End of term 1 blog :)
Look out for final updates and some fun pics on Friday 🙂
The children have worked extremely hard over our first term. Everyone settled in and gelled as a class, albeit it chatty one 🙂 As we are nearing the end of a number of areas of our learning a variety of assessments have taken place or will be taking place this week. Assessments vary between written, self/peer, observations and presentations.
Numeracy: The children have all worked extremely well on our fraction/decimal/percentage topic. This can be a very tricky area of numeracy however I am very pleased with how all the children have addressed the challenges faced. We linked the introduction of decimal learning into ‘Money Week’ which took place last week. In groups the children were faced with the challenge of planning a party of their choice with a budget of £100. The variety of ideas and control of the budget was most impressive by every group. We will be using ICT and some ‘real life’ contexts to build on our decimal and percentage learning this week.
Literacy: The majority of this term’s literacy work has been linked to our whole class topic of ‘Citizenship, Eco and Fair Trade’. We have been developing our Listening and Talking skills through a variety of group based tasks. We have also been focusing on improving our writing by adding depth using a variety of the 4 key areas of VCOP: Vocabulary, Connectives, Openers and Punctuation. After the October holiday we will begin ‘Literacy Circles’ and ‘Reading Routes’ to develop comprehension skills. The children have been learning a variety of different Literacy Circle roles in preparation for this set of primarily homework based comprehension tasks.
Health & Well Being: Our main HWB focus this term has been to get to know each other and develop our team work skills of listening to others, sharing opinions and negotiation. This has been done via a variety of paired and group tasks. Assessment is via teacher observations and peer/self evaluations over the term. P6 and P7 were separated into their year groups as of last Thursday for a 4 week period for their HWB specific lessons.
P6: Tobacco Workshop – these sessions are run by an external team who come in each Thursday to discuss the dangers of smoking.
P7: Drug & Solvent Misuse – these sessions are run by the class teachers, again each Thursday, to discuss the dangers of misuse of both legal and illegal drugs.
HWB/PE: We have been blessed with the weather this term and have been lucky to have not missed any of our outdoor PE sessions. Our whole school initiative of the ‘Daily Mile’ has also happened almost every day. As a school we are lucky to have Mrs Logan as our PE specialist.
Topic/IDL: This term’s topic of Citizenship, Eco and Fair Trade was split into two separate entities (driven by timetable commitments). Mrs Harrison has been focusing on the Citizenship and Eco areas and my focus has been Fair Trade. Driven by the interest shown by the pupils this aspect of their learning was amended to focus on the current Syrian refugee situation. Mrs Harrison will update the blog with regards to the learning within this area.
As the concept of ‘fair price for farmers’ is topical at the moment we focused on the price of milk, linking the issues faced by producers closer to home. In groups the children have been researching the issues faced by British dairy farmers, considering production costs vs selling price, climate issues relating to our very wet Summer, comparisons between supermarket prices etc. On Tuesday (13th Oct) the groups will present their findings to the rest of the class. I have had a sneak preview of the presentations and I have to say it is obvious that the ICT research, knowledge of PowerPoint and team working skills have been of a very high standard. I am looking forward to the final presentations tomorrow! We are also extremely lucky to hopefully have Mr Findlay, a local dairy farmer and father of two MPS pupils come in this week to answer our questions. Unfortunately this was not possible prior to the end of term IDL assessment but as a class we have a number of very interesting questions prepared.
Our whole class topic for term 2 is Rain-forests. I am really looking forward to this topic as I think it allows the children to excel themselves through artistic and imaginative expression of their learning!
Modern Languages: Our primary focus is French. In preparation for P7 and S1 we are beginning to concentrate on our written French. Over the past two weeks we have been learning how to write facts about ourselves. Going into term 2 we will continue to develop our French vocabulary to enhance our French conversational and written skills. We will begin to embed French into our daily routines in term 2, for example, instruction and responses throughout the day will be in French. Some basic Spanish words will also be introduced over the coming months.
RME: Mrs Harrison has been teaching RME this term so she will update the blog with details. I know there has been lots of fun activities and learning taking place.
General:
Can I please take this opportunity to remind you that:
* Bathgate Academy Open Evening is on Wednesday (14th)
* All after school club letters must be returned by Wednesday (14th)
Both Mrs Harrison and I hope that term 2 in our class will continue to be filled with fun and learning 🙂
Miss Preston x
