We have had a busy couple of weeks with the Christmas season beginning. We have been finishing off blocks of maths, literacy and writing along with learning about Christmas, hearing festive stories and doing Christmas crafts.

We have been busy auditioning for the school talent show and we were also able to show the nursery some of our talents as well.

Here’s a few pictures from the last 2 weeks.

Next week is our Christmas party. This is on Tuesday afternoon after spending the morning at the Panto! We’re all super excited about both events.

Have a good weekend.

P5 & Mrs Rankin

This is a fornightly update this week for last week and this week.

Last week we were busy with Kids Gone Wild with Rob where we built dens in the woods and we had Stuart Reid the author in school giving us a full school assembly and then he was in our class for over an hour helping to give us advice on how to write a story and get inspired. He was brilliant with the kids in both the assembly and in our classroom. Such a great inspiration to have in our school to help develop and encourage writing. We also had Miss McGregor in class to make willow wreathes to decorate for Christmas. Everyone has now made a wreath. This week the decorating started and we have some amazing looking wreathes now and the rest of the class will decorate theirs next week. These will be used to decorate the outside of the school and pupils will get to bring these home at the end of term.

Have a nice weekend.

P5 & Mrs Rankin

Well this week isn’t really a big news week as we have been working mostly on preparing for our assembly today! We sorted out our scripts and PowerPoint and also practiced our lines and songs a lot between the classroom and the hall. P6 came to see our final rehearsal on Thursday afternoon and gave us feedback on how to make it even better.

Mrs Rankin is very proud of each and every pupil as they gave their all on Friday morning, giving their best performance! We hope you all enjoyed it. Mrs Harris has been great with helping us to prepare as well.

There are a few pictures below from this morning.

Also this week:

• We had Sing Out with Jen on Monday and were given our 4th song to sing. We all love it!
• Half of the class were working with Miss McGregor who comes to work in the school garden. We were cutting willow down and weaving it to create wreaths. We will be decorating these and using them to decorate the school entrance for Christmas. We’ll get to bring them home at Christmas. The rest of the class will work with her this week.
• Some of us dressed down after our class assembly for Children In Need and we did some colouring in of Pudsey Bear!
• Mr Hunter held auditions for the Christmas Choir. They will be performing at Cluster event in December. He has still to announce who is in the choir.

We’re all looking forward to getting back to normal with our lessons next week after all our hard work organising the class assembly!

Have a nice weekend.

P5 & Mrs Rankin

Here we are with a week to go until our class assembly! We have been in full swing this week with preparation, putting together powerpoint slides, finding out more information about what we want to share with you and singing practice!

Read on to hear more things we have been doing in class:

• In maths, we have continued with fractions and learning how to identify these on number lines and ordering fractions.
• For literacy we have been working on visualising a text using either pictures, mind maps or even bullet points to help show our understanding of what we were reading.
• Writing this week was our invitations for the assembly which we have all brought home. Please check our bags for these!
• We had another teacher on Thursday while Mrs Rankin represented West Lothian at an Education Scotland event. We were doing maths word problems and learning about Remembrance Day which is on Monday 11th November.
• We had Jen on Monday with our Sing Out session. We sound pretty good and we still have a few weeks left with her. Hopefully we can only get better!
• We have all really got into involved in our own areas for the class assembly. We hope you like it when you get to see if next Friday morning.

Just in case you have not received the assembly invitation, P5 families are invited next Friday, 15h November @ 9.15am for tea/coffees and then the assembly starting at 9.30am.

Our star of the week for next week if Mya – well done Well done Mya for working hard at all times this week!

Have a great weekend!

P5 & rs Rankin

We have a good week, picking our topic for our assembly, working with Jen for Sing Out and doing some Halloween art in class!

Read on to hear more:

• We are working on fractions for maths looking at what a fraction is and how is can be displayed – on a shape, number line or as an amount of something.
• We have also been looking at shape and the difference between 2D & 3D shapes to see how these are made up.
• In writing, we continued with narrative and created a spooky opening paragraph to get our readers hooked and wanting more.
• We have the Fire Brigade come in and speak to us about keeping save on Bonfire Night. Fireworks are small bombs and only adults should handle them.
• In PE we are doing handball as we have a tournament coming up at Inveralmond Community High School.
• We were creating a haunted house art scene, using paints to create a spooky night sky and then using black and yellow paper to create a haunted house to stick onto out sky. See some pictures below – these all turned out really well!
• We have been looking at metalinguistics in our reading this week and using different ways to figure out what these mean.

Next week we will be getting started preparation for our assembly which will be on 15th November @ 9.30am in school. We’re all excited to be doing this for you all to see!

Our star of the week this week is Emma – well done to Emma for fantastic listening and staying on task at all times!

Have a nice weekend.

P5 & Mrs Rankin

Here we are at the start of term 2 in P5 and what a nice week we have had welcoming everyone back. We have been finishing off Mary Queen of Scots and looking at new things we’ll be doing this term. Read on to hear all about it.

• Jack/Abbie – in PE we started learning about Handball as we will be hopefully be attending a Sports Festival with the other cluster schools in November.
• Jamie – we took part in a trial about who killed Lord Darnley. We had a judge, jury and suspects and we had to decide using the information given who we thought killed Lord Darnley. The jury decided on Mary Queen of Scots herself!
• Devin – we were answering questions about Mary Queen of Scots to see what we could remember about her from last term.
• Erin D – we started working on book trailers using the iPads so we can recommend books to others to read.

We are all looking forward to starting work on putting our class assembly together in the next few weeks. Look out for invites coming home!

Our star of the week has been Sophie this week! Well done to Sophie for extra hard work this week.

Have a nice weekend.

P5 & Mrs Rankin

Well we have made it the first big holiday of P5 and how quickly it has come around. We have had a busy week, as always and we are all ready for a break from school.

Read on to hear what we have been up to.

• Maths – we have been working on angles and looking at turns making 90, 180, 270 & 360 degrees and linking these to compass points and directions. We also used Plickers for a lesson to see how our learning is going with our topics from this term.
• Literacy – we were looking at summarising and finding out our reading group’s novel we’ll be working on after the holiday.
• Writing – we were completing our final piece of instructional writing.
• Health & Well Being – we were learning about keeping ourself safe if there was to be a fire in at home/school. Planning escape routes and knowing what to do if we had to escape  from a building on fire. We had some great conversations about this and everyone was really engaged.
• PE – we finished off basketball with some games and then did some fitness in the classroom for our second slot as we let P6 have the hall to practice their assembly.
• Mary Queen of Scots – we finished off our art and got this up on the walls for parents evening. We used HP Reveal to show us saying what we have learned so far about her. We also used our investigation skills to try and solve the murder of Lord Darnley, Mary’s second husband.
• We all got to see a preview of P6 class assembly on Thursday afternoon and gave them feedback. It was really good – well done to everyone in P6!

Here are some pictures from our week.

We are off school now until Tuesday 22nd October. Have a nice time off school and keep safe during the holidays.

See you all on Tue 22nd 8:55am!

P5 & Mrs Rankin

Another week has flown by with us having only 1 week left until the October break. We have been busy in class with it having been Maths Week Scotland and having a SumDog competition.

Read on to hear what we have been up to:

• Maths – we were doing different activities in class all wee as it was Maths Week Scotland. We all got to play SumDog at some point in the week to allow us to get involved in the competition. If we weren’t on the laptops, we were playing maths related games, solving real life problems with tasks created by Edinburgh University for P5-P7s or working on our times table knowledge and Number Talks strategies. We came 271st out of over 3,300 schools and we beat all other Letham classes! Well done to those who answered all 1000 questions, they earned 5 house points each.
• Literacy – we were looking at finding the main idea of a passage this week and worked on several small passages to explain what the main idea was using just 1 sentence.
• Writing – we were writing instructions about how to play Hoop Hop and we had to be clear about what we wrote about and to make sure were gave key points to do. For example, place the hula hoops on the floor in a long snake shape.
• Health & Well Being – we were learning about Fire Safety this week and everyone was really engaged in this discussing hazards around the house and what to look out for.
• National Poetry Day – we wrote acrostic poems for the school competition. These were to be about one of our school values. There are some really great poems and good luck to Miss Smith who has to judge this!
• Mary Queen of Scots – we completed our power points on places where Mary lived and gave a brief talk about what we found out. We also completed our art of Mary and you can see these next week at parents evening with a bit of a digital twist to them!
• In PE we were playing games in basketball and we were using the full sized court. We all took turns in offering feedback to the teams we were able to watch.
• Sing Out – Jen was in on Monday and we were practicing the songs she gave us in week 1. It’s going well son far.

Our star of the week this week is Kayson – well done. He has been showing fantastic listening and contributing confidently to our lessons all week.

Here’s a few pictures from this week.

Have a nice weekend.

P5 & Mrs Rankin

Primary 5 have had a very busy week this week with a lot of different things going on in school and class. It was the MacMillan Coffee Morning today so the whole school were getting organised for this and we visited the coffee morning as a class this morning. With different activities going on, some of us got out nails painted, played Beat the Goalie and Dunk the Biscuit.

Read on to hear more about our week.

• We had our first Sing Out session with Jen who will be working with our class for the next 12 weeks. She had us warming up our voices and then we sang 2 songs that we will be learning to sing.
• We were out with Rob from Kids Gone Wild on Wednesday afternoon where we were looking at Wildlife Tracks. We walked down to the Almond with Mrs Rankin & Mrs Harris and we then looked for any signs of life. We looked in a burrow and saw a nose but we’re not sure who was in there. We saw a few slugs (big and small!) and some other bugs. We were looking out for birds to see what types there are in our area. See some pictures below.
• We continued with Mary Queen of Scots and we were working in groups to find out more about the different places Mary lived during her life. We’ll finish these off next week and share with the rest of the class.
• We were also finishing off our Mary Queen of Scots artwork – we’re nearly there and are looking forward to seeing them on the classroom walls.
• In maths, we were learning about angles and learning about multiplication and division using our times table knowledge.
• We were decorating Digestive biscuits on Thursday afternoon for the coffee morning for the pupils to have.
• For writing this week, Mrs Rankin showed us what we needed to do for decorating a biscuit and we then had to write the method for doing this, making sure we did not miss out any important steps.
• In literacy, we were working on inference so we were looking for clues in passages to try and figure out what the author was meaning.

Our star of the week is Erin D – well done to her for modelling the Letham Way and getting involved in all lessons this week with confidence!

Some pictures of our week.

Have a nice weekend!

P5 & Mrs Rankin

A short week for us all this week so our blog is shorter too!

Please read on to hear what we have been doing this week.

• Jamie – today we were doing Plickers to answer some maths questions.
• Malin – we were looking at 2D shapes in maths this week.
• Erin G – we were finding out about Scratch and what this was.
•  Travis – in PE we were working on our shooting skills and played 1-v-1 challenges and then 2-v-2 challenges which we all really enjoyed.
• Rhea – we were learning about imperative verbs to help us with our instructional writing.
• Sophie – when Mrs Zohoorian was in we building boats out of different materials. My group were trying to make a submarine.
• All – it was National Coding Week so we were learning about Binary Code.

We did Secret Student on Thursday and Emma-Rose modelled being ready, respectful and safe consistently all day and earned a reward at the end of the day

Here are some pictures of us using Scratch on the laptops to create animations and characters. Everyone really enjoyed this.

Have a good weekend.

P5 & Mrs Rankin