Congratulations to P5m who sang Circle of Life beautifully for Celebrating Success!! Well done everyone, it was not an easy song to sing!

A special mention goes to the following people who received certificates….

Lexis McGrorty – Head Teacher’s Award

Roan Laing – Demonstrating School Values

Declan Doyle – Effort and Improvement

Louise Kirk – High Standard of Work

Scott Aitchison – P5 PE award

In between song practices we learned…

Lots of stuff about the insides of plants (ovary, styles, stigma, carpel) and grew plants. Roan

I learned about pollination and fertilisation. Annie

I learned how to times and divide a decimal. Ella

I learned about money when I did my shop. Louisa

I learned the song Circle of Life. Declan

….a catchy but very annoying song that is stuck in my head now! Kiera H – would that be ‘Pollination Rocks’ Kiera?

I have learned how to sing!! Well done Cameron M!

I learned how to multiply a decimal by a single digit and I learned about pollination and fertilisation. Casey

I learned how to play Brass Profundo in Double Base. Louise

I learned about Pollination, fertilisation and germination. Zoe

I learned how to describe a species. Ella

Just for Kiera, here’s the link to Pollination Rocks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5yya4elRLw

Have a great weekend!

Article 29 – Your education should help you use and develop your talents and abilities.

This week we had a visit from West Lothian Drug and Alcohol Service to talk to us about tobacco and smoking.

Ellie: “I learned that there are between four and five thousand different chemicals in each cigarette, one of which is tar.”

Jay: “I learned that smoking affects the whole body. For example, it affects your teeth by making them turn yellow.”

Jack: “It can make you really unhealthy because it makes you unfit and you can’t run very far.”

Lauren U: “It can give you lung cancer because all the tar builds up in your lungs and there is less oxygen.”

Callum: “It can affect your hair and make it fall out or turn yellow.”

Declan: “It can make you more likely to have a heart attack because it is harder for the blood to move around your arteries.”

Jay: “It can affect your veins and skin by making them turn black or darker.”

Antonia: “It increases your chances of dying quicker than you would normally. If someone stopped smoking they could add ten years to their life.”

Lauren C: “It increases your chances of having a stroke which is when a part of your brain stops working and it can cause serious damage.”

Paul: “Another effect is that it can affect your mental health and make you stressed.”

Chloe: “It increases the risk of you going blind or deaf as well.”

Finlay: “We worked out that someone who smokes 20 cigarettes a day spends about £2500 a year on cigarettes!”

Jay: “We learned also that nicotine is the part of the cigarette which make sit addictive.”

We also researched and discussed the death penalty this week and we wrote discursive essays on them.

Taylor: “The death penalty is when someone goes to court and they are given the punishment of being put to death. It is usually for the crime of murder.”

Adam: “Over the years types of capital punishment have been hanging, beheading, lethal injection and the electric chair plus a few others.”

Flyn: “I learned that in America a boy under the age of 18 was given the death penalty. I’m not sure what the crime was but my opinion would depend upon what he did.”

Jay: “I learned that in some countries you can get the death penalty for small things like reading the bible or for looking at things you shouldn’t on the internet. I think that is very sad because there might be Christians who live in that country who can’t read their bible.”

Lauren U: “I learned that 1 in 25 people who are given the death penalty in America are actually innocent. That makes me feel sad because those people didn’t do anything wrong and can’t just be brought back to life.”

Declan: “I learned that in China they don’t tell other countries how many people they have given the death penalty to but it is estimated at over 2000 a year. I think that is shocking because it is a lot of people.”

Olivia: “I learned that a man got the death penalty for being gay in Russia. I think that was unfair because it isn’t his fault.”

Paul: “I learned that in Saudi Arabia sometimes people end up getting the death penalty because they don’t speak the language and can’t defend themselves.”

Nathan: “I learned that there are 32 countries which still have the death penalty 130 that used to have it which don’t anymore.”

Harry: “I learned that in America 32 of the 50 states still have the death penalty.”

Who has impressed?

Flyn: “Lauren Kirk impressed me by standing in and doing William’s lines during our assembly.”

Antonia: “Olivia impressed me because even though she doesn’t like singing she sung her best at the assembly.”

Chloe: “I’m impressed with everyone in the class for doing so well in the assembly.”

Lauren U: “I’m impressed by Summer in p2m for getting two certificates at the assembly this morning.”

Ellie: “The whole class impressed me by doing amazingly with our assembly this morning.”

Paul: “I’m impressed with the class and the lyrics we made up for Don’t Stop Believing.”

Lauren K: “I’m impressed with Emily because she finished in the top 5 for Young Writer of the Year out of 8500 pupils.”

Flyn: “I am impressed with myself, Callum, Finlay and Paul for getting onto step 5 this week.”

Mr Berginis: “I am very proud of the class for performing so well in their last ever assembly at Balbardie. I really hope they remember the message of the assembly and that they never stop believing in themselves because I never will stop believing in them.”

This week has been a busy week in P2M.  We had our Celebrating Success Assembly yesterday and we sang our song ‘I’m a Miracle’.  Well done to our 4 certificate people Louie, Jaime-Lee, Ailah and Dani. Miss McDougall is proud of her whole class 🙂

In drama this week we learned how to use a sword and a shield and we played a dragon footstep game and made a maths dragon.

In P.E. we have been learning how to use a basketball correctly and practising how to bounce a ball correctly.

Achievements this week

Pupil of the week & Rights Respecting Schools certificates-Summer

Guy-In running club Guy was first in the race

Jay-In Karate Jay moved onto level 9

Lucy-At Rainbows Lucy got her Roundabout Healthy badge

Ailah learned how to do a split jump

Isaac got his red stripe on yellow belt in Tae Kwon Do

Jaime-Lee learned to do the splits

We are very excited because our class assembly words were handed out this week-We will be busy practising them next week and look forward to seeing you on Friday 22nd May at 9.20am 🙂

This week in maths we had to use our group working skills.  Miss Holwill set us a challenge, we had to work together to solve  a problem.  We learned that there are different ways to solve a problem in maths and we thought that drawing a picture would help us this week.

Our problem was….How many different ways can you sort a deck of cards?  These were our ideas;

How would you of sorted them?

We have a had a busy. short week back to school. We have been learning about how crops grow on farms. We watched the story of the Little Red Hen. We looked at how farmers collect wheat to make bread and the different machines they use. We had a challenge to design our own farm machine and explain what job it would do on a farm and why it is useful. Miss Elliot then decided if she would buy it from us for her farm. Some of the designs were very interesting. Some ideas very original. Keira designed a machine which would go around the farm and feed the animals for the farmer. It would know what types of food to give all the different animals. We also learned how to make the bread as we were interested in what happened to the wheat once it had been turned into flour. We followed the recipe and used our weighing and measuring skills to get the measurements correct. We had great fun, but got very messy!

We have been busy practising our song for Celebrating Success. We are really looking forward to performing it next week. Hope to see you all there at 11.30am on Thursday 14th May.

Article 24: Right to healthy and nutritious food.

Awards:

Class Dojo: Ellis and Dadirayi

MVP: Dadirayi

Lots of learning this week – here’s what we thought:

Jamie – I liked writing our Dragon stories – we had to use lots of ambitious vocabulary and remember all our VCOP skills as well!

Emma – My self-portrait was fun.  I learned how to draw a face in proportion and I think it looked quite like me.

Josh – The display wall will look cool with all our self portraits on it.

Lucy – I liked using the formula when working out the volume of a cuboid. It looked really  hard but once it was explained it was really quite easy!

We have also been practicing our song for our Celebrating Success performance – and even though we say so ourselves we are looking good!

This week we took a back to front approach to maths. On Thursday we looked at the ‘bigger picture’ and how one thing relates to another. We did this with angles, degrees, fractions, decimals and percentages. The reason we did this was to know a bit about inter-relatedness of these concepts before we visit each one discretely. What a great morning we had! Here are some of our comments …

Zoe – I now know there are four angles obtuse, right angle, reflex and acute.

Emma – I now know that two quarters is the same as 50%

Jamie – I learned that one quarter is the same as 25% and as a decimal this is 0.25

We had a rugby taster session this week and were glad that it went ahead even though it was raining. We live in Scotland so we know that much of what we do in life will be done in the rain!! Here are some of our comments….

Polina – I really enjoyed the sharks and fishes game.

James – we had to run around dodging people and we are all getting very good at this.

Ryan – the tag rugby game was a really fun way to learn about dodging people when running around. Next time we will be using a rugby ball instead of the tags.

In our topic we are continuing to learn about the various creation stories. This week we learned about one version of the Chinese creation story.

Iona – The Christian and Chinese creation stories are similar because they both began with the creation of light.

We have been reminding ourselves this week about how we learn and that a positive attitude will help us to achieve success both in and out of the classroom. We know that being on time, coming prepared for school with pencils, pe kit etc is a very small part of preparing ourselves to learn. We are adopting a ‘can do’ attitude and already we can see results!

Have a good weekend!