Today we went to Bathgate Academy for our first transition day.  When we arrived, Mr Connelly (head of Newlands House) gave us a summary of what to expect at high school.  For example, if you have a sibling you will probably be in the same house as them, there are approximately 90 members of teaching staff, periods are 50 minutes long and you can get up to 17 teacher a week!

Afterwards, we split into groups and participated in a treasure hunt around the school.  This showed us about the school and some of the things we might do in S1.  An example treasure hunt question was: what is the school motto?  We then had to go to the office to find this information.  We counted up the scores at the end of the hunt and Jack, Reiss, James and Rebecca answered the most questions correctly.

Lastly we went out for break in the quad.  We saw some familiar faces- siblings and former Balbardie pupils!  The playground is quite big!

We are now more excited to attend high school, meet new people and annoy our siblings!

P7b

We were so busy with Christmas show rehearsals and church service song practice we forgot to blog! Sorry!

We have been working hard to learn our words and the songs for the Christmas show and we are really excited about performing it next week.

The 1st December was the start of the Christian festival, Advent and we learned all about the meaning of Advent and why some people open Advent calendars (and some eat chocolate)! It’s not just to help count down the days until Santa comes!

Our tricky words last week were go and no.  We have started learning vowel diagraphs, ee for sheep and oo for food.  We continue to work on knowing money to £1 and adding to 5/10/20!

In LAC we were learning about forces and completed a fun activity with our buddies, pushing cars and guessing how far they would travel!

On Friday we spent time looking at our targets in our review jotters and looking at the progress we are making this term in Literacy, Numeracy and H&WB.

It is another busy week this week in P1 as the learning and Christmas madness continues…. next Wednesday is Christmas show, party and lunch!!!

Have a great week!

In maths we have been learning about financial education.  Last week we explored the benefits and risks of using bank cards.  For example, using a bank card is a quicker way to buy a product, however, contactless on a bank card can be risky if you loose it.   This week we looked at the differences between bank cards and credit cards.  A bank card is your own money from your account, whereas a credit card is like a loan and borrowed money.  This means that you have to pay back interest.  We designed our own bank and credit cards and on the back we recorded our learning so far.

In class we have been learning about the one child policy in China, which was introduced in 1979 by Den Xiapping.  We learned about the advantages and disadvantages of this.  This was introduced because of the rising population in China.  Something had to be done, due to the lack of food, housing and resources.  Here are some pros and cons:

Pros- ‘It is now the two child policy.’- Aaron

‘China makes up 20% of the population but only 7% of farmland.  The one child policy helps to ensure there is enough food.’- Viggo

‘You get better benefits/awards if you stick to the one child policy. For example, if you get a loan, you don’t pay any interest’- Reiss

Cons- There is now a gender imbalance, with between 32-36 million more boys than girls. – Aaron

‘If you have one child, you can get really spoiled.’- Callum D

‘Some kids are getting abandoned- especially girls.’- Lucy

This week’s guest editors are children from the Green Table.
Ben – I like PE because we do creative stuff.
Lucy- I liked outdoor PE.
Camaron – I love playing.
Katie- I liked outdoor PE because we were practising throwing and catching.
Isaac- I like outdoor P.E.
Louie- I like doing shapes
Hope-I liked doing maths
Emma- I liked doing the Christmas story.
Emily – I like outdoor P.E.
Maisey- I liked doing the Christmas story.
And from Mrs Collings
The children’s thoughts…..
Hayley – I’ve learned about flight, balance and control.
Jaime-Lee – I learnt about St Andrew and what he did.
Skye – I liked indoor P.E.
Dani – I liked doing the St Andrew’s story.
Rose – I liked doing the Christmas story because we made it with Lego.

It’s been a busy week again with a lot of different activities in the run up to Christmas. We started thinking about the Christmas Story and drew or made our own pictures/ models to show a different part of it.

This children have really enjoyed doing hama bead pictures in golden time. These are some of their efforts from today.I think they are pretty awesome!

We would like to thank all the parents and children who came to the fair and helped or played on the games on the stall. We hope you all enjoyed it.

We are very much looking forward to sharing our Christmas party with 4A on Wednesday. Don’t forget to bring your party clothes to change into!

Table of the week – yellow table with 960 points (apologies for putting the wrong colour up on friday!)

Pupil of the week – Camaron for making good progress with big number, little number work

Article 28 – the right to an education.

Our learning this week:

Tobin i have learnt how to write a news report on the Caribbean island

kamron i have got my first saxophone lesson

harry i have learnt not to be scared of the camera when filming our news report

Mark i enjoyed learning about the Caribbean

Emma i enjoyed learning keys in clarinet

Aidan i learned to work with new people

Skye i learned to draw beauty and the beast when designing the school float.

Archie I enjoyed watching the balbardie factor ellis boyle and annie and olivia won well done to them !!!!!

Dasha -i engoyed pe. We got our reward for following instructions.

In writing this week we have been writing about The Magic Christmas Tree.  Miss McDougall has a tree up in her classroom and she thinks the tree comes alive when the children are away from school! Magic adventures! We had some lovely writing about what the trees looked like and had some fantastic describing words.

This week in maths we have been learning about data handling and making bar charts.  We found this to be good fun!

Well done to Hollie for participating in the school talent show and a big well done to Ellis who won for P1-3.

Thank you to all the P2 helpers who helped out at the P2 stall, we had a great time and sold out of hot chocolate reindeers and Santa lists.

Achievements this week:

Well done to Daniel and Jude for raising money for the READATHON challenge! Daniel has raised £40…a brilliant achievement for helping sick children in the UK 🙂

Daniel has got his black stripe in Tae Kwon Do

Elena learned how to whistle

Teigan earned a ballet achievement

Emily has an orange cap in swimming

Pupil of the week-Emma

We have had a lovely week with lots of fun learning going on. We started making papier mache Caribbean Islands and what a fabulous mess we made!  At one point we couldn’t see our carpet for the newspaper on the floor! We loved putting our hands in the gloop and making our islands smooth.  Once the balloons have dried out we are going to pop and cut them then we can start creating our dream island.

We have also been busy with our assembly which is all about Christmas traditions. We have some amazing facts to share and some good old singing too.  Our Assembly is on the 9th December at 9.15 and is the hottest Christmas show in town! Everyone is welcome and you can even have a wee cuppa after it with us.

Writing

This week we completed part three of our Alien adventure. We were able to compare the three pats and see how we have improved over the past few weeks. We are now more confident using writing planners and sentence stretchers to make our writing more interesting for the reader. We are definitely becoming more confident using adjectives and adverbs in our writing.

Maths

This week we have been revising what we know about division. It quickly became clear we had forgotten quite a bit and we are really beginning to understand what Mrs Little means when she says we need to learn to take our learning with us as we begin to make links between skills and concepts. We have been learning about the link between multiplication and division before we move on next week to setting out division sums.

Ranna – doing the multiplication and division was very challenging but fun

Kiara – division is just like times tables

Denholm – we were writing the times tables and doing the division opposite

Music

Following on from last week we learned about timing and pace. We used glockenspiel and sleigh bell instruments to play along with the song that we have been learning. We are finding it challenging as this requires good hand eye co-ordination whilst learning to play by ear before we progress to reading basic notation.

Suvi – I liked the activity where we listened to Blame it on the Boggie and we compared it to the song we learned last week

Teighan – I found it difficult to play the glockenspiel and not look at the screen for the notes

Have a great weekend!

Hi,

We have had lots of exciting moments this week in P2/1, especially with the start of December!!  Here are our most exciting learning moments:

Emily – “Learning how to set up the Christmas tree in the Cosy Corner”

Liam – “Playing a new phonic game, the Invisible Man”

Rio – “I liked outdoor learning this week”

Cameron – “Outdoor learning because we got to do adding sums in a game”

Brandon – “Outdoor learning was fun because we played ‘Shark Attack’ and the sums were the islands”

Max – “Getting to play invisible man”

Ellie – “I liked Buddy time because we made backgrounds for our P1 show”

Poppy – “Learning how to fold and make a paper snowflake”

Regan – “Playing invisible man”

Leah – “The snowflakes were fun to make”

Jonah – “I liked winning invisible man”

Keegan – “Decorating the Christmas tree was good fun”

Rory – “I liked outdoor learning too”

Marley – “I liked making my snowflakes for the class – it made it look Christmassy.  I liked using the ipads for adding too”

Griffin – “New phonics games and activities”

Millie – “Buddy time and snowflakes were exciting”

Teigan – “Learning about Christmas trees and talking about our next learning”

Leila – “I liked circle time because we talked about the naughty and nice list and the things the cheeky elves have done”

Breghannon – “I liked outdoor learning, it helped my sums”

From,

Primary 2/1

(A note from Mrs Mansfield – costume letters have now been issued for the P1 parents, they are due to be brought into school by Wednesday so we have time to organise these before our dress rehearsal. If there are any issues with this, please let me know!  Also – apologies for the delay in getting homework out this week…in the excitement of Being Cool in School lessons and the Show Practice on Wednesday it was overlooked!)