It has been a really busy term and we have learnt a lot of new things. Here are some of our highlights:
Jackie – I liked crossing the 100s barrier in maths
Rory – I enjoyed doing tiling with shapes.
Kyle – learning about fossils.
Alfie B – I enjoyed the panto.
Olivia – I enjoyed Rookie Rockstars and the panto
Ruby – I liked Rookie Rockstars
Bryce – I liked the panto.
Max – I enjoyed learning about different kinds of rocks.
Jamie – I liked the panto.
Ellie – I enjoyed the panto.
Charlotte – I enjoyed the panto and Rookie Rockstars and learning about fossils.
Annie – I enjoyed writing about our visitor, Blue.
Dylan – I liked the panto.
Alistair – I enjoyed Golden Time
Eva – I liked doing mild, spicy and hot maths challenges.
Holly – I liked the panto and Rookie Rockstars.
Brandon – I enjoyed the panto.
Owen – I liked doing tiling in maths.
Orla – I loved the panto.
Lewis – I liked doing the Christmas cards.
Liam – I liked the panto.
Shaun – I liked doing the 3d shapes.
Florence – I liked playing hockey in outdoor P.E.
Brooke – I enjoyed the panto.
Ellie-Rose – I loved the panto.
Aaron – I liked learning about soil.
Alfie L – I liked the panto because I got to go backstage and see all the characters.
We would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and happy new year. We look forward to welcoming the children back to school on Tuesday January 9th.

Snow-Learning-Primary4-1

We have had a good week this week and have been lucky to have different teachers while Mrs Little is off.  We have learned lots of new things and have enjoyed getting to know the teachers in our school a bit better.

Here are our best bits:

• Maths – We played Invisible Man with Mrs Mansfield to practise our mental maths and played games to extend our learning.  It was a lot of fun.
• Music – We were learning about music notation this week with Mrs Mansfield.  She taught us about rhythm and melody and we created our own alien songs using the rhythms we had learned.   To learn about rhythm we learned new songs and used our ears to listen carefully and repeat patterns back.
• Literacy – We learned about the story of Mr Potter’s Pigeon with Ms Davidson.  We wrote a description about the story and created picture boxes to show what happened.    We also wrote a remembrance day story.  We stepped into a picture and used our imaginations to write about being a soldier in the war.  It was tricky but we enjoyed adding lots of description to our writing.

We hope that Mrs Little gets better soon.

From

Primary 4a

Another great week!

Literacy

This week we have been learning about stretching sentences. We all had great fun! Here is an example…

Maths

This week we continue to develop our mental agility. We have been learning a new game called elimination. Gabriel has added some new rules which make the game really exciting. You have to answer a multiplication question correctly then you get to eliminate someone and after 5 eliminations you can invite someone back into the game. We love it. Oh and Gabriel is currently developing more rules to make the game even more fun and challenging.

HWB

This week we were acting out situations where people could get hurt and we had to show what we could do to keep ourselves safe.

P.E

In P.E. this week we were learning about the importance of balance. We had three stations to go to and each station had different activities. At one station we had to work with a partner and one person had do be on their hands and knees on the floor while the other person had to lay across the top of them. It was great fun!

Have a great weekend!

Another great week!

Literacy

In our VCOP lesson this week we have been learning about different types of sentences. We learned about questions and statements and the difference between them. We have been discussing why we use VCOP and we all understand that it gives us the skills necessary to do our writing.

Tamsyn- V stands for vocabulary

Luke- C stands for connectives

Brooke- O is for openers

Cameron- P is for punctuation

Maths

This week we continue to develop our mental agility. We have been learning about the link between addition and subtraction. Here is an example 5+4=9 and this is the same as 9-4=5. We can add this to the strategies that we have for doing calculations.

We have been having lots of fun using money. We used coins – 1p 2p 5p 10p 20p 50p and £1. We had to make a given amount using a certain amount of coins. It was quite tricky at first but was good fun when we got the hang of it! Here are some pictures…

HWB

This week with Mrs McKenzie we were learning about medicines. We learned about storing medicines safely at home, how they can help us and how they can be dangerous.

P.E

In P.E. this week we were learning about the different ways we can ‘travel’ when doing different sports. It’s important that we learn to travel safely especially when playing fast games that involve running or playing with a ball.

Have a great weekend!

This morning we were lucky enough to enjoy two amazing stories from a Scottish storyteller, Daniel Allison.
The first story was called ‘A close tongue keeps a safe head’. It was a story from the island of Orkney about a strange visitor who had a blue cow. He met a ferryman called Tam and asked Tam to take him to an island out east, ‘east of Stronsay’. Tam took the man and when they got there, they found the fin folk. But the man wouldn’t let the mermaids take Tam and they turned on Tam, hissing at him. He was magicked back to the island of Sandy, near to Orkney where he told many people about the fin folk that he had met but noone believed him. The second time he met the man, the man realised that Tam could see him through the magic of the fin folk and blinded him so that he would never see again! He then took Tam down to the Fin world, under the sea, where he was able to see all the fin folk and enjoy living in their land.

We really enjoyed meeting Daniel and listening to his stories.

Table of the week – announced on Friday!

This week each table in the class has prepared a paragraph about their learning. They had to work together to discover their most enjoyable or memorable moments of the week. Then they had to write a couple of sentences each to explain what they had enjoyed learning.
Red table
On Newsround there was a lot of rubbish in the ocean. I enjoyed outdoor PE. I have enjoyed doing Maths. I love Maths a lot and I am good at Maths. We have been learning about Mary, Queen of Scots.
Orange table
We have been wondering who will be special person next. We were table of the week three times and we got prizes. We did French, Science, Clocks and times and reading.
Yellow table
We have been learning about Time. We have been learning about Mary, Queen of Scots. We were counting back in 10s. We were testing materials on with magnets. In French we were learning seasons.
Green table
In PE we played ‘Don’t fall in the water’ – a team work game. In French we were learning the seasons. We did a timelime of Mary, Queen of Scots. I enjoyed the clock because I like Maths. We did lots of Maths this week, including place value.
Blue table
I’m looking forward to learning more about Mary, Queen of Scots. I liked learning with Mrs Collings. I love to learn about magnets. Time was very, very fun.
Table of the week – with 490 – the green table!

What a great week we have had preparing for our assembly. We have all been practicing very hard to learn our lines and to learn the different rhythms we had to play. The assembly allowed us to demonstrate a variety of things-

• teamwork
• playing a polyrhythm
• what we have learned about beat and rhythm
• our learning about other cultures
• children’s rights
• being part of the wider community
• speaking for an audience

Thank you for coming along!

Have a great weekend 🙂

Another great week!

Literacy

We have been learning about contractions. First we looked at the root word of contraction to help us figure out what a contraction might be. We then played a fun game with pieces of paper that expanded and contracted to help us understand. Here are some pictures of our activities…

We continue to develop our ability to use a writing planner to help us structure our writing. This week we had to make notes in our planner to help us structure a newspaper article. We also had great fun making up newspaper headlines about the death of Lord Darnley. Here are some of the ones we came up with….

Maisie- Suspicious Death of Darnley

Ellis- Darnley’s Mysterious Death

Luke- Murder or No Murder?

Cameron- Darnley’s Suspicious Death

Callum- Explosion Kills Darnley

Niamh- Darnley’s Mystery Death

Zara- Mary Queen of Scots ….Suspect!

Maths

Once again there’s been lots of hard work this week. We continue to work hard to improve our mental agility. We have been practicing our tables using an online multiplication game which makes learning fun! We have been learning to convert analogue time into digital time. Here’s a picture of the result….

HWB

Continuing on the theme of friendship from last week we made our own little friendship balloon to decorate our classroom door. We are all able to discuss what a good friend does and how a good friend makes us feel. Here is a picture of our door….

P.E

In P.E. this week we were learning about the importance of teamwork. We played the game of castles to help us learn to work together to defend our castle.

Literacy

We have been doing lots of short activities to help us identify nouns/pro nouns and verbs. Each time we practice we are getting better and better!

We continue to develop our ability to use a writing planner to help us structure our writing. This week we had to make notes in our letter writing planner then we used them to write a letter from Mary Queen of Scots to her mother. We are finding the planners really helpful.

Maths

Once again there’s been lots of hard work this week. We have been consolidating our knowledge of time and learning how to tell the time using 5 minute increments eg. 5 minutes past/to. We are beginning to get the hang of it. This week we have also been doing lots of activities to help develop our mental agility. Here are some pictures ……

HWB

This week we were focussing on friendship. We had a whole class discussion about what makes a good friend then we worked in groups to make a poster about what a good friend looks like.

P.E

In P.E. this week we were learning about the importance of playing safe. We played some games that helped us to identify when we are not being safe and then we worked together to make sure that when we are running at speed or changing direction quickly we do it in a controlled way.

What a great week!

Pupil of the week – Nathan

Table of the week – Sharpeners

We have all really settled well into P4a and we are ready for a great first term. We have been discussing how a positive mindset influences how we learn and we will all try to keep a positive attitude towards our learning.

Literacy

We have been learning about the life of Mary Queen of Scots and have used this as a focus for our writing this week. We used a writing planner to record the facts that we needed. We then used the planner to help structure a newspaper birth announcement.

Maths

We have been learning how to use loop cards to help with our recall of the times tables. We will record how long it takes us to complete the loop each time and gradually get quicker. We have all made a times table helper and are looking forward to some exciting games and activities in the coming weeks that will develop our understanding and recall of the times tables.

HWB

We are very lucky to have Mrs McKenzie to teach us in Health and Wellbeing. This week we were discussing what strengths we have and here are some of our comments ….

Ellis – I am friendly to others

Donna- I am an honest person

Brooke – I am a happy person

Ross- I am kind to others

P.E

In P.E. this week we were learning about teamwork. This is important in almost everything we do in school. We played the castles game and had to work together to stop people from knocking our castle down. We are also very excited that we now get to use the changing rooms and we are learning how to behave when we use them.

Thankyou to everyone who managed to come along to meet the teacher on Wednesday.

Have a great weekend!!

What a great start to the new school year!

We have been doing lots of little activities about getting to know each other along with  some maths and language as well. We are all finishing the week feeling great!

Katie – I liked the maths

Ross – I enjoyed making my name poster

Rory- I enjoyed writing this week

Luke – I enjoyed music

Tamsyn- I enjoyed music

Ellis- I enjoyed circle time and talking about what I did at the summer

Brooke – I enjoyed the ‘all about me’ activity

Ammie-Leigh – I liked storytime

Zara- I liked doing ‘all about me’

Callum- I enjoyed writing

Jodie- I enjoyed playing the drums

Blaire- I enjoyed creating my folder

Arran- I enjoyed making my name poster

Donna- I liked music

Ruby- I liked coming back to school

Erin- I enjoy our morning circle songs

Kai- I enjoyed the morning circle

Murray- I enjoyed the writing

Farah- I enjoyed writing about my holidays

Cameron- I enjoyed the music

Niamh- I enjoyed playing the drums

Mia- I enjoyed playing the drums

Nathan – I have had a good week back at school

We are all looking forward to the weekend! Have a good one 🙂

This week we have been learning about speech marks in Language. We are learning the rules about using speech in our stories. It’s quite tricky but we are getting there!
In PE we are learning to bowl in cricket. Keeping that bowling arm straight is quite hard. Guy, Isaac, Ela, Charlotte, Maisey, Katie and Aryan all managed to hit the stumps. No mean feat!
We are planning a class talent show with Mrs Mackenzie. We are looking forward to demonstrating our talents to our panel of judges.
In Golden time this week our stem challenge was to build a tower of cups without touching them with our hands. It was a real challenge but one that the groups all took on with great enthusiasm!

Please don’t forget to find the blog post to nominate Balbardie for the £5000 of book vouchers. We’d love such a boost to our finances for our new library!

Pupil of the week – Guy Lumsden for participating enthusiastically in our home team challenge to design a healthy town.

Table of the week – 930

Literacy

This week we have been developing our ability to use a dictionary correctly. We know there are different reasons why we might use a dictionary –

Mia – to find a word that you may not know how to spell

Euan- to find out if the word is a verb, noun or adjective

Connor- to find the definition of a word

We have had fun working with a partner to find the definition of words that Mrs Little put up on the board. First we had to find the words though and that was the tricky part!

Denholm- if I was finding the word ‘last’ I would flick through the pages of the dictionary to get to the letter L then I would search the words that begin with ‘l’ and ‘a’ the word would be quite far down the list because the third letter is an ‘s’

Maths/numeracy

We have been having a great time with our numeracy lessons! As always we have lots of opportunities to develop our numeracy skills both written and mental. This week we played games such as nine snap, Harry Potter Maths, elimination, hit the button, loop cards and Tom Thumb. Some of us were using Numicon to create number bonds and we also used the fuzzy ball darts to help with counting in 10’s.

We have also been learning about chance and probability this week.

Jason- we played ‘play your cards right’ and this is about predicting what the chances were of a number being higher or lower than the number on the board.

Alfie- if there are three green cubes and two red cubes in a bag you are more likely to pick out a green one because there are more of them

Euan – if you have 7 balls in a bag and two are orange and the rest are black you have a two in seven chance of pulling out an orange ball.

P.E.

We have been learning to play golf with Mr Jeffries.

Denholm- we were learning how to chip the ball

Kiara- we were learning about long distance and short distance putting.

Euan- I liked it when Mr Jeffries made a golf course and we got to play it

That’s all for now! Have a great weekend!

Apologies for no blog last week!

Celebrating Success

Here are the recipients of our celebrating success awards-

Suvi – Head Teachers Award

Megan- School Values Award

William- Effort and Improvement Award

Sophia- High Standard of Work Award

Kiara- P.E. Award

Maths/Numeracy

We continue to work hard developing our numeracy skills each week. We are all feeling much more confident using fractions. We can find a fraction of an amount and we also know what the term ‘equivalent fraction’ means and how to identify them.

Literacy

We have been using our knowledge of poetry to move from non rhyming verse to one that rhymes. Here are a few examples –

My Friend by Suvi

I have a friend his name is Mike

He loves to go on a mountain bike

I have a friend her name is Nancy

For prom she loves to dress up fancy

I have a friend his name is Ben

He has a very silly hen.

My Friend by Euan

I have a friend his name is Peter

He is always a big big eater

I have a friend her name is Jane

She always is a great big pain

I have a friend her name is Lily

She runs around looking silly.

That’s all for now, have a great weekend in the sun!

In Maths with Mrs Mackenzie we are learning about Fractions. We have looked at wholes, halves, thirds, quarters, fifth, sixths, sevenths, eighths, ninths and tenths. We played a game where we had to fill a wall with different fractions of bricks.
I found out that the number on the bottom of the fraction is called the denominator. This is how many pieces you need to make a whole with that fraction. So if it is ¼ we need 4 pieces to make a whole – Aryan.
In indoor PE we were doing hockey and we did races with the ball concentrating on keeping control of the ball. In outdoor PE we started learning some cricket skills.
In learning across the curriculum we are looking at climate change and different types of weather. We wrote similes about the weather which we then wrote into a poem. Here are some of our favourites
Jaime-Lee – the storm is like Thor striking his hammer
Elliot – the storm is like a dragon’s winging soaring in the sky
Luke – The hail is like me having snowball fight with God
Ela – The mist is like a dragon’s breath
Hope – the fog is like a ghost coming to get you
Louie – the clouds were like paintings in the sky
Rose – the storm is like my Dad shouting
Isaac – the wind is like a strong man lifting weights
Jason – the rain is like clouds crying
Ben –the rain is like a waterfall in the sky
Dani – the fog is like the steam from a fire, covering the land.
Guy – the storm was like God in anger
In STEM at Golden time, the group made helicopters. We investigated what happens when you make them bigger or smaller, what happens when the wings are made shorter or folded a different way. It was great fun testing them in the stairwell!

Pupil of the week – Maisey for sharing and comparing strategies so well during our number talks.

Table of the week – with 960 points

Outside achievements – Jaime-Lee gained a distinction in her Jazz exam.
Elliot passed his accreditation 3 at the velodrome and he is now on the last level of development.

Article 28 – the right to an education

This week we have enjoyed being back and sharing our stories about our Easter adventures.

Language

We have started learning about different types of poetry. We will share some of our poems with you over the next few weeks. This week we have been looking at poems that do not rhyme and we all agree that this was a little trickier than we thought it would be. The title of our poem was ‘In My Box’ here is a little sample written by Suvi (we will post a completed one next week).

In my box I would put…

The touch of my dog’s fur

The smile of my mum

My dad’s tickles

In my box I would put…

A hug from my mum

My dream of an Olympic swimmer

And an Icelandic whale swimming in the ocean

Maths

We have started learning about fractions and by the time we are finished some of us will have made links between fractions, decimals and percentages while others will be able to identify equivalent fractions. This week we began with building fraction walls –

LATC

Our topic for this term is weather and climate. This week we discussed the weather in Scotland and how our climate determines the agriculture and lifestyle we have.

Suvi – I am looking forward to learning about the climate of different countries

Sophia – I am looking forward to learning about what life is like living in the tropics

Alex – I am looking forward to learning about life in the polar region

The weeks never get any less busy! In Health and Wellbeing this week we acted out situations where we were being annoyed by someone. We had to act out how we would deal with these situations. We learnt to get more confident in dealing with these sorts of problems. The first response is to speak politely for the person to stop whatever they are doing. The second is to repeat yourself more firmly. Finally, if the person continues to annoy us, we give them a ‘last chance warning’ which if they ignore, means that we will tell the teacher.
We have been enjoying our music workshops with NYCoS and are looking forward to them continuing next term for a brief while.
We have also been making Viking games this week. We have devised a number of different games which we are looking forward to playing next week when the rules and pieces are all finalised.
We learnt about Up Helly Aa in our Viking topic. Up Helly Aa is a fire festival held in Shetland on the last Tuesday in January. Squads of men dressed as Vikings march around the streets singing songs. In the evening, a big Viking Galley which has been built on the pier in Lerwick is burnt with the fire from 1000 torches which are thrown into it. After the burning, there are parties and celebrations which go on until the morning. The following day is a day off from school and work to recover! Maisey’s Dad is going to be in one of the squads in the future because his friend will be Guizer Jarl, the chief Viking.
This video was made during this year’s festival

This week the children are bringing home their review jotters. Please ensure that these are returned by Wednesday 29th March.
The Primary 4s have been running a competition to see which class can save the most pennies in their Snuffles box. We look forward to sharing the totals with you!
Pupil of the week – Emily for being a good team players in the benchball festival.

Table of the week – with 740 points

Article 28 – the right to an education

Writing

This week we have been writing about what it was like going to settle in a new country with our Viking family. We can all see how well our writing has come on in P4. We are including adjectives, varying sentence openers, using wow words and similies more often!

Maths

In maths this week we have been learning about angle. We made an angle finder which we then used to find right angles around the classroom. Some of us were learning about different types of angles-

Suvi –an acute angle is smaller than a right angle

Sophia- an obtuse angle is bigger than a right angle

Murray- a reflex angle is bigger than a right angle

Ranna- a right angle is 90 degrees

Science

We have been learning about parts of plants and what they need to grow. We planted cress seeds and watched them grow. The seeds that had no light or water didn’t grow.

Have a great weekend!