Deans Primary School Blog

We have a very exciting opportunity coming up at Deans Primary. We are going to be holding a parent and child first aid course in school on Friday 22^nd March from 9:30am-12:30pm. This will be run by staff from the Low Port Centre and we are sure this will be a very valuable experience for all those involved. There is no charge to parents/carers for this.

Spaces are very limited and will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

If you would like to participate with your child please return the slip in your child’s bag to school office as soon as possible.

This week we started our new topic – The Highland Clearances. We worked in groups to create a clan, clan name, tartan and a Blackhouse for us to live in. All of this has now been displayed on our wall in our class ‘village’. 

We have had even more exciting new resources to explore in our classrooms. Kayleigh has used one of our amazing new writing logs to practise writing sentences and she has even included a describing word.

This week’s sound has been ‘d’ which has driven us dotty!! We hope you like our dotty d’s. We have had lots of fun building words and exploring the sound. We know we have to be careful not to be tricked with the sound b! We know that d has a tail just like a dddog.

The primary 2’s have been practising their dictation skills and writing sentences independently using d words. Well done Primary 2.

Scarlet  – I liked all the busy start jobs this week especially making d words with the play dough.

Ashley –  I liked practising writing my d’s on paper with a writing pencil.

Aayan – I liked my dotty d because it was really really spotty.

 

 

In numeracy we have been exploring number friends and counting in 10’s. We have had a great time using numicon to make 10 in different ways.

Lewis made the pattern 6 + 4 =10 using his numicon and Aaron was able to write all of the tens numbers up to 100. Wow! well done.

Daniel wowed Mrs Stevenson this week because he counted in 5’s all the way from 0 to 100.

Lexie – I liked counting in 10’s and making patterns with the numicon.

Aaron – I have enjoyed my  number work this week and found that counting in 10’s with the numicon is easy.

 

This week sees the beginning of Fairtrade Fortnight. We have been exploring the symbol and learning all about where chocolate comes from. We read the story of Pablo the Fairtrade Super Banana and decided to create our own super hero bananas. Tadas thought it would be a good idea to include the Fairtrade  symbol in our class shop to help promote Fairtrade.

Aayan – I loved making my Super Banana, mine was a bit like Batman-  batbanana!!

We have been using our imagination in our role play areas. We have been performing fairy tales and using our voices to retell the story in a dramatic way and in the right order!

Sophie – I loved using the finger puppets to retell Little Red riding Hood. It’s one of my favourites.

Our Homework superstars this week are Harrison, Calvin and Sophie. They boys made fantastic mini beasts using recycled materials.  Sophie made her very own dot patterns and wrote the calculations to go with it. Well done everybody. Thank you to everybody who sent in pictures of your home learning, we thoroughly enjoy looking at them together.

 

 

 

The weather has been lovely this week and everyone has been enjoying the sunny, fresh mornings when out playing at break and lunch time. P4 have been encouraged to make sure no one is left out when playing games and always to involve others.

We also spent time this week recognising the qualities and strengths of our classmates. These were then recorded onto certificates which are displayed in class. This was a very valuable exercise as recently there have been a few disagreements between classmates. It’s important to understand that whilst we might not always agree with each other we should still value our classmates for who they are.

In maths we have been very busy working on reviewing multiplication and learning new skills in division. We discussed the maths vocabulary for these topics and did lots of practical activities to help us understand the concepts. We were reminded how important it is to know our times tables for these skills and it would be great if you could encourage your child to revise these at home.

In literacy we worked as a pair to complete a creative writing activity. Everyone really enjoyed this and many said they found it helpful to share and build on the ideas of their partners.

Next week we are looking forward to working with P3 and P3/4 on our new topic of the Egyptians.

 

*ATTENTION PRIMARY 1 PARENTS AND CARERS*

There is a letter in your child’s book bag about our Families Connect programme, please read this and return by Friday if you would like to take part.

Sessions will run on the following dates from 1pm-3pm

• Thursday 14^th March
• Thursday 21^st March
• Thursday 28^th March
• Thursday 4^th April
• Thursday 25^th April
• Thursday 2^nd May
• Thursday 9^th May
• Thursday 16^th May

We would love to invite parents, grandparents, aunties or uncles to take part in this with their child. Childcare will be provided for any younger siblings of participants.

Sessions will focus on health and wellbeing, literacy and numeracy. The first hour of each session will consist of parents/carers enjoying a cup of tea and looking through resources, the children will join us for the second hour where we will have a snack and carry out the activity. You will then get to take the resources home with you to enjoy again and again.

Parents and carers who took part in the last session have said:

“I feel happier to interact with school”

“I enjoyed every minute”

“Families Connect has been really good and I feel others would benefit from it”

“Very helpful with bringing emotions and school subjects together and doing it at home”

“I think my friends would enjoy doing all the activities”

 

We look forward to hearing from you!

In p5/6 we have been taking part in daily mindfulness. We were very lucky this week as Mrs Moyes brought up our school guinea pigs to join us.

Our mindfulness story focused on spending some time on the beach – here are some of the things we saw.

 

Millie – I saw dogs

Tayle – I was playing with a beachball

Arran – I saw Whales.

Liam – I saw a blue whale and a great white shark.

As a class we have seen many benefits to our daily mindfulness. These include being calm and relaxed as well as more positive and focused. 

 

 

Over the last few weeks, it has been very busy in P2. We have almost finished our Scots topic! We read a lot of Katie Morag and practiced writing letters and postcards to her, to persuade Katie to come and visit us in Deans! We now know all about island life and we even created one of our own. We also learned about Scottish slang and traditional Scottish words. We read Scottish poems with our favourite being a Humphy-Backit Heron (which we performed at our assembly) and we made a Scottish dictionary to show what words we have learned.

In P.E we have been learning different ceilidh dances. So far, we have mastered the Gay Gordon and the Canadian Barn dance. Miss Beattie is very proud of us.

In Math’s we are still focussing on fractions and learning all about the relationship between division and multiplication. At the moment, we are focussing on halves and thirds. As well as looking at multiplying and dividing by 2’s and 3’s.

In science, we are learning about the lifecycle of a plant. Last week we planted cress and we had a share the learning event with our parents in attendance to help us understand more about the life of a plant. We put most of our seeds by the window so they could get lots of sunlight, and we watered them everyday. We also put 2 in the dark cupboard, 2 on the radiator and we left 1 without water to see in what conditions would the plant grow best. Of course, the cress by the window did and it grew very tall (5cm to be exact). P2 even got to taste the cress, some of us did not like it because it was a little bit too nippy on our tongues. We are now very efficient in looking after plants and know exactly what they need to grow. We even know the parts of a plant and it’s lifecycle. Pip and his friends will be very happy with us!

One of the highlights of this week was making shortbread! As our topic is Scotland, we thought we would incorporate some food technology into our learning. We baked some traditional Scottish shortbread and we even got to take it home to show our family (and then eat it of course!). Mrs Wood kindly helped us in the kitchen and we discussed where all the ingredients come from, as well as weighing them all out. Our numeracy skills really came in handy! Mrs Wood is an excellent cook and P2 are very grateful for her help. To follow on from this lesson, on Thursday, we wrote up a set of instructions on how to make shortbread so anyone who wants to make shortbread can do so!