Month: December 2019

Another fantastic week in P3/4!

P.E

Our week began with some Scottish dancing in P.E. We were learning the ‘Gay Gordons’. The children picked this dance up pretty quickly. They all worked  collaboratively in their pairs and showed each other respect. It certainly got us moving, especially when we added the music.

Anton: “I enjoyed dancing with a partner”.

Anna: “Learning the dance was a fun challenge”.

Maths and Numeracy

In numeracy we were continuing with the addition of whole 3-digit numbers without carrying. Next week we will start to look at carrying numbers over using the column number strategy.

In maths we continued to use our time story book to challenge our learning. The focus this week was the time in 24hr. The children worked really hard during this session. I am sure our class could be heard cheering each time we got a right answer!

Kiera “It was very hard but we all worked together to find the correct time”.

Health and Wellbeing

This weeks focus within our celebrating difference topic was around bullying. The children were asked what they would/should do if they were to witness any signs of bullying. They were also asked to discuss the difference between bullying and falling out with a friend. As this sometimes is something that gets misunderstood. We spoke about how as a school we should always use kind words and respect one another.

Science

In science this week, P3/4 and P4 got together to learn all about viruses and how they can be spread. The children watched part of ‘operation ouch’ to gain a deeper understanding of how viruses spread and how we can avoid this happening. After, Mrs Morrison and I demonstrated what happens when we all sneeze using a balloon, some flour and a very sharp pencil. This was a really fun experiment. Lets just say my carpet wasn’t blue for long!!

Kara: “I loved it when the balloon was popped and the flour went everywhere”.

Literacy

The children learned about similes this week, they really enjoyed coming up with their own and sharing these with the class. The class will be set the challenge to begin to use these in their creative writing.

For writing this week we worked on the final part of our series of lessons. We used our work from last week to help us create our first drafts of our fantastic Viking stories. The class were able to look back at their characters that they had created and the settings that they had described to help them hook their audience. Before the lesson had ended pupils shared some of their stories and peer assessed others work.

Sophie “I really enjoyed this task, it was fun and interesting”.

Emily “I learned about similes this week, I was able to include them in my writing”.

P3/4 have worked really hard again this week! Well done everyone!

 

Feeling festive in P2!

Our classroom has turned very festive this week. Have a look at the decorations around our room!

As part of the festivities starting, we all have a pair of Christmas reading glasses. We each chose a pair from the selection and wear them when we read with our friends, when we read the class novel and when we read our reading books. Check out how cool we look!

For art this week, we each took turns to make a batch of salt dough. Once we measured out the ingredients and mixed them together, we printed our hands into the dough and have left them out to dry ready to be pained next week. Can you guess what we are going to paint on them?

We also created winter landscapes. We began by choosing colours that are appropriate to winter and then sketched out our winter scenes. Then we brought them to life using oil pastels. Once finished with the oil pastels, we learnt the technique of flicking paint off our fingers to create a snowy effect – this is harder than we first thought! We challenged ourselves not to give up and in the end we created some wonderful winter landscapes.

During health and well-being this week we have had a look at different things. Firstly, Jigsaw Jo explained to us what bullying is and how it has a big effect on people. We collaborated in small groups to come up with solutions to different bullying scenarios. Jigsaw Jo asked us to think about how people may feel when they are being bullied and how we could help someone who might be in this situation.

Secondly, we had a lesson designed by the NSPCC on how to keep our bodies safe and private. We watched a video all about Pantosaurus – a dinosaur who sings a very catchy song to help us remember the PANTS rule. We all designed our very own pair of pants and had a discussion about the importance of privacy and what to do should we feel the PANTS rule has been broken.

This week, we had a super challenging lesson involving STEM. We had to use our collaboration, communication and problem solving skills to build a boat to help take Bracho the dinosaur safely back to Dinosaur Land. We had a choice of materials and had to predict which material we thought would be best to float in water and hold the weight of Bracho. We had so much fun during this lesson and only one of our boats capsized – however there was a lot of soggy cardboard by the end!

This week was Participation Friday. As a class, we had a look at the results of our questionnaires that we sent home last month and we have decided on the products that we will be selling at the spring fayre in April. We also used our numeracy skills to work out budgets, costs, and selling prices of the products. Keep an eye out to see what we will be making!

We are all looking forward to another fabulous week in P2 next week!

Deans Den

It has been another busy week in Deans Den. Mrs Wallace visited the den on Wednesday as Mrs Morrison was working in P4. During her visit the children discussed the emotion’ scared’ and’ frightened’ and talked about what makes them feel this way.

” The dark makes me frightened sometimes” Max

Spiders and monsters make me scared” Maddison

“My Mummy helps me when I’m scared” Charli- Mae

” Mummy and Daddy help me when I’m frightened” Andrew

News From Primary One

Firstly I would like to say thank you to everyone who managed to join us last Friday for the Big Bedtime Read. The children had a fantastic morning and hopefully you have had time to read some of the books the children were given. Some of our favourite pictures below.

Literacy – Phonics

This week we have been focusing on the “ck” sound which appears at the end of words. The children have successfully blended ck with different consonant and vowel sounds to create words.

Elizabeth and some of the other children are beginning to use their knowledge of blending to create words independently. I am so proud of them!

Reading

We continue to practice reading and tricky words as often as we can. This week the red group were reading Fun at the Beach. One of the tasks was to draw themselves at the beach with their family and write a sentence about their picture. It is important that children can make a link from a story they are reading, to an event they have or may experience. Louie was extremely proud of his detailed picture and matching sentence. Well done!

Writing

This week we have been focusing on our writing targets. The targets are to use capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. As well as ensuring we meet our targets some children are challenging themselves to write 2 or 3 sentences.

We are also beginning to look more closely at how to improve our learning across all areas of the curriculum. The children are now more aware of their “Next Steps” and how to achieve them. More general information about this will be posted on the blog.

Numeracy

This weeks challenge was to firstly use their knowledge of number bonds to 10 and then to break the bonds down further e.g. 5+5 =10 – 2+3+5 also equals 10. They used numicon frames to build towers of 10 with different combinations.

Health and Wellbeing

As a continuation from last week we discussed in more detail what we should do if we are being bullied. Layla said ” we should tell a teacher or an adult” Sophie said we should say “I don’t like what your doing” Emily said we should tell them to “stop”. We drew pictures to demonstrate our understanding.

The children are very excited about our Nativity “It’s a Baby”. We are now practicing on the stage with P2 and P3. It’s all beginning to come together.  We look forward to seeing you on Thursday 12th or Friday 13th December.

Have a lovely weekend. Only 20 sleeps to the big day!!

 

 

 

 

Primary 2/1 Weekly Update.

There has been a big buzz in Primary 2/1 with the start of Advent this week, with lots of chatter about  Elf on the Shelf and Christmas decorating. We are looking forward to adding some festive cheer to our classroom next week.

This week we got all festive in our writing lessons. We wrote about what we would do if we were an ‘Elf’. The children came up with some wonderfully imaginative and naughty ideas.

Erica – I would wrap toilet roll around the toilet.

Nathaniel – I would throw things down the stairs.

Tyller – I would throw books at people.

Kayden – I would sit on top of the tree and watch everybody.

We also had a go at writing sentences all by ourselves. Mrs Stevenson put a picture of a cat in a Christmas stocking on the smartboard and our aim was to come up with a sentence which we could have a go at writing independently. We are getting really confident at using the sounds we know to help us spell words. We were all able to use /ck/ to sound out tricky words like stuck, sock and lick. We have started to use targets in our writing to help us focus on what we need to do be successful and to improve our writing. At the moment we are focusing on remembering to use a full stop, finger spaces and to use our very best handwriting.

In numeracy we have started to think about using mental strategies to help us in our number work. We have started a ‘Daily 5’ challenge on the smartboard, here we have to answer some addition calculations using our knowledge of number families within 10.

In Health and Wellbeing we are still investigating and celebrating differences. We have been enjoying starting our lessons with ‘calm me’ time, where we clear our minds and imagine we are in a calm and safe place to help us relax. Here are some of the examples of our ‘calm me’ places.

Nathaniel – At home in my cozy and warm bed.

Euan – On a beach listening to the waves crashing on the shore.

Elkie – At home stroking my guinea pigs.

We are finding that when we start off our lesson like this we are relaxed and ready to listen and learn. Elkie and Belle both described their feelings afterwards as calm and happy.

Last week we had a discussion about bullying and this week our focus was on what advice we would give someone who was being bullied. The children gave lots of sensible ideas and we finished off our lesson by drawing a detailed picture and describing 2 things we would do if we knew of someone getting bullied.

Lennon said that he would tell his friends to share the problem. Tadas said that he would say ‘Stop’ to the bully. Jordon suggested that he would say that he was going to tell an adult about what was happening. Take a look at some of our wonderful pictures.

 

 

As you can see we are getting more confident with adding important details to our work and talking about what is happening in our pictures.

For the past two weeks, we have been working on a STEM challenge. We have been reading the bible story, Noah’s Ark and discussing our favourite parts and which animals we would save if we had the chance to. Mrs Stevenson set us the challenge of designing our very own Noah’s Ark. We thought carefully about which materials we would use, especially materials which would be waterproof or not. Then we had to think about materials which may float or sink. There definitely was a lot to consider in our designs. Luckily, we had lots of junk modelling materials in our class which we could use to help us construct our arks. We spent one afternoon building our arks and choosing appropriate materials. It was pretty tricky and we had to solve quite a few design problems in the process. One problem which kept cropping up was what type of glue would work best. Thankfully in the end we were ready to make some predictions about whether our ark would float or sink and then test out our arks. Here are some of our predictions…

Here we are ready to test out our arks.

It was great fun testing out our arks, unfortunately not all of them floated. It led us onto a great discussion about what we would do differently next time to ensure our ark floated.

    

We are looking forward to next week and our Nativity performance. We hope that all of our friends and families can come and enjoy some super festive singing with us.

 

P6/7

In topic work this week we have been trying out some anime style art. Pupils worked well to grasp the techniques involved and produced some excellent results.

In maths we have started work on angles and will be moving onto compass bearings next week which will also link in with our map work on Japan.

In ICT we have been continuing work on our information leaflets and re visiting maths and spelling topics on Education City and Sumdog.

This afternoon we planned out our topic for next session.  The pupils have chosen an environmental awareness theme. As part of this we will be looking at; the impact of human activity upon different areas, renewable energy, transport around the world and the work of different environmental campaigners.

The class are looking forward to their local area visit this week. However,  we are still missing some permission slips so if these could be brought in tomorrow that would be great.

 

 

What’s on…

Week beginning 9th December 2019

Mon –

Breakfast club fitness fun – p4-7

Lunchtime Multi-sports club

P7 Attend Bubblegum and Fluff workshops at St Andrews Church

3.15-4.15pm Tae Kwon do After school club

3.15-4pm Choir After school club

 

Tue-

School Christmas Lunch

Christmas jumper day

Planet Soccer Lunchtime club

 

Wed-

11am and 2.30pm Nursery Christmas Sing along

Dad’s drop in session meet in Hub

Scripture Union lunch club#

10.15am Choir recording

3.15-4.15pm Lego Club

 

Thu-

2pm (doors open at 1.30pm) P1-3 Nativity

Move to the Beat workshops P5 and P5/6

3.15-4.15pm Lego Club

 

Fri-

9.30am ( doors open at 9am) p1-3 Nativity

P5 talk about Bullying.

Maths

This week we continued to learn about the properties of 3d shape and consolidated our learning through playing online games on the laptops.

The class went outside to hunt for 2d and 3d shapes.

Lewis – I have improved my ability to name 3d shapes.

Numeracy

During the week we have been practising our maths and numeracy skills on Sumdog and have been involved in competing against other schools.

We came 262nd out of 2184 schools.

We also learnt about negative numbers and practised placing them on scales and counting forwards and backwards using negative numbers.

Eva – I liked learning about negative numbers.

When practising our multiplication skills we have been discussing how to work out calculations using various strategies. These have included arrays, grouping and counting in regular steps.

Watching funny videos has also helped with our learning.

Nicholas – I am getting better at recalling my times tables.

Literacy

Reading

We used various strategies to improve our fluency and expression in group reading.

Writing

We completed our information fact file about Christmas in Spain and learnt about the different features that information texts have. These are fantastic!

Science

Georgie – I enjoyed the eye experiment and learning about the structure of the eye. We watched each other’s eyes and when the lights were turned down our pupils got bigger!

Health

P.E.

We were unable to use the hall on Monday and so practised our fitness and Zumba skills in the classroom. However on Wednesday we were able to practise our shooting and dribbling skills during a basketball session.

Circle Time

In circle time we discussed bullying. We learnt that name calling and spreading rumours can be just as hurtful as physical bullying. We discussed strategies in order to handle bullying.

Finally…

We talked about how to improve our classroom and playground  environment and came up with some great ideas. Watch this space!

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