Happy New Year!

It has been great to welcome the children back to school this week and hear all their lovely news from their holidays.  We have been delighted to welcome Teme and Blake to our class this week and look forward to getting to know them over the coming weeks.

As it is the new year, we began this week by writing our new year’s resolutions.  We discussed the things we thought we needed to improve and wrote our own targets for things we will try to improve at home and at school.

This week we also started our Scottish Focus and the children were given their poems home to practise.  They have the choice of three poems to learn and will recite these to the class on Wednesday 23rd January.  The poems choices are The Sair Finger by Walter Wingate, Crocodile by JK Annand and Mince and Tatties by JK Annand.

We have also begun looking at Scottish Food and Drink and will continue this next week.  Perhaps we will finish our Scottish Focus with a tasting session?

In our number work this week we have been revising the 2x, 5x and 10x tables and have begun to learn the 4x and 8x tables.  We have been looking at patterns between the tables.  Please practise the times tables with your children at home as a quicker recall of the table facts will be beneficial to their mental maths.

In art this week we were learning about primary, secondary and tertiary colours and enjoyed exploring colour mixing with the paints.

Some highlights from the children:

Joe and William particularly liked the colour wheel in art.

Anna enjoyed the assembly on Keeping Connected which helped us learn more about having a back up team to help us through the low points in our life.

Freya enjoyed when we were listening to everyone’s Christmas news.

Luke N enjoyed having Teme and Blake join our class.

Happy New Year to everyone. P2 have settled back into school. We have been learning about the geography of Scotland and where we are in relation to the rest of the UK.

We have also been learning about how to be resilient when things are toughter for us. We have been sharing our favourite books with the class. In maths, we have learned about capacity, investigating how much water different containers can hold.

Well done to Aakruti for being our class pupil of the week for writing!

The children have enjoyed the Christmas themed work this week and have very much earned their holidays.

This week we have been playing drama games to develop our voice and dialogue.  What fun we had seeing the expressions on people’s faces as we demonstrated different emotions.

We also took part in a game where we developed our understanding of needs and wants.  We were told by the Prime Minister that we had 30mins to gather our stuff as we would be leaving to go and live on another planet.  We worked in groups to choose things we would take with us to help us survive.  Mrs Clyne hopes she is never stranded with us because mobile phones and games consoles would not be good choices!

During this week’s work on The Power of Kindness Calendar we learned what a refugee is and Mrs Clyne read the story “There’s a Boy Just Like Me” which we were surprised to know was written by 9 year old Frasier Cox when he won a writing competition.  Maybe next year one of us might win the competition?

On Thursday we celebrated the end of term with our Christmas party and this was the highlight of the week for most children.  Here’s what they said:

Elisha “I enjoyed the party.”

William “I enjoyed the Grand Old Duke of York.”

Jarrad “I liked the balloon game.”

Finn “I enjoyed learning the first aid skills.”

Luke C “I enjoyed Pass the Parcel.”

Kayden “I enjoyed the dancing competition.”

Well done to the children for all their hard work this term.  I hope that Santa is good to them all and I wish you all a very happy and relaxing Christmas break.  See you in January.

What a busy week to begin putting us in the festive spirit!  On Monday we were delighted to watch the dress rehearsal of the P2/1 Nativity which was fantastic, well done to all the boys and girls and the staff for their hard work.

On Tuesday we learnt about Christmas Around the World during our reading session and we will continue to learn about how Christmas is celebrated in different countries next week.  We have also been learning about different Christmas traditions every day as part of our interactive advent calendar.  This week we have been learning about the traditions of the Yule Log, Stockings, Carols, Mince Pies and Candy Canes.

On Wednesday we had a very interesting and informative chat from the PC Michael regarding safety around the railways.  Did you know a train weighs the same as 93 elephants and takes the length of 20 football pitches to come to a halt!  We’d better stay well clear!

On Wednesday we had some good discussions around simple steps to take in different first aid situations.  We considered how to help when someone is choking, someone gets burnt, someone is bleeding, someone is breathing but unresponsive, someone has an asthma attack and when someone has a broken bone.  The children have been given an information sheet home about this so perhaps you can use it to discuss each situation at home to make sure everyone knows what to do should a situation arise.

One Thursday we had great fun watching this year’s panto by M&M Productions, Dick Whittington.  Most of the children said one of their highlights was seeing Mrs Clyne take part in the dancing!  We also joined up with Primary 2 to begin practising our dancing for our Christmas Party.  We had great fun learning the Grand Old Duke of York and are very much looking forward to our party next Wednesday – remember to send in party clothes and dancing shoes with your children.

Today we learnt about Antarctica from Primary 6’s assembly.  One important fact to remember is that polar bears and penguins do not live at the same pole!

Have lovely weekend.

We loved performing our nativity this week. We have also enjoyed writing about Christmas and ordering Christmas words alphabetically. We finished working on our Moon pictures in Science. In P.E., we have been following instructions to learn dances for our Christmas party which is on Wednesday 19th December.

We have been busy learning the order of the alphabet this week- we sorted out jumbled up letters and sang and danced to the alphabet song. 

We have been learning to weigh in our Christmas Parcel Office, where we sorted parcels into heavy and light sacks.

We have been working hard on our Nativity and are looking forward to performing it next week ( please have all costumes in on Monday for the dress rehearsal).

In science, we learned about the Moon and created pictures from pastels. We then added facts about the moon that we had learned.

What an exciting week we have had.  The children have worked really hard to practise their assembly lines and were amazing this morning when sharing their learning with the whole school.  It was lovely to see so many grown-ups there to support the children and we appreciate your lovely feedback.

As well as our own assembly, we attended a whole school assembly led by Mrs Mill on Resilience.  We will be working hard to learn the skills needed to be more resilient in tougher times.  Anna reminded us that the main character who will help us to learn about Resilience is called Skipper and he will be teaching  us to navigate our boats along the river of life.

This week’s highlights from the children:-

Olly “I enjoyed getting ready for the assembly.”

Kalista “I enjoyed the fact that so many parents could come to see our assembly.”

Joe “I liked the parents’ feedback from our assembly.”

Luke N “I enjoyed practising the assembly.”

Finn “I enjoyed the assembly too.”

Ethan “I enjoyed when we got to go up on the stage and read our stuff.  It was scary and I got butterflies in my tummy but it was fun.  I think we should film the assemblies for the parents who can’t make it.”

Have a lovely weekend and remember the Christmas Lights will be switched on this evening in the village at 6pm.  Look forward to seeing you there.