Author: Mrs Matos Van Den Heever

Our week started off with a bang! Mr Wells and Miss Baillie joined our classroom during a Literacy lesson. We were learning about the importance of adjectives in our writing and how important it is to use creative adjectives to help our readers create a clear picture of what we are writing. Things got rather strange, one minute Mrs Matos was there, and the next…poof! She was gone, MISSING!! She had just been teaching us about adjectives and we all got to work using creative adjectives to describe our missing teacher. We used a missing person’s poster layout to help us describe her….and after all the adjectives that were used, and creative posters that were created, Mrs Matos was found!! Do ask us about our lesson, as we now know how to add more detail to our stories for you to get a clearer picture of went happened during our lesson.

BINGO!! We played some rounding bingo for numeracy this week.  The game helped us to use our knowledge on rounding numbers to the nearest 10 and 100’s. We also learned to use rounding in calculations for addition and subtraction, as it is easier to calculate numbers which are in 10’s or 100’s. We even managed to use the rounding strategy during number talks which we realised was a very efficient strategy to use. Try asking us some calculations at home and we can practice using the rounding strategy.

We continued to  practice some ball skills in PE this week. As our  focus is on basket ball, we practiced some dribbling and some different passes.

Bonjour! We’ve been practising our greetings this week in 1+2. We word together with a partner . In speech bubbles we wrote down the dialogue that we spoke to each other.  Keep your eye out for our dialogue on  our French wall display in our classroom. This activity helped us to practice our pronunciation  and extend our writing in French. Next week we will focus on feelings, how to ask how someone is feeling and the  appropriate responds to being asked how we feel.

We’ve been using the class atlas and netbooks to research key facts and features of the River Forth. We created our own representation of the River Forth and added in some key features to our representations. We have been using the netbooks to research different rivers around the world, and we voted for the river that we would like to compare the river Forth to. The Amazon river was the winning river. In the next few weeks, we will be comparing the features of the two rives.

Last week Friday Miss Baillie set the school a writing challenge, and as we are fond of challenges and competitions, we were keen to show Miss Baillie what  star writers we are. We wrote poems about Autumn in Linlithgow, our poems described what Autumn looks like, feels like, and smells like in Linlithgow to us. We spent some time planning our poems, some poems were acrostic poems and some were poems that rhymed.  After our planning we used the netbooks to type our poems, we were creative with using a range of fonts, and page borders.  Mrs Matos is so pleased with our efforts that she is very sure that we will have a few winners from our class.

On Friday, it was the first of our various committee meetings. remember to ask us about our chosen committee and what we have planned for this session!

Lastly a massive well done to all P6A learners, Miss Baillie awarded the class with Class of the week in assembly on Friday. Mrs Matos is very proud of all the boys and girls in P6A.

 

 

 

We really try this year to work together as a team. We know that if we work well together, that together we will learn.  Each week Mrs Matos will give us a team building challenge, so that we can practise working together. This weeks challenge involved plastic cups, an elastic and string. We worked in groups of four. Each person in the group was given a piece of string, our string was tied to the elastic. Using only the string, we needed to build the tallest tower with the plastic cups. To start off we found it very difficult, but with a growth mindset, communication and team work we managed to build our towers.

It was Maths week this week, and we took a hands on approach to help us with numbers. We have been working on 7 digit numbers, we’ve been looking at the different ways that numbers can be written , such as in words, standard form and expanded form. We’ve been looking at the place value of numbers and rounding to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000. We took our learning outdoors this week, we worked in groups to collect natural resources to create a ‘big’ number. We used sticks, stones and leaves to create our number. Using the number we created we, wrote the number in words, we showed the place value of each digit and lastly we rounded our number to the nearest 10, 100, and 1000.  During class we had various place value and rounding stations set up. We worked in pairs and used concrete materials to answer questions based on numbers. Our last Math challenge this week, was to create as many shapes possible using just one large piece of string, which you could not cut, with team work we raised to the challenge with some great results.

    

Through a variety games, such as word match and scrabble we practiced our spelling words and sound patterns.

We’ve been working hard over the last few weeks to create our French vocabulary flash cards, this week we worked with a partner and using our flash cards we practiced the pronunciation and meanings of the words we have learnt so far.

One of our PE focuses this term is going to be basketball, to get us prepared we are practicing different skills that we will be using. This week we focused on our dribbling skills. It was important that we kept our eye on the ball, and tried to keep control of the ball, so that it didn’t go all over the place.

We’ve had a busy week, but we will be looking forward to it all again on Wednesday, when we back from our long weekend break.

P6A and Mrs Matos

 

 

‘I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you are thinking, it’s  probably worse’. These words come from our class novel, Wonder by R.J Palacio. Before listening to the novel, we were grouped into three’s, Mrs Matos gave each group a tube of toothpaste, a toothpick each and a plate. You can imagine we were just as confused as you are. Mrs Matos asked us to empty out all the toothpaste into the plate, that was a lot of fun, still left confused the next instruction was to put ALL the toothpaste back into the tube…..with only the TOOTHPICK!! It was impossible. We learnt from this activity that the tube represents our mouths, and the toothpaste our words. We realised that any words that are spoken, especially unkind words we can not take back, just like the toothpaste couldn’t  go back into the tube. This activity was fun and messy but we learnt something special before embarking on our journey through the book called Wonder.

This year we want to focus on having a positive growth mindset towards Numeracy and Maths . A lot of us sometimes feel anxious or don’t enjoy Maths because we worried about getting the answer wrong. We watched an important video on why challenges are good for us and how, when we find things difficult, that by trying our brains are growing and by excepting the challenge and making mistakes that is how we learn. To help build our confidence and mental agility, we have Number talk discussions. Number Talks help us to solve problems mentally and then to share our strategies with the class, this has helped us to see that it’s  not how fast we get to the answer or even if we get the answer wrong, it is about sharing our strategies and finding our errors, and that is how we learn, because we all see numbers differently. Over the last week we have been learning to analyse and interpret graphs. We have looked at bar and line graphs, but just for that extra challenge we worked in pairs to analyse and interpret a graph we have never seen before…..A ‘cross graph. We took on the challenge, worked well with our partners and managed to identify all the information that we needed.  ‘Never give up, no matter how difficult it may seem.’

Being in Primary 6 comes with some responsibilities. We have taken on the roles of having P2 Buddies. We know that sometimes using the netbooks can be difficult, so we went along to Mrs Burton and her P2 class to help them research the closest sea side resort to Linlithgow using the netbooks. We needed to show our buddies how to switch the netbooks on, we explained how and why we were using google, and then helped them to type and search. We enjoyed spending some time with the P2’s and we hope to help throughout the year with various other activities.

As part of our weekly research this week, we worked with a partner to research  Treacher_Collins syndrome, as this is the condition that the main narrator in the book, Wonder, has. We had to find facts about the syndrome, this will help us connect better with the narrator and will help us to understand his condition better.

In 1+2 this week we made our own French vocabulary flash cards, which we will use throughout the year to help us remember the meanings of the words and to practice the correct pronunciation.

Another busy week has past, what will be in store…….I ‘WONDER’

P6A and Mrs Matos

Being inspired by last weeks visit to the Edinburgh book festival, we had spent a lot of time this week writing our own monster stories. Although the author Dave Rudden explained the writing process to us, we have been surprised how much hard work goes into writing an extraordinary story.  Mrs Matos has taught us about the three parts of writing. First we need to write all our ideas and thoughts down, we did this by making a story map, the next step is using the story map to help us write our first draft, during and after the first draft we practised our editing skills. We learnt the importance of proof reading as we managed to identify errors with our spelling and punctuation, and finally we could write our final draft, we used our edited first draft to up level our final draft of our monster stories. Mrs Matos is looking forward to reading our creative stories which we have worked so hard to complete.

This week in Numeracy we’ve been learning about different ways to collect data, and the reasons why and how we collect data in the world around us. We worked together to complete a survey on the classes, favourite sports, subject, food etc. Using the information we had gathered we drew up a tally chart. Using the tally chart we compiled all the information onto a bar chart. We have also spent some time this week learning to interpret bar graphs, we quickly learnt how deceiving some graphs may look.

Have you ever been worried before? This was a question that Mrs Matos asked us, Mrs Matos read or should we say dramatized the story of a Huge bag of worries. Mrs Matos had her own bag of worries that she was carrying around to, and showed us that if we don’t share our worries with someone how big the bag of worries can become. We confidently shared some of our worries with each other. Mrs Matos also showed us her special box on her table, that if ever we were worried about anything big or small that we can write it on a piece of paper and put it her worry box, Mrs Matos will then read our worry, and will try her best to help us.  We created our own bag of worries which we wrote down some of the worries in the bag.

Skipping, Hula hooping, balancing are just a few things we did in PE this week. Stations were set up around the hall, and we had to rotate through all the stations focusing on balancing, jumping, skipping and eye hand co-ordination. Miss Hardie even showed off some of her skipping skills too.

In 1 + 2 this week we practised some vocabulary, such as Salut, Au revoir, Bojour , Bonsoir etc. We focused not just knowing the English translation for each, but how to correctly pronounce the words.

From monsters to French words that sums up our learning, and we eager for it to all happen again next week.

P6A and Mrs MatosA

 

A massive warm welcome back to all our learners in Primary 6A. It has been a busy fun first week back. We have enjoyed spending time  learning more about our class mates and familiarising ourselves with our new classroom.

We  started our week off designing a name tent for our tables, this has helped Mrs Matos and Miss Hardie to help them learn our names much quicker.  Our name tents allowed us to be creative with our names, we also wrote three truths and a fib and everyone needed to guess which one was a fib. This was great fun, with a lot of laughter but we also learnt a lot more about each other.

To help us set our expectations for Primary 6, Mrs Matos wrote  various questions on a large sheet of paper , e.g. What can we do to make our class run smoothly and how can Mrs Matos help me be successful this year? Mrs Matos gave us time to think and reflect on these questions. We wrote our answers on a post it note and stuck it under the questions. We then worked in groups to organise the answers and we displayed the responses in a bar graph.

Our first week in Primary 6 has been a real ‘sweet’ week. One of our favourite activities this week was the M&M ice breaker game. Can you believe we got to eat the M&Ms too?? We played the ice breaker game in pairs. We were also given a list of the instructions. Each colour M&M was a different topic that we needed to tell our partner about, for example, if we chose and orange M&M we needed to tell our partner our dreams and hopes for the future. This was another activity that helped us learn more about each other.

An important part of our learning is being able to work together in a group. To help us learn what makes group work effective, Mrs Matos set us on a challenge. We were given three large sheets of tinfoil and some pipe cleaners. We were only given 45 minutes to come up with our own creative structures. For us to complete this challenge we needed to make sure we communicated effectively and that all team members agreed on the design, we had to plan our design and then ‘build’ it, all of this in just 45 minutes!! We all quickly learned as the clock was ticking how important listening and co-operation was in order to complete the challenge. There were some really creative designs. We all had an opportunity to vote for our favourite and the winning group was Mack, Morven and Luke with their house design, well done.

Our final highlight of the week was our trip to the Edinburgh Book Festival. We were fortunate to have an interactive author talk from Dave Rudden and J R Wallis. The talk was not only funny and entertaining but we learned from these two authors that writing is like a muscle, the more you practise the better you will become. We were spoilt with a £3 book voucher which we were able to use towards purchasing a new book. We finally had the opportunity to get our books signed by the authors.

After a busy week, we can only wonder what next week will have in store for us.

P6A and Mrs Matos