December 2019 – Page 2 – Deans Primary School Blog

What’s on this week…

Week beginning 16^th December 2019

Mon –

Breakfast club fitness fun – p4-7

Lunchtime Multi-sports club

11am Choir visit St Leonard Cheshire

P5-7 Christmas Treat Afternoon

Tue-

9-10.30am Community Café

P3, P3/4 and P4 Christmas Party PM

6-7pm Community Christmas Carol Sing-along

Wed-

Dad’s drop in session meet in Hub

Scripture Union lunch club

Thu-

8.55-10am Parent Helpers Tea

10am Nursery Christmas Party

Move to the Beat workshops P5 and P5/6

P1, P1/2 and P2 Christmas Party PM

2pm Nursery Christmas Party

Fri-

LAST DAY OF TERM!!

HAVE A FANTASTIC CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR!!

SCHOOL PUPILS RETURN ON TUESDAY 7^TH JANUARY

Christmas arrives in Deans Den!!

We have been feeling joyful in Deans Den and have made a start at making our room look and feel festive. The boys and girls made decorations and helped Mrs Morrison decorate the tree. Well done boys and girls, Deans Den is looking FAB-U-LOUS!!!

Mrs Morrison is proud of all the boys and girls for their excellent performances in the infant Nativity. You were all superstars, well done!!

Feeling Festive in Primary 2/1.

It has been a busy week in Primary 2/1 and we are now in full festive mode. We decorated our classroom with Christmas trees, tinsel and fairy lights and we have even been enjoying having a ‘real’ fire crackling on our smart board whilst we work.

On Tuesday we had our Christmas jumper day and our Christmas dinner, it was very yummy!

Despite all the festivities we have still been working hard in the classroom. We have been learning all about the sound ‘e’ and are making great progress using the vowels we know to help us build and write new words. We have been writing more silly sentences using tricky words and the sounds we know to blend together and create CVC words. We also had a go at some functional writing and created some wonderful invitations to our Nativity performance.

In numeracy we are continuing to develop our skills using number bonds for 10, we are enjoying using games on the smart board to help us and practising using concrete materials to help us. We are still practising our mental maths skills every day with our ‘Daily Five’, we are coming up with lots of strategies to help us such as, counting on, using our fingers or using a ten frame.

In Health and Wellbeing we are continuing to develop our focus on Celebrating Differences. This week we have been investigating the qualities which make a good friend. We have been working alongside Primary 1 where we came together to watch the story of ‘The Rainbow Fish’, this helped us to think about what makes a good friend and what doesn’t!

We designed a Friendship Token which displayed a quality which we would like in one of our friends. We had lots of lovely ideas which reflected our class charter and school values and we were able to share our thoughts confidently with the group.

This week we have also been having a big think about our learning environment. We spend so much time in our classroom everyday and it is important that we all have a say in how we would like it to look and what resources we have to help us learn. We talked about all the things we like about our room and all the things we don’t. We then made a list of what we would like changed or included. The main items to come from this discussion was the inclusion of a ‘computer den’ and to improve our class library, making it more colourful. Here are some of our detailed designs. What this space to see what happens to our classroom in the New Year………

To round off the week we finally got to perform our Nativity ‘It’s a Baby’ to all of our friends and family. We have been working very hard over the last few weeks to perfect the actions and words to our songs. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and hope all the audience did too! We would like to thank everybody who attended for their valued support.

We are looking forward to another festive week before we break up for the holidays. Please remember our class party will be held on Thursday afternoon, get those party clothes at the ready!!

Latest News From Primary One

It is definitely beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Primary One! We have a new Christmas tree, lights and decorations.

On Tuesday it was Christmas jumper day as well as Christmas lunch. Very, very exciting!

Nativity has been a big focus this week. The children have had a “photo shoot” (individual pictures available to order after Nativity performances) a dress rehearsal in front of the whole school and our first big performance today. I am very proud of each and everyone of them. It can be a bit daunting being on stage, but I must say they have taken it in their stride. If you have managed to come along I hope you enjoyed it and it put you in the festive mood.

Literacy

Continuing on the nativity theme, we wrote invitations asking friends and family to join us for our very special performances. A few examples below.

Health and Wellbeing

For the past few weeks we have been looking at how we celebrate differences, bullying (what it is etc.) as well as what to do if you are being bullied. This week we focused on friendship, specifically what makes a good friend. We made a mind map to illustrate our ideas.

Once we had brainstormed we created friendship tokens that we would give when we saw someone being a good friend. We were also able to describe how we feel when someone is kind to us. A few examples below.

Numeracy

We are continuing to work on our number bonds to 10. Our challenge this week was to create a jigsaw displaying number friends to 10. The children worked in small groups of 4/5, they had to communicate with each other effectively (listening and talking at appropriate times) as well as taking on different roles e.g. cutting, sorting, gluing etc. The skills we are beginning to develop are essential for future employability. Developing the Young Workforce is a phase you will become more familiar with as your child progresses through school.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend and the elves are not too naughty! (I’ve been hearing all about them at check-in time).

An exciting week for P2!

This week we have been so very excited. We finally got to perform our Nativity in front of our friends and family after spending the last few weeks rehearsing. We did such a great job in all 3 performances and we are very proud of ourselves.

Some of us have been working on our teamwork and collaboration skills this week. The group were tasked to construct a mini world out of wooden blocks and make sure that it was stable enough that it didn’t fall. Look how well they did!

On Tuesday, some of us wore our Christmas jumpers to school. We enjoyed a special Christmas lunch together whilst listening to some great Christmas songs. We all had a wonderful lunch in our jumpers!

We have also started our solo talks in front of the class. Everyone has been asked to prepare a short talk about winter and deliver this to us so that we can keep working on our listening and talking skills. The first few presenters have done a wonderful job and Miss Borsbey is loving learning all about everyone’s favourite and least favourite parts of winter.

Everyone is very excited on the run up to Christmas Day. On Tuesday, we had some fun after break time and did the Crazy Santa Dance! We were all exhausted after it and there were lots of red faces. It was so much fun!

One of our classmates asked for an extra super hard challenge in numeracy on Wednesday. He was given the challenge of seeing how many number bonds to 10 he could get correct in 60 seconds. Look how amazing his score was! There was definitely some celebratory dancing at the end of the challenge!

This week, Jigsaw Jo was helping us problem solve in different bullying situations. She gave us some scenarios and we collaborated in teams to act out the scenario and think about how we could make the situation better. We definitely have some young actors and actresses amongst us!

During art, we used paper plates to make our very own Holly Wreaths. First, we had to paint them and wait for them to dry. Once dry, we had to plan out where to put our decorations. We chose different sized and coloured pom poms to put on our Wreaths and finished them off with a lovely bow.

We would like to thank everyone again for coming to see our Nativity this week. We have had so much fun rehearsing it and had a brilliant time performing for everyone. Miss Borsbey couldn’t be more proud of everyone who took part!

P5 Enjoy Christmas Lunch

Christmas Lunch and Christmas Jumper Day

We enjoyed our special meal on Tuesday!

HO HO HO!!!!

Some of us helped with our new Christmas Tree!

Maths

This week we learnt how to visualise 3d shapes from 2d drawings and built 3d shapes using nets.

Numeracy

We have continued to practise our multiplication skills and reinforced how to multiply numbers by 10, 100 and 1000.

Lewis – I enjoyed doing this.

Eva – I learnt that the x9 table has lots of patterns.

Nakeal – We used our skills to multiply a single digit by a 2 digit multiple of 10.

Number Talks

During these sessions we have reinforced our subtraction skills. We have discussed various strategies such as counting on, partitioning and adjusting numbers to make them more ‘friendly.’

Literacy

We have now finished our group reading novels and are ready to move onto another book.

On Thursday we practised our letter writing skills. Some of us wrote to Santa Claus; others chose a Naughty Elf and some chose a famous person.

Topic

We combined our numeracy skills with our topic this week when we practised adding up various euro notes and coins.

Science

We continued learning about our senses and this week watched a video about the inner ear. Here is a model of the eye.

Art

The magic pictures we created were very colourful. Using a scratch tool we revealed colours underneath the blackness and made various impressive designs.

Restondene

Last week during Participation Friday Mrs Wood came to visit to discuss recipes we could make for the residents at Restondene.

This week we used the laptops in groups and using our COLLABORATION and COMMUNICATION skills used online shopping sites to calculate how much the cost of the various ingredients would be for the different recipes.

We couldn’t believe how expensive butter was!

Classroom Environment

We discussed how to improve the class and one suggestion by Lewis was to change the display in the library to make it more inviting. So everyone thought about what was their favourite book and either designed a book cover or completed a book review. Here are two ready to display:

Lewis – I enjoyed writing the book review. The scaffolding frame we used was helpful.

Health

As part of our ‘Celebrating Difference’ Jigsaw unit we continued to learn about bullying and strategies for dealing with bullying. This week we learnt about the difference between direct and indirect bullying.

Craft

We practised our cutting and sticking skills and made a Christmas card using various materials.

P6/7

Our class have been thinking about ideas they would propose if they were prime minister. There were some really valuable and interesting suggestions such as, possible solutions for global warming, strategies for reducing homelessness and living in more environmentally friendly ways.

On Tuesday lots of people wore their Christmas jumpers to school and greatly enjoyed having their Christmas lunch together. The class is getting more and more excited as the holidays draw near! Many members of our class have been taking on extra responsibilities either in the choir, leadership team or as a narrator in the infant’s nativity.

In literacy we completed a piece of information writing about school life in Japan. We used the internet and topic books to research relevant information and take notes. We worked on using appropriate titles, subtitles and topic vocabulary.

The class are looking forward to their pizza and movie afternoon next week.

Writing fun!

As part of our ongoing Literacy Development with school, we are trialing a resource called “PM Writing” which focuses mainly on Non- Fiction writing. We have already been learning about Persuasive Writing, Recounts, Procedures and now we are learning about how to structure a Descriptive piece of writing.

This week our challenge was to create a character and describe how they look, act,their personality and any special talents or skills they have. We looked at our Elf names to start us off and created the characters from there. There was much hilarity as children identified their names and discussed their ideas with partners before beginning the writing process!!

Elves created showed great imagination and creativity on the part of the children. We had elves who helped Santa fit down the chimneys, elves who had glittery moustaches and even an elf who had very good dress sense and only wore Gucci !

If children had completed their writing they had the opportunity to draw their characters.

We look forward to continuing this in the week ahead by writing about an adventure on Christmas Eve!

If you want to be part of the fun find your elf name above!

P6/7 visit to Howden Park Centre

On Friday morning P6/7 visited Howden Park Centre. This is part of our ongoing Developing Young Workforce and Participation Friday events – where we are linking with our Community.

We were met there by one of the artists who are exhibiting for the next year in the Exhibition space:

“Drawing on a wealth of photographs, illustrations and models, as well as historical artefacts from the museums and the archival collection of West Lothian, this exhibition explores the identity of Livingston as a thriving New Town – from its beginnings in the 1960s to today.”

We looked at photos and 3D models and discussed the planning that went into the housing areas and design to build communities in Livingston as a new town. This linked in well with our previous discussions about the 1960s as part of our School’s 50th birthday celebrations !

We then looked at the Craft cabinets on display which were showcasing local Craft businesses. We discussed their products, prices and display techniques.

We hope to incorporate some of these ideas in our own sales techniques and make use of ideas for our Spring Fayre!

P3 Learn about measuring

This week, we have decided to give our classroom a makeover. We have been learning to measure and calculate how much space there is in our library. We would really like some more seating so we are all sitting comfortably there. We would like 2 small benches. We have measured the space available, and we have found some we like, and then we checked that they would fit.

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