helped to decipher the Hieroglyphs and with that knowledge, we were able to write our names, different fruits and even secret messages using Hieroglyphs. Ancient Egyptians did not use pens or pencils like we do, so we also practised writing using Bamboo pens and ink. It was great fun!
Here are some pictures.

We also learned that Ancient Egyptian Kings and Queens wrote their names in a cartouche to show their importance. And, because we are all important, we made our own cartouches! They are not quite ready yet – pictures to follow when they are ready!