January 9, 2020 – Deans Primary School Blog

Latest News From Primary One

Firstly Happy New Year to everyone, I hope you all enjoyed the holidays I know the children did, they couldn’t wait to share all their news at check in time. We thought it would be a good idea to write a thank you letter to Santa, to tell him how much we loved our new toys.

On Wednesday we had a surprise visitor, Hamish McHaggis from Coorie Doon in the Highlands . He brought some amazing books with him. We have started to read all about his Scottish Adventures. The children are loving the new scots words from the books such as “braw”, “blether” and “peely wally”(lots more words to come!)

We created the first page of our Scottish floor book which demonstrated what we already know about Scotland.

Over the next few weeks we will use Hamish’s adventures as a vehicle to learn more about important places in Scotland such as Edinburgh Castle, Loch Ness, Glamis Castle, The Falkirk Wheel and the Islands of Scotland. We will also explore Scottish food, drink, music, wildlife, tartan etc.

In Math’s we will be exploring shape and time. We began today by looking at calendars for 2020. The children plotted their birthdays and we discussed the purpose of a calendar and how to use it.

In a previous post I spoke about the importance of Developing the Young Workforce, it is an initiative which schools across West Lothian are developing. We are focusing on Social Intelligence which can be divided into 4 parts- Communication, Feeling, Collaborating and Leading. The children had some good ideas about how they would like to lead learning in our class-

Sophie would like to lead reading groups. She would do this by encouraging her peers to sound out words and point to each word as they were reading.

Louie feels confident when identifying sounds and would like to lead others by helping them use their sounds to create new words.

Jayden really enjoys art and would like to lead some art lessons by encouraging his peers to add more detail and use real life colours.

Mark would like to lead a number talk. He enjoys solving number problems and can lead and support others by explaining necessary steps that need to be taken to arrive at the answer.

I shall keep you updated on their progress.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend.

Happy New Year from Primary 2/1.

Happy New Year everybody!

It’s been a quick and busy break but we are all back to school and raring to get learning. We’ve had a hectic first week back in Primary 2/1 and have packed lots of exciting learning into our days.

One of the topics we have been having a focus on, is developing our 4 social Intelligence skills which are, leading, communicating, feeling and collaborating. These are essential skills for everyday life and will provide us with the appropriate skill base for entering the workplace, which is a little while off for us but its good to make a start early!

Primary 2/1 have become something of experts at leading number talks, so much so that we don’t even need Mrs Stevenson to help! We are able to discuss and share with the class how we see the number patterns and can confidently record our calculations using the correct symbols, all whilst talking to the class and writing on the board. We really enjoy taking on the role of the teacher and helping our friends learn. Here are some photos of us in action….

We have also started investigating the concept of time in maths this week. We explored different calendars and found out how many days in total were in each month as well as how many Monday, Tuesdays etc there were. It was tricky at first but we soon got the hang of it. We also discussed why it is helpful to have a calendar and how it can help us remember to important dates and get organised. We decorated our very own calendar to take home, not forgetting to circle the most important date of the year….our birthdays! Just so nobody forgets!!! Here are some examples of our work.

With Burn’s Night fast approaching we have decided to start a mini topic featuring a special visitor to Mrs Fleming’s on Wednesday……Hamish McHaggis. It was all very mysterious indeed. We got a note to tell us that a visitor was hiding somewhere in the class. After a frantic search we found Hamish wrapped up in a tartan scarf. He had brought a number of books with him to help us with our learning. The first book he introduced us to was called the ‘Edinburgh Adventure’. Here we saw lots of famous landmarks in our capital city, like the Edinburgh castle and the Forth Road Bridge. There was also lots of funny Scottish words which Mrs Stevenson couldn’t pronounce, so we helped her out! We are looking forward to learning lots more about our beautiful country with Hamish and his friends.

We had a big think about all the things we already know about Scotland and what we would like to learn about in the next few weeks, we enjoy planning together and having a say in what we would like to learn about.

Happy New Year from P5

Although this week has been shorter than usual we have still been busy!

Maths

Using our knowledge of angles and clockwise and anti-clockwise turns we answered questions involving using an 8 point compass.

Lewis – It was challenging.

Numeracy

We revised multiplication learning from last year and then practised a new skill : multiplying a 2 digit multiple of 10 by another 2 digit multiple of 10 or a multiple of 100.

Number Talks

Our subtraction skills were revisited and we practised using various strategies with our talking partner.

STEM – Science

We learnt about the 3 main states of matter – solids, liquids and gases. In addition we learnt how materials can change from one state to another.

In the photo below we are in role as the molecules of a solid – tightly packed together and vibrating slightly.

We then pretended that we had been warmed up and this heat energy caused more vibrations so much so that we expanded and then we moved further away from each other because we had melted into a liquid.

Then we pretended that we had even more energy and we began to vibrate even more so much that some molecules started to escape.The photo below shows this process of evaporation when a material changes from a liquid into a gas.

Keris – Learning about the 3 states was fun.

Lacey – It was fun moving around the room as a gas.

Health

As we have started a new year we thought about our future dreams and wrote these ideas onto little fluffy clouds which we have displayed in the classroom.

Bella – I want to become a fashion designer and a famous singer.

Chloe – I want to be a Hearts player or a contortionist.

Lewis – I want to be a professional footballer and in my spare time I would like to practise Mindfulness.

During this Health session we were practising the social intelligence skills of COMMUNICATING and FEELING. We have COLLABORATED to create ‘Our Sky of Dreams and Goals.’

P.E.

We continued to improve our basketball skills.

Art

We are reading Dino Egg by Charlie James and designed our own colourful dinosaur egg and modern dinosaur. We are going to use our ideas to write a story about a dinosaur hatching in our own homes; just like in the book. Watch this space!

Happy New Year from Deans Dens!!

Happy New Year!! It is lovely to see the children back after the holidays. They have been lucky boys and girls as I have been hearing all about the lovely gifts Santa for them all!!

During our group time we have been remembering to follow our group charter and setting some new targets for the coming term. Here are some of them:

To use pencil control and not scribble- Andrew

To use scissors correctly- Max

To use the picture clues to talk about what is happening in a story- Charli- Mae

I am sure the children will work hard to achieve these targets.

Welcome back from P2

We have had a great first week back in P2.

We started the week off with a lovely new floor in class! Our furniture has also been re arranged a bit and we have a new kitchen in our role play area. We love our new learning environment!

On Tuesday, we learned all about New Years’s Resolutions and even set some of our own including learning to ride a bike, eating healthier and improving our football skills. Have a look at some of our resolution stars.

We also created 2020 scratch pictures. We used special scratch paper and a wooden tool to scratch away the black paint and reveal different colours underneath. The pictures look wonderful! See if you can spot them on our winter wall the next time you pass it!

This week we started our new topic of Katie Morag. We read the first book of the series and had a discussion about islands and what they are. We also learned that next week we will be video linking with a P5/6 class who live on the island of Millport. We are so excited to speak to them about the differences between island and mainland life. In addition to our video link, we are learning how to write a letter. We have started learning the basic layout of a letter and will be using our skills to write a letter to our new friends in Millport. We can’t wait!

During spelling this week we have been revising what we learned last term before moving on to new sounds. Have a look at all of the active spelling activities we have been participating in.

Throughout last term we have been working on developing the following 4 social intelligence skills: communication, collaboration, leading and feelings. These skills have been woven throughout our lessons and we are developing confidence when displaying them. We are looking forward to continuing the development of these skills in different contexts throughout this session.

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