We have had a great first week back, we have started to learn to knit! If you want to help your child but are not confident then we have used this video to help us.

We have learnt some emergency first aid – how to treat cuts and bruises.

We have begun to read a new class reading book and really enjoyed our first visit of the new year with our P1 reading buddies.

We have revisited our knowledge of compass directions and angles, and have begun some map reading work.

Looking forward to next week’s adventures.

Our highlights this week have been:

Sharing our poetry homework. The children really seemed to enjoy reading out their poems and discussing their answers and ideas about the poems.

Our walk with some of our P1 reading buddies.  The children were challenged to teach the P1’s 5 plant names and collect their leaves.  Most of the children did a great job teaching the children while being responsible for their young buddies, keeping them safe, making them feel included and sharing a sense of fun and adventure.

https://twitter.com/livivillagePS/status/1075057809740435457

The Christmas party was a lot of fun,  the class did you proud with their Dashing White Sergeant and they really loved showing off their moves in the freestyle and disco. Great fun was had during the mars bar game. Now they are used to putting the gloves on I am sure they would get used to doing the washing up too!

We have also been creating posters, making patterns for wrapping paper in art, had a movie morning, some choral speaking poem practice, a visit to church for the end of term service and lots of singing, especially today in our Christmas sing-a-long.

All that is left is to take this opportunity to say Thank you and Happy Christmas. Looking forward to next term already.

What a great week, your children have been amazing.  We all loved watching the dress rehearsal of the P1/2 nativity on Monday afternoon. The infant classes did so well and sang with enthusiasm.

On Tuesday for our outdoor classroom the class had their first go at choral speaking using some of the poem Heard It In The Playground by Allan Ahlberg. They picked up the concept really well and did a great performance in our playground area, which was  entertaining for parents arriving for the nursery nativity!

On Wednesday we had Micheal from transport police and linked to Network Rail, who spoke to us about safety near railways.  Many of the children were interested in the fact that a train can weigh as much as 93 elephants and takes 2km / 20 football pitches to come to a stop.

Thursday we had a fantastic maths lesson stretching the children’s numeracy thinking and exploring area as they worked out how much wrapping paper would be needed to wrap a box.  The children had to think in 3D, understand what is meant by area and the equation needed to find the answers, they had to understand basic measure in cm and use their times table strategies and addition skills.

Friday, we watched the P6 assembly on Antarctica. what an amazing amount of learning they have done and they delivered a fantastic and informative assembly. Thank you.

What an amazing week of exploring.  We have been to the Antarctic (sort of) when we listened to Peter Convey’s experiences as a terrestrial ecologist doing research at the British Antarctic base. We have explored our local woodland and bought back holly and ivy for our class Advent wreath.  The children collected greenery with great enthusiasm so they were then able to decorate the classroom as well!

We began to explore the book The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane, by reading the poems on an acorn and a weasel. The children then wrote their own shape poems for holly or ivy.

Baby Emma came to visit once more and we were able to observe and think about the things Emma can now do that she couldn’t before.

The children took their first steps into peer evaluation of homework this week, which they did very well, remembering the three rules of feedback – be kind, be specific, be helpful.

We finished off our week with our last NYCOS session. The children have thoroughly enjoyed the sessions and learned so much.

Finally we lit our first advent candle to mark the end of the first week in December, as we count towards the coming of the holidays and time with family and friends.

My proud teacher moment this week has been the kindness and generosity of your children as they are willing to give a specific act of kindness through our advent weeks, and help in the lunch hall.

This has been a great week with the class.

At the start of the week Mr Boyd came to speak to the children about his life journey and the skills he felt were important to his life, learning and work. He very kindly also gave the children a chance to try some hot chocolate, which was delicious. Thank you for your time and generosity.

They have welcomed Miss Ross who was on work experience from high school, and who helped support the children in their learning.

We have completed our snow globes and they have been selling fast.

They have been continuing to learn  about multi-digit addition using carrying over and subtraction using borrowing / regrouping. They will still need lots more practice for the method to become a habit, but they are doing well. Some have been motivated to do sums just for fun!

They have been learning about the meaning and traditions of Advent, and  some traditions of Christmas time around the world for our assembly. They worked really hard and delivered a great assembly sharing their learning and having fun.

Thank you so much to all of you that made it along to support your children.

We also had some time to talk a frosty walk for our outdoor classroom, and build some awesome construction models including 3D shapes and marble runs.

We have been primarily putting our snow globes together for our enterprise project. We have had a few issues but have problem solved and sorted them. The results are looking lovely,  ready for sale next week.  To support their learning they have been writing to Mrs Mill for a business loan to give us the start up costs of resources,  we have developed our understanding of what a budget is, and we have been practicing addition and subtraction of money in column/ chimney sums.

We have taken a senses walk around the school as we work towards writing a description of the school setting and mood.

We have had mini lessons, exploring place value and learning coin multiplication strategies.The children have enjoyed their reading buddy sessions with P1 and their music with karen from #nycos.

They are really developing their bench ball skills and growing in awareness of the value of tactics in the game.

Nex week we are exploring the subject of Advent for our assembly on Friday, and look forward to seeing you at the PATPALS session on Tuesday too.

This week we have had three visitors to take our learning forward in two areas. On Monday, we were pleased to welcome another of our class parents to the class to share their life journey. We found out about apprenticeships, and the important part that maths and physics play in his current career. We discovered that management and planning of time was important as well as independent skills. The class asked some interesting questions about skills as well as what Mr johnston’s favourite car was!  (I do love the links that go on in their brain.) Thank you Mr Johnson for giving us your time.

On Thursday, we had a visit from a five month old and her mum. We linked their visit to our learning about the GIRFEC wellbeing wheel. We talked about a babies needs, and care, keeping a baby healthy, safe and nurtured. We spoke about a babies development and what she could and could not do at five months old. One of our children had a music box which she played, and the baby fell asleep just before they left. Thank you for your visit.

In PE the children have been really pulling together their skills for benchball, they are beginning to show a greater awareness and understanding of tactics and defence skills to win the games and many are persevering and increasing their length of pass/ throw.

In our spelling word of week pocket was the word adventure, so we developed our learning with other words that ended in ‘ture’, challenging themselves with temperature and linking their learning with mature and nature.

The children are collecting facts about key Scottish animals about their habitat, food, and predators. Again, our outdoor classroom we continued tidying the back garden,  planting iris, daffodil and tulip bulbs and collecting more worms for our wormery.  We have prepared, cooked and eaten the potatoes the children found in the planters while they were weeding.  Almost all the children tasted them, and all rose to the challenge of unscrambling the method list and putting them in the right order.

The children were challenged to summarise what they have read so far in their group reading book, or were asked to find links with factual book and their reading book.

In maths,we had a go at money sums and word problems, it seems that many are a little rusty with their chimney sums but their mental maths is much better. Word problems can be difficult as they children find the vocabulary or pattern of information hard to unravel – more practice on its way!

Some of the class continued to type up their story writing while others were writing letters to Mrs Mill to ask for a loan to buy resources for making our snow globes.  I wonder if our ‘bank manager’ will say yes?

The children enjoyed learning about visiting a mosque and even learnt how to greet each other in Arabic.

This week the children have visited the cemetery to explore the subject of our Remembrance Day. The children took time to respectfully look at the graves and find those who had served in the military. The children were moved when realising how young some of the service men were when they lost their lives.  The display created by the parish was lovingly made up of knitted poppies and the time and effort put in was recognised by the children.

In our literacy work we have been reading the book Storm by Kevin Crossley-Holland as a class.  Through the book we have been exploring the tools the author uses to affect the way the reader thinks and feels about characters and to set the mood and pace of the story.  

The class worked fantastically this week to tidy the back garden, clear some leaves, collect litter, weed the planters, find worms for a wormery, and plant some bulbs.  Some of the children found some potatoes that had self seeded from last year and have chosen to cook them as wedges next week.

For maths we have been learning about budgets and making plans for our business enterprise.  More of this will emerge over the next few weeks.

The children were story making with their P1  buddies this week and they loved it – such an effective way to extend their sense of story sequencing, sentence structure, vocabulary as well as building up their confidence in their work.  

The class have been introduced to the wellbeing wheel and we have considered what inclusion can mean through the story Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson .  

We have revisited the 6 x table, and applied our learning of author’s tools to our reading group texts,  they have had  judo taster session and shared their home learning as a class, they have begun learning some basic Scottish country dance steps in PE and are looking at energy and electricity in science.

Finally, on Friday children got to hold the stick insects if they wished to. I was surprised how many were had a go.

“They are really soft they just pad gently”  “It feels a little tickly”  ” They go quite fast”  “They like the dark colour on my sleeve”

And last but not least, we had fun in the NYCOS session as you can hear –

What a great start to the term. The children are doing well and having fun in their quiz of the week which test their retrieval memory of past learning.  One of my favourite highlights this week is the classes confidence to times a number such as 64,321 by ten and most of them can explain fully what happens to the number when we multiply by ten.

I have challenged the children to improve their knowledge of graphs during outdoor classroom where we have begun exploring pictographs and pie charts.

The children have loved getting their new reading books and settling into their new reading groups.  This term they have been mixed up  to give different challenge and to develop the children’s comprehension further.

The highlights this week for the children have been Tuesday’s outdoor classroom, number talks, story writing and this week’s question challenge.

On Tuesday in the rain the children worked in groups and found a way to make a picture / diagram to illustrate the water cycle.  They had to answer the question as to how the water gets in the cloud and gets out, and what happens in between.  All groups were successful in piecing their knowledge together to find the answer, working collaboratively to discuss, plan and find the resources they needed to make the picture.  There were a few extra additions to their pictures for artistic effect such as speed boats in the river, however they did an amazing job and were able to effectively explain their learning.

We had a great number talks session on Wednesday, and the children went on to extend their knowledge of multiplication strategies.  they particularly liked the x10 and the challenge of ten times a 2, 3, or 4 digit number.

For a number of weeks we have been exploring legends and this week the class finished their planning and began to write their own legend stories. They are very excited and worked well.  Later we will edit and proofread before we publish them.

This week the class were challenged to answer the question Is Livingston Village a town or a village?  It was an interesting debate and the class found it hard to come to a conclusion.

Finally, I would like to share a picture of our learning about the colour wheel which is now on display.  The children really enjoyed the challenge and exploring the different mediums. They really did some amazing work.