P7/6 went on a class trip to East Calder cemetery with our war veteran helper Alan Hamilton. We found the WW1 graves that related to our IDL context and discussed the other war graves from WW2. we discussed the way the cemetery was set up to catch the sunrise and sunset and why that was important.
We took time to be reflective and respectful to those who laid won their lives for us. We laid poppies by the graves for remembrance day.
We celebrated book week by making book covers for our competition, enjoyed our DEAR time (Drop Everything And Read) and were lucky enough to get a visit to our local East Calder library. We enjoyed being able to use our library space and learn how to find the books that interest us!
We would like to thank our secret readers for coming in to read to us!
We’ve had a super time during Book Week. One of our favourite things was the book mark competition.
Congratulations to Leonor who won a certificate from our class!
We were all excited to receive our Bookbug bags in P1 and our Read, Write, Count bags in P2. We loved listening to one of the stories in the library with Mrs Robertson and our families! We were really pleased to share our learning with our families back in our classroom, and especially enjoyed the juice and biscuits!
We wrote book reviews during our writing lesson. Lots of our books got 5 stars.
We designed book covers for our favourite stories and made sure we had a title, author and illustrator written on them.
We were also very lucky to have a secret reader (thanks to Jude’s Mum in P2!) who came to read one of our favourite Julia Donaldson stories ‘Zog’ and ‘The Twits’ by Roald Dahl.
This week has been an amazing week in P2. We have taken part in lots of book week activities such as Drop Everything And Read time, making book covers and bookmarks, creating finger puppets, having a secret reader in our class, watching a live reading session with Julia Donaldson and James Robertson (who translates Julia Donaldsons’ books into Scots language) and also receiving our new Bookbug reading bags.
We were also very lucky to be joined by our family and friends this week for our sharing the learning afternoon where we joined in with lots of other reading activities. Then we also had the chance to visit the book fair this week and read lots of books. It has been a super busy week but it has been brilliant!
Using our class novel, Light on Dumyat we applied a range of reading strategies to read and understand texts, for example, skimming, scanning, predicting and summarising. We read in a range of styles from paired to choral to echo and individual. We tried to read with increasing fluency, understanding and expression, using appropriate pace and tone.
We also visited the school library where we identified Non Fiction texts associated with our IDL context, Natural Disasters. Also in the library we pair read with our P2 buddies, so using the skills of reading to a different audience. We welcomed Mrs Stewart to our class as our Secret Reader who read a very interesting version of Little Red Riding Hood!
On Thursday we made community links with our local Library and enjoyed an afternoon of a variety of tasks all linked to our reading benchmarks and outcomes.
Finally, as part of the Book Week competition we all chose a book to either create our own version of the cover, blurb and spine or replicate it as closely as possible. As you can see from the photos we have some amazing artists!
Congratulations for winning Player of the Week with your football team East Calder United. You told us you were awarded your medal for not only playing well in each game but also working hard in training. It was great to hear you were so happy to receive it and we are proud of your achievement too!
Last week, we were visited by Fischy Music! We learned new songs and had good fun singing and dancing. Then we had a school concert in the afternoon which was very loud and great fun.
In Literacy, we continue to learn new sounds: ‘u’ , ‘l’ and ‘f’, and are practising blending to read small words. We read in school on a Monday and a Tuesday, and then we send books home on a Tuesday to be returned on a THURSDAY.
In Numeracy, we have been learning all about addition and can add two sets together. We use the vocabulary – add, plus, equals, makes and total.
This week is Book Week. We are enjoying stories every day in class and taking part in fun activities. Yesterday we listened to stories and songs in a live event with Julia Donaldson. We all know some of her books and shared our favourites. We look forward to seeing you at the library on Wednesday at 2.20pm when book bags will be gifted!
In science we have been learning about mixtures and chemical reactions. We made our own lava lamps by mixing oil and coloured water and added an effervescent tablet to the bottle. This created a chemical reaction when the tablet mixed with the water and started to bubble.
Congratulations on winning a bronze medal at the East Lothian Gala. You shared with us that you swim for Broxburn Amateur Swimming Club and that you achieved your medal for the butterfly stroke. Congratulations,we are all really proud of you!
In Numeracy, we have been learning to use subtraction strategies and we have been learning to find the most efficient strategy. We have been using our Numeracy Tools to support our learning. We love sharing our strategies with each other.
Our first calculation was 23 – 13. One group worked with Miss Marra and we also worked in random partners. Even though some of us knew the answer straight away, we still used the Numeracy Tools to demonstrate our understanding and share our strategy.
We were challenged to keep making our starting number ten more and we had to keep subtracting 13. Some of us were eventually starting with a three digit number which was a fun challenge.
Innes was provided with 213 as his starting number and he kept subtracting 13 until he reached the smallest number he could. This was how he shared his strategy, he chose to write it on the desk using white board pen. He also taught his partner column subtraction.
This group worked well together with Miss Marra and they used the cubes to support their learning. They counted the cubes to ensure they started with 23 and they subtracted 13, they then wrote the calculation on the board.
As always, we co-created the Success Criteria. One of the skills we decided we had to use was “teamwork.” We thought it was very important to work together with our partners in order to be successful in our learning.
In Literacy, we have continued learning about question marks in Grammar. This links closely with our learning in Writing and Guided Reading. This term, in Guided Reading we are focusing on questioning to develop our comprehension skills.
This week, we co-created the Success Criteria as always and we also identified the missing punctuation in The Three Billy Goats Gruff. The story was displayed on a power point on the smart board and we had to add missing full stops and question marks. We also identified missing speech marks when a character was speaking.
We also focused on question words and identified these words on our Literacy Bump It Up Wall. We often use these to support with questioning in Guided Reading.
We then worked in random partners to complete a pencil task in which we had to complete the sentences by adding the correct question word at the beginning, and writing a question mark at the end of each question. Some of us worked with Miss Marra and we were so good at identifying the correct word because we worked so hard. We were very focused on our learning too. It was funny when we tried to say the questions aloud with the wrong question word. We shared our learning during our Plenary and we peer-assessed two pupils’ work using our Success Criteria.
In Art this week, we worked hard to design our own bookmark for the Book Week competition. Although Book Week is next week, we started our bookmarks early so we can send them to Mrs Robertson. We were very focused on our learning and made sure we did our very best work. We used our creativity and got some ideas from examples of bookmarks that Miss Marra showed us. This helped us to create our Success Criteria. We can’t wait to share more Book Week learning next week.
