On Tuesday 26th the boys and girls of P7 joined all the other local schools at Craigswood Sports Centre . They participated in a sportshall athletic festival which involved 10 different activities. All children put 100% effort into all the events and had a great time.
Throughout the month the children have been practising the 6, 7, 8 and 9 times table. Each week I (Mrs Dobbie) have challenged them to a times table test. All the children did their best to beat me and on 2 out of the 4 occasions I was too good for them. In the 8 times table test I made a mistake and was beaten to the post and on the 9 times table I missed out an answer, easy done. I would like to congratulate everyone for the effort they put in.
The tables challenges will continue with an expectation for all children to improve on their previous results.
Keep practising.
The children have continued to learn how to be assertive by being a ‘positive bystander’. This is when they observe an unfair situation and choose to say or do something about it rather than watch it unfold and / or walk away.
We have been practising our songs for the Christmas Nativity. We are singing “It’s A Baby”, and we have had a practise on the stage. We will be performing for parents and friends in December.  (Roman, Ryley & Erin)
We have been learning to recognise the ‘igh’ ‘ue’ and ‘ch’ words. We have been playing a game and we have done a crossword and a wordsearch. (Lewis)
We enjoy reading with our friends.
We have been counting forwards and backwards in 10’s and 100’s. (Summer) We have been making number grids. (Olivia)
We have been learning about values in a friend. (Maisy)
We have been learning to celebrate differences in our families. (Matthew)
NEWS!
We have just discovered that we are the class with the winning number of pegs this week! We are very excited.
It has been another busy week in Deans Den. We continue to work on our listening skills and being kind and caring to others. This week we learned more about using the golden words, such as please, thank you, pardon me, excuse me and sorry. I hope the children continue to use these words at home.
We have been working together with P1-3 children learning the songs and actions for the Nativity. It is hard work remembering all the new words, but with support and encouragement we will do it!!
We have had another extremely busy week in Primary One. The children would like to share some of their learning with you.
Literacy – Reading
In addition to daily reading the children have been carrying out a number of reading skills activities such as, unscrambling jumbled sentences from their reading books. This supports and encouraged them to read individual words, sequence sentences as well as track and count words. We have also had daily tricky word challenges to help recognize, read and write words.
As you can see from the above pictures Mark and Oliver have extended their learning in a fun way by playing word and picture dominoes.
Literacy – Writing
The children have been writing winter poems. In order to focus their thoughts and ideas about winter we decided to use our 5 senses. The children described what they would see, hear, smell, feel and taste during the winter season. A lot of work has gone into the poems and the children are very proud of them. Here are a few examples.
Health and Wellbeing
As a follow on from last week and in keeping with our school values we have been focusing on inclusion and how to recognize when someone is being excluded through bullying. We looked at pictures of children and decided you can’t tell a bully by the way they look, you can only tell by their unkind actions. Children can find the term bullying a difficult concept to understand so we decide that there are 3 key features-
It doesn’t happen once: it goes on over time and happens again and again.
It is deliberate: hurting someone on purpose, not accidentally.
It is unfair: the person doing the bullying is stronger, bigger or there are more that one of them.
The most important message is to tell an adult, no one should ever feel excluded! The children made posters to demonstrate their understanding.
Numeracy
We have been working on adding numbers within 10. This weeks challenge was slightly different, the children had the answer (1-10 written on a large sheet of paper)Â and had to work collaboratively to place the addition sum(e.g. 4+5)Â next to the correct answer. There was lots of super discussion and competition to finish first!
I hope you all have a lovely weekend and if you can make it to our Book Bug event tomorrow (29/11/21) at 11.50am it would be great to see you.
Health
This week we learnt that racism was unacceptable. In order to raise awareness of racism we made ribbons.
Literacy
Reading – Metalinguistics
We used various strategies to work out the meaning of tricky words in our group reading books.
Writing
We chose a character from our novels and created an informal letter in which they wrote to another character in the book.
Talking and Listening – Philosophy
We designed the following thunk to debate and discuss:
What do you prefer gaming or reading?
In groups we expressed our FEELINGS and then shared with the whole class. There were some very interesting ideas and the class was split in two – approximately half in each group.
Liam – I like gaming because the game never ends.
Monika – I like reading so I can imagine things in my head.
In the photo above we are listening to each other’s views and considering how to respond.
Maths
We revised the names and properties of common 2d shapes using mathematical language such as curved, straight, regular and parallel. In groups we used our skills of COLLABORATION to create 2d shapes using string.
We learnt about the properties of 3d shapes and then went onto use pipe cleaners to build different shapes. The pipe cleaners were the edges of the 3d shapes.
Topic – Europe
We listened to the tale of the Pied Piper which comes from the German town of Hamelin. Then in groups we acted out the story using our role-play skills. It was great fun. Afterwards we discussed who had met the agreed success criteria and given the audience a good performance.
Her are our freeze frames. Can you guess which character we were?
Josh went on a shape hunt around school and found 3d shapes that we had been learning about.
We have had another busy week in P2! We have started our nativity rehearsals on the stage and are having a lot of fun practicing our best singing voices! With a few weeks to go it is all staring to come together!
In maths this week we looked at volume and what this means. We experimented with different containers to see which would hold the most water and which holds the least. We had a great time measuring out different volumes of water and recording this in our books.
In writing, we have been looking at rhyming words. Some of us found this challenging to begin with so we split into teams and worked together to come up with rhymes for the words Mrs Anderson was writing on the board. Both Mrs Anderson and Miss Borsbey’s team scored 8 points each! On Thursday, we split into teams again and took our learning outside. We played a game which involved running to different areas of the playground if we heard a rhyming word.
Jigsaw Jo came to visit us again and this week she was helping us learn about the differences between people in our class. We spoke about things such as appearance, age, likes and dislikes. We collaborated in pairs to create our very own difference shields which we then shared with the class.
In P.E., we used our safe jumping skills in a different context – we learnt how to hurdle! We started off with small hurdles which then got bigger and bigger every round! It was really tricky by the end as the hurdles were up to some of our waists but we challenged ourselves and came up with different strategies of how to jump over them. Look how shocked Team 1 were when they saw how big the last one was!
Our cosy reading area has been updated this week. We now have books featuring winter stories, measurement and feelings.
The children all sat down last week as a class with a budget and decided on new books to fill our reading area. The majority of the class voted to buy books from the “Little People, Big Dreams” collection, which is a collection of books each focusing on the life of a historical figure/celebrity. The books tell the story of each person’s life and how they became famous, but are worded in such a way that are great for children to read. The books look wonderful in our bookshelf and we can’t wait to start reading them.
P.E
Our week started with gymnastics. This week we continued exploring the sequence of movement using our bodies and working as part of a team. In their groups they were asked to compose a routine that would include skills such as; rolls, jumps and balances while travelling around their area. They were all fantastic!
Literacy
P3/4 started creating a plan this week to help them with their creative writing. First the children focused on their main character (Vikings), there were some great imaginative ideas here. We also used our laptops to research clothing, weapons and hair styles. The children had to first draw the character after this they then began to describe the character in more detail.
Next we explored the type of setting the characters were going to be going ‘a viking’. We looked at images of some Viking villages, stormy seas and longboats to help us to develop some great adjectives for our story when we come to write it.
Health and Wellbeing
This week the children were learning about family conflict as part of our celebrating difference focus in Deans at the moment. The children discussed issues that may cause conflict, and were suggesting ways in which this could be resolved. We referred to the ‘solve it together’ technique. We also made the word family with our bodies, each small group were given a letter to shape and form this. Some great examples of our collaborative learning below.
In this week P5/6 have been learning about anti-racism, inclusion, celebrating our differences and cyber-bullying. We made posters in partners about one of the themes.
We discussed what cyber-bullying is to prevent it and what we should do. We used the online resource. ”Think You Know” We tested how far we could go and how much answers we could pass.
Inclusion is one of our own school values.
