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Coming soon .. our Library opening event ..and World Book Day!

As part of our Reading Schools Award we are working to promote reading for pleasure and enjoyment.

A growing number of studies show reading can have a major impact on on children and young people’s attainment, self-confidence and well-being.

Next week we will be opening our  long awaited, refurbished library (just in time for World Book Day on Thursday 4th March) We hope everyone will enjoy reading and exploring all the fantastic books we have. Classes will be invited along for an opening event and then will have an allocated time each week to spend in the library.

This is what our library looked like before..

Each pupil has been given a token for World Book Day which can be exchanged at participating retailers (Waterstones book shop in Livingston is one) for a selection of short, free books or used to discount other books by £1.  The tokens can be used from now until 27th March.

NEXT FRIDAY  4th March we will be celebrating World Book Day by dressing up ..or down .. if you wish. We would really love to see some characters from books!

We are looking forward to a fun…and book-filled week ahead!

Article 31 (leisure, play and culture): Every child has the right to relax, play and take part in a wide range of cultural and artistic activities.

P6 Art Project

On Monday February 21st, P6A and P6B took part in the Almondell Cemetery Memorial Artwork project. Visiting artist Svetlana Kondakova specialises in public and environmental art and has been commissioned to create a piece of art for the cemetary at Calderwood with the help of our P6 pupils.

Svetlana Explained the concept she had in mind and showed us how to make templates to represent water, leaves or flowers. We then cut the shapes from silver, gold and bronze card and glued them together.

Once they were finished, all the pieces of art were joined together to make the final shape. It looks amazing! Svetlana’s plan is to use our design to help her create the finished 3D version which will be made of metal; we can’t wait to see the final result.

Discovering Angles

P7A used their prior knowledge to create and identify different types of angles through folding paper. We managed to create and identify the properties of most of the angles; there was a bit of problem-solving involved when it came to the reflex angle! We used our communication and team work skills to conquer the task.

Primary 1

It’s been another busy week of learning in Primary 1.

Well done to the children in P1b for sharing their Scots story at the assembly last week.  Everyone worked hard to learn their words and they shared the story beautifully!  Congratulations also to all those who learned their Scots poem.

We have all been learning about time.  We started with the year, then seasons, months, days and now the hours.  We have been making clocks and using them to tell o’clock times.

We continue to learn and practise sounds and are beginning to  write sentences, remembering capital letters, finger spaces and full stops.

A gentle reminder to please return reading books on a Thursday and to keep toys at home, we don’t want any getting lost.

Have a super holiday weekend, we’ll hear the children’s news on Wednesday.

This Week in P5…

In P5B we are continuing to try out lots of different reading strategies and are continuing to learn about the structure of a recount piece of writing.

In numeracy we are continuing to work on our mental/written multiplication and division strategies. We have been looking at what fractions look like in everyday life and how they are shown on a number line depending on their size.

As part of our health and wellbeing we have been learning about healthy lifestyles. As part of this topic, we explored the way food is advertised and how this effects the choices we make. We worked in teams to create our own food brand/cafe and thought about using different advertising techniques to persuade people to buy our product. We look forward to sharing our creativity and ideas with the rest of the class next week!

We have been looking at photos from WW1 and discussing what has been happening in them as part of our War Years topic. One picture showed us 3 Scottish soldiers working together as a team and we look forward to finding out about Scotlands role in the war! On Thursday we enjoyed learning more about the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance agreements. This led to a great discussion  about what other countries worked with and against each other during this war.

 

WW1 in P6A

In P6 we are all becoming thoroughly absorbed in our WW1 IDL context, with lots of pupils able to share stories about family members who have been involved in both World Wars and some pupils bringing in artefacts to share with us.
This week, 2 pupils chose to get creative and brought in these amazing representations of a tank and a WW1 trench- fantastic work, thank you!

Wordle and Nerdle in P7A

P7A have expressed interest in exploring the online ‘Wordle and Nerdle’ games, we have been using our talking and listening skills to explore strategies within numeracy and literacy. There have been some interesting learning conversations around vowel patterns, commonly used consonants and probability.

Have a look at a few of our recent class attempts.

 

In P5…

Last week P5 continued to look at more of our Scots language through stories and poems written by lots of different authors. We explored these in our reciprocal reading roles too.


We created our own Scots dictionary during our ICT lesson. We used class notebook/our electronic jotters to present our work using a range of Microsoft word tools. We also listened to an online lesson from two different authors all about their books and the life of Robert Burns. Hag Storm seemed to be our favourite and we hope to read this in class soon.

We enjoyed listening to pupils recite their Scottish poems in class and during our whole school Teams assembly last week and today.

We have finished off our information handling topic and will start exploring fractions, decimals and percentages next. We will continue to work on our division of numbers using mental and written strategies, as well as our knowledge of times tables.

This week in P5… we have been exploring fractions within our number talks. We have been figuring out what language to use and how to find fractions of shapes, numbers and objects while sharing our strategies with each other.

In literacy we tried out a new talking and listening resource called PM oracy which we loved using on the iPads. We also started a new genre of writing and look forward to learning all about recounts.

We also started our new topic called The War Years. We enjoyed learning historical information, taking notes, answering questions and exploring BBC Bitesize to develop our research skills.


 

Scots whae hae!

Over the last few weeks all classes have been working on Scots language activities.

A knowledge and understanding of Scots language and Scottish texts allows children and young people to explore and appreciate Scottish culture. Learning Scots can often improve learners’ engagement in learning and their development of wider literacy skills.

In the nursery I enjoyed reading a story in Scots to the boys and girls. Some  made beaks and built a ‘waa’ for the three ‘Craws’. The Primary ones have made some super displays about ‘The Teeger that Cam for his tea’ and ‘Katie Morag’. Primary 2’s and 3’s have been learning and using lots of Scots words. Primary 4-7 have worked on creating their own Scots word lists and dictionaries. They have even been writing in Scots!

Primary 4-7 also took part in a live author event about Robert Burns with author Victoria Williamson. Primary 7 are really enjoying reading her novel ‘Hag Storm’.

We have been learning Scots poems and 2 pupils from each class were chosen to recite their poem at one of our two Scottish Assemblies. Well done to everyone who read aloud at assembly or in their class. It’s not easy to speak aloud in front of an audience.. and a special mention to Primary 1B for their amazing performance of ‘There was a wee lassie who swallowed a Midgie!’

We are currently working towards our Reading Schools Silver Award and part of our action plan is to celebrate books and special reading events. We now have lots of fabulous displays to demonstrate our learning of Scots language. Fantastic work everyone!

Article 30 I have the right to use my own language and culture.

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