Deans Primary School Blog

Happy New Year from everyone in Primary 3! We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and enjoyed the holidays.

Primary 3 have been working with Mrs Hillan at the start of this week and we enjoyed sharing how we spent our Christmas holidays. We had a Circle Time and took turns to share the things we had done over the holidays as well as anything exciting we did on Christmas Day or New Year. This was a good opportunity to refresh our memories of the 4 skills from our Skills 4.0 document, focusing on Social Intelligence, using communication and being aware of our own feelings and the feelings of others. It was lovely to share what a wonderful time we all had!

We began reading the story of Greyfriar’s Bobby as a class. The children have done a super job of recalling the story so far and we have created our own versions of the cover of the book including something we heard about in the story so far. Some children chose to draw Bobby up in the Pentland Hills when he first ran away and met his new owner, Auld Jock. Others chose to draw Bobby following Jock to Edinburgh and visiting the busy city. The children came up with lots of options to choose from.

Primary 3 also revisited our Number Talks in Numeracy this week by finding out how many ways we could make the number 5. The children were keen to share all the different ways they found. Some pupils used addition skills, some used subtraction skills and a number of them used multiplication. There were a few children who even included all 3 skills in one sum!

Mrs Hillan has been very impressed with Primary 3 and looks forward to continuing to work with them whilst Mrs Buntin is absent. Well done P3, keep up the good work!

Primary 7 are back and ready for some hard work. Already we have been working on rounding decimals. To help us understand we found a clip that explained significant numbers.

Deans Travel Agents

To work on our new topic the class have split into 6 different groups and are planning a budget holiday. each group has chosen a country such as:

1. Mexico
2. India
3. Israel
4. Indonesia
5. Japan
6. A tour of the famous football stadiums in Britain

There are many skill that will be covered during this topic and each group will keep you up to date on their progress.

Some of the Primary 7’s have been selected to work together to improve the playground. Along with Mrs Wood, Mrs Rosie and Mrs Stewart they have been searching through catalogues to get ideas and implement the new look playground.

This term Primary 7 will have gym on Mondays and Tuesdays. Can they all bring a complete change of gym kit, no jewelry and a pair of indoor shoes both for gym and the classroom. We are getting new flooring in our room and we want to keep it as clean as possible.

Last week we were looking at a famous Scottish cartoon character and climate change. We have tried designing our own comic with the character about climate change. We also decided to be put forth in a big event in the Edinburgh Film Festival. We can get to make our own mini movies and if we win, we get to see our movie in a cinema! Also if we win massive film directors can get to see it on the big screen, other school pupils also get to see it! We have made letters to ask the company (for copyright reasons) if  we can use their characters.

We tried using a new genre in language, Persuasive writing. We used this genre for writing our email/letters to the company to persuade them to let us use their characters.

On the first week back we looked into a new topic for math, Division.  We have made math posters on laptops to show what we understand in math. We tried using the bus stop method when trying to do division. We have learnt what a remainder and how to use the bus stop methods. We also used fact families and used algebra.

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.

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.