Author: Mrs Matos Van Den Heever

It was important that our blog started off with the highlight of the week. Entering the classroom we noticed something  in the  corner of the room , suspiciously cornered off with tape, and the words ‘ CAUTION’.. We were keen to find out what this was all about. Soon we heard the sounds to the breaking news, and all was revealed, In our classroom was the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. We knew that this news needed to be reported in our P5B news report. We were all quickly trained on how to be creative and factual journalists. We learnt about the three C’s in a news report –  Clear, Concise and Correct. After our journalism crash course we got straight to work gathering facts about Mary Queen of Scots and the lead up to her execution. We made sure we sorted through all the facts and planned what will be important and relevant in our report. We made sure that our opening statement answered the questions, who, what, when, where and why. We are looking forward to reading and sharing our news report with the class next week.

We have continued to learn a variety of subtraction strategies. We have enjoyed sharing and discussing the different strategies that we prefer using during our Number talk discussions. Our Number talk sessions helps us to talk about our thinking and the strategies that we find most effective to use. We worked together with a partner and created a story board of the different subtraction strategies that we can use.

During literacy this week we have been learning about the three uses for the apostrophe. We shared and gave examples of the three uses for the apostrophe. We had great fun singing along to the apostrophe song. The song helped us to learn when to use the words, they’re, their, and there correctly. The song also helped us learn how to use the words your and you’re correctly. Mrs Matos has set us a challenge to check any written work done by the adults at home and see if they make any apostrophe errors. As we discovered the apostrophe can often be used incorrectly. We worked together and sorted out words and phrases that showed if the apostrophe is used correctly. We later became editors and edited a passage from ‘The sea King and the Little Mermaid’. We quickly picked up the apostrophe errors and were able to correct them. We really got the hang of editing when Evie had spotted that Mrs Matos had forgotten out her apostrophe on her PowerPoint. Well done Evie. We guess teachers can make mistakes too.

 

We did something rather strange this week…We got to relax!!! While it was a type of relaxing. Mrs Matos and Mrs McCartney took us on a journey of Mindfulness.  It was interesting to learn how important breathing is and by breathing correctly it can help us to relax and if we get upset or worried about something, taking only a few minutes to go somewhere quiet and take careful breaths can really help.

 

Next week we looking forward to our fencing taster session on Tuesday. Hope everyone has a lovely weekend.

P5B and Mrs Matos

 

 

It was lovely to see all the children back this week, after what sounds like a busy and fun long weekend.

Although it was only a short week, we managed to get plenty of learning done.

On Wednesday we were excited to show of our bridges that we had built at home. This was a follow up activity from our visit to the Forth Road Education centre. Mrs Matos was so pleased and proud of all the hard work and thought that was put into building our bridges. We used all the knowledge we had learnt from our visit, to build our bridges. Primary 3 came along to look at our master piece, we spent time talking to Primary 3 , explaining why we chose the design and materials that we did. Primary 3 were so impressed with our work, that word spread around the school, that Primary 2 wanted to come have a look and even Miss Baillie.

In Literacy this week we were learning about the comma, and how important that the comma is used correctly in our writing. To help us remember when to use a comma, we worked with a partner and created a ‘Rules about Commas’ poster. Our poster displayed the 6 comma rules and for each rule we had to write our own sentence using the comma rule correctly. Mrs Matos has displayed some of the poster on the classroom wall, so that we can refer back to the rules, when using commas in our writing.

We have been continuing to learn different strategies in subtraction. Last week we had learnt the counting on strategy/shopkeepers method, using a number line. But this week we learnt the counting on strategy without using a number. We also learnt one other strategy and that is called the negative way. We are enjoying learning all these different strategies, and we will be able to use the one that we feel is best for us.

We’ve been learning a lot about Scotland and about the people who have made a difference in Scotland, one person we have been researching about is Mary Queen of Scots. Mrs Matos his clues around the classroom, we needed to find the clues and use our note taking skills, to write down as much information as we could. We used the information that we had found on the clues to create a time line of events for  Mary Queen of Scots. Did you know? Mary Queen of Scots was married THREE times!

What more could we possibly learn this week?

Continuing with our Scottish focus, we spent some time on the netbooks  researching facts about Scotland. We looked up interesting places in Scotland, historical sites, traditional foods, and so much more. We made a note of the all the information we found on a Scotland snapshot worksheet.

Last week we created interactive posters which included the facts we had learnt about the life of Alexander Graham Bell, this week we had the opportunity to present our research and posters to the class. A lot of work was put into the posters, a lot of creativity and detail was shown.

In literacy this week we continued learning about the different types of figurative language. We worked together with a partner. We were given some pictures, we had to match the pictures together, decide what figurative language it would demonstrate and using the pictures we made our own sentences that would demonstrate the type of figurative language it was. We worked really well together, we communicated our ideas, listened to each other and we had to use some problem solving skills too. We put all this information onto a poster, which we later presented to the class.

In Numeracy this week we continued with subtraction, the strategy that we learnt was partitioning. During number talks we were given a string of 2 digit subtraction problems, we were encouraged to use the bridging strategy to solve the problem, we also had to think of one other strategy that we could use to help us solve the subtraction problem. We are becoming very confident with our number talk discussions. We all really enjoyed the partitioning strategy better, so far we find that this strategy can help us solve 2 and 3 digit subtraction must quicker. We wonder which strategy we will be learning this week?

This week Tuesday was our last week of Rugby at the Linlithgow Rugby club. We have learnt so much over the last three weeks, not only did we learn about rugby, but we learnt the importance of teamwork and listening. The coaches and our teachers were so impressed with our behaviour , our willingness to learn and our team playing, both Primary 5 classes were award class of the week this week at Friday’s assembly! Well done P5A and P5B.

It’s a short week this week, we wonder what Mrs Matos could have in store for us this week?

P5B and Mrs Matos

A fun start to our week. Miss Baillie came along to our class on Monday morning, and got involved in our lesson on famous Scots. Miss Matos really got into the spirit of things, although born in South Africa, Mrs Matos is proud to call Scotland her home. We discussed things about Scotland that made us proud, and we learnt that Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh and amongst other inventions, he is most famous for inventing the telephone. As part of our learning, we worked together in groups, and did some research on Alexander Graham Bell, we researched facts about his early life, his inventions and his interest in sound. Once we had gathered all our information, we created an interactive poster ( this is a poster that you can stick your head through so that you look just like Alexander Graham Bell). We will be presenting our interactive posters to the rest of the class next week. Emily, Jared and Hannah presented their poster at our Scottish Assembly on Friday.   ( Written By: Evie and Emily)

This week’s  highlight was our trip to the Forth Road Crossing Education Centre.  On Wednesday the, 25th January, Primary 5 went to on a trip to the Forth Road Crossing Education Centre, we were so lucky to have Elaine Barry, a Civil Engineer, to educate us about the new bridge and how different bridges are made. We worked in two teams , Ready 2 Build and Engineering Scotland. In our teams we had to work together to build a bridge. Our project managers were, Andrew and Emily. The Quantity surveyors were, Evie and Anna, and the health and safety officers were Hannah and Barry. The winning team was Ready 2 Build- Well done, their project manager, Emily lead the team to success, everyone worked really well together and had their bridge built in speedy time. After lunch we had the opportunity to walk across the Forth Road Bridge, this gave us the opportunity to have a closer look at the bridge’s construction. It was a wonderful trip, lots of fun and a better understanding of what all is involved in building a bridge.  (Written By: Dayna ).

Numeracy this week we focused on subtraction. The first strategy that we worked with was Bridging. Bridging is when we use a number to help us subtract 2 and three digit numbers. Some of us found this tricky, but after some practise on the white boards we quickly became more confident using this method. We even made some subtraction problems for our elbow partner to solve. In number talks we were given a string of subtraction problems. Using our mental agility we quickly found the link and were able to solve the problems using more than one strategy. (Written by Evie)

 

In Literacy this week we have been learning about Figurative language. Some of the ones we focused on were, Similes, Metaphors, Hyperbole, Onomatopoeia and Personification. We worked together with our elbow partners to complete a task of deciding which Figurative language each sentence would be. Some of the sentences were a little tricky and we were getting confused between a Metaphor and a Hyperbole, Mrs Matos then got us all up on our feet, and taught us a dance and song to help us remember the differences between them. Our spelling sound for this week was words with the ind and idl sound patterns. ( Written by Emily and Adam).

 

In science this week we made the colour wheel. We coloured our wheel the 7 colours of the spectrum and then we put it onto a motor. We made the motor spin with our electrical circuit. The colour wheel spun and we saw white.

 

On Tuesday it will be our last trip to Linlithgow Rugby Club, we all looking forward to what will be in store for us next week.

P5B and Mrs Matos

 

 

This week in P5B we have had an active fun filled week. Starting our week off with a walk to Linlithgow Rugby Club. Once we arrived we were met by the coaches. We were divided into two groups. Once in our groups, we played a few warm up games and then a few rounds of tag rugby. It was great fun and we are looking forward to another round of games next week Tuesday.

The fun didn’t stop there. On Wednesday morning the RSPB came to visit. We had a lovely discussion about the different types of birds that we can find in our area, and we were also given tips on how we can identify the different birds. We then headed outside to do a little bird watching and we helped the RSPB count the number of birds on our pitch. This week we will be logging our bird count on the RSPB website.

The fun didn’t stop there. Mrs Matos surprised us on Thursday afternoon with a visit from one of the teachers from Dance World, who came along to teach us some street dance! What fun, Mrs Tulloch and Miss Prince came along too, to learn a few new moves. We even got to add a dab to our dance.

In numeracy this week, we used all our knowledge that we have learnt so far in P5 (Place value, doubles/ near doubles, rounding and addition) and worked in pairs to create our own Math game. We needed to use all that we know to create a challenging and Fun Math game. This week we will get the opportunity to play each other’s games. This week we became Math detectives, we worked with a partner to answer some maths problems to help find the super hero who had turned bad in Mathhaton. Ryan, Ambra, Evie, Samuel, Emily and Gabriella were among a few of the detectives who managed to solve the mystery of the evil super hero. We are looking forward to learning different strategies to help us solve subtraction problems  next week.

The fun never stops in primary 5, next week we have another trip to Linlithgow Rugby club to look forward to, and on Wednesday we are going to the Fourth Crossing Education centre!

Till next week Mrs Matos and P5B

 

 

Welcome back to everyone after a lovely Christmas break. We hope that everyone had a lovely time with family, and by the sounds of it Santa was good to all the children.

We have been busy over the last week and a half, reflecting on things that had happened during 2016, we also thought about the things that we had achieved in 2016. With it now being a new year, we thought we would join the thousands of people around the world and write down some of our goals for 2017. We created lovely 2017 flip charts, and under each number we wrote our goal for 2017, we hope to look back at them at the end of the year and I am sure that we would have reached the goals we set for ourselves. We made ‘Lets party like it’s 2017’ booklets,  our booklets helped us to reflect on 2016, set goals for 2017 it also involved a little Math and having us calculate what age we would be in different years.

 

Literacy this week we started writing letters to our future self. This is great fun as we getting to write things about ourselves, and we also leaving special messages for our future selves. We have included special memories and events that have happened that we want to remember. Mum’s and dad’s have the big responsibility to hold onto our letters until the specified date that we have chosen to open them, we will be finishing our final draft this week, and will be bringing them home. Keep an eye out for our letters mum’s and dad’s and remember to keep them somewhere safe.

We have been learning about verbs and adverbs this week. We worked together in groups and identified the verbs and adverbs in the sentence. We noticed that an adverb can tell us how, when and where the verb takes place. We had fun creating our own sentences and asking other groups to identify the verbs and adverbs.

 

Numeracy this week we have been learning to use partitioning and friendly number strategies to solve addition problems. We are really enjoying our number talks discussions, and using the different strategies to solve the problems. We worked in pairs to solve a couple addition problems and also made some of our own addition problems for other groups to solve. We made some very tricky problems, but we managed to solve them using the strategies we have learnt and a little bit of team work.

 

The weather helped us to create some lovely art this week. We got creative and made pictures of ourselves catching snowflakes.

 

PE this week we warmed up with some fun exercises, we  did some army crawls, bear crawls, leap frog and some stretches. We had so much fun at the handball festival just before Christmas, Mrs Matos thought we could improve on our  handball skills with a game of handball. We really remembered so much from the festival, we were exhausted after PE but we had plenty of fun.

 

A have a few things to look forward to next week. On Tuesday morning we will be going to the Rugby club ,  Wednesday morning the RSPB are coming to the school and we will be doing some fun bird watching activities and on Thursday afternoon we have special people coming in to teach us some new dance moves. Hope everyone has a lovely weekend, have fun and plenty of rest because next week looks like it is going to be jammed packed with fun!

Mrs Matos and P5B

 

We can’t believe how quickly the weeks are going by, already at the end of another week and time to update our blog.

This week we were fortunate to have Mrs Malcolm come along and visit us during our literacy lesson. It was no ordinary lesson, we had to step into the emergency room, become doctors and preform contraction surgery!! We received an emergency call on the smartboard that the contractions had fallen apart and we have to put them together with plasters (apostrophes), we even had the heart monitor beating, making sure that we didn’t let our ‘patients’ flat line! It was great fun and we quickly figured out how important it was to put the apostrophe in the right place when using contractions. We are going to make sure that we using them correctly when doing our writing tasks.

In number talks we have been teaching each other various addition strategies. We have discussed which strategies we found more efficient.

With the run up to our Christmas Fayre we had a fair bit of planning to do. Not only did we have the exciting part of having to make our snowman soup but there were other important matters to attend to. We learnt about the importance of product costing and the terms profit and loss. We spent some time this week calculating  how much our snowman soup would cost us to make. We then had to determine what the best selling price would be, keeping in mind that we had some competition, as well as the cost of making the product. Once we decided on a selling price, we calculated whether we would make a profit or loss. We calculated how much profit per snowman soup we would make…WOW we didn’t realise how much was involved! Although we had to spend a bit of time calculating, adding, dividing…it all added to the fun and excitement that was still to come! We are proud to say that we did, in deed sell ALL our snowman soup Wahoo! What a fun morning at the Christmas Fayre, a job well done Primary 5!

 

It was so great to have our special person come along and join us for our growth mindset afternoon. We had great fun designing and building a flying machine, although not all our ‘machines’ managed to fly we did a very good job trying to persuade our special person that our flying machine was best. It was a challenging task and we all tried our best to have a growth mindset. Thank you to everyone who came along.

 

Another exciting week planned for next week, keep checking in to see what we have been up to.

Mrs Matos and P5B

 

It was all go with our class assembly this week, with dress rehearsals, dancing ,singing and then finally the big reveal on Friday. What a show! Our class assembly was about children of World War 2 and evacuation, we did a short play , ‘Goodbye Mr Hitler’, its was amazing,  a great experience for everyone who took part , we remembered all our lines and really stepped into character . It was a special experience and a big thank you to everyone who came along to support us.

This weeks book week we had a little bit of fun creating our own character menus. We learnt about healthy eating and the importance of exercise. We chose our favourite book and created a healthy menu using the characters from our book. It was great fun playing with words and creating some delicious healthy menus with a splash of fun.

Continuing with World War 2 , we learnt what items evacuees had in their case when they were evacuated to the rural areas. We worked in groups to arrange modern and war items under the headings, essential items, chosen items and unsuitable items. Not only did we learn what was essential during the war but this activity really made us realise that a lot of the modern items we have are not essential and we could live without it. We learnt about food and clothes rationing during the war and the reasons and importance of rationing. We learnt that adults were given 66 clothing coupons and children were given 76 coupons. We had a think about all the clothes we own and we calculated how many coupons they would add up to, we were shocked by how many coupons we would have spent, some of us spent as much as 500 coupons!!! We then imagined that our house was bombed and our clothes were all burnt. We had to use our 76 coupons to buy new clothes, what a challenge, but we leant how fortunate we are to have so much.

This week during number talk, we worked with a partner and we taught each other different addition strategies. It was very interesting to see the different strategies that everyone uses. We are becoming more confident adding 3 digit numbers.

This week in science with Mrs Tulloch we launched our rockets. It was great fun, thank you Mrs Tulloch!

In PE with Mrs Reid this week, we were challenging our gymnastics abilities. We were so excited for this lesson and it was definitely worth the wait. Some things we found more challenging than others but overall we enjoyed PE.

Next week  is all about Christmas hampers and Christmas fayres. Another busy week of learning and fun ahead. We are looking forward to having our special person coming along on Wednesday afternoon.

P5 and Mrs Matos

 

 

 

 

It has been a week of remembrance in P5B. We have taken the time this week to remember the soldiers that had fought and lost their life in the war. To help us understand more about what it was like to have lost someone during the war, Mr Robison (Ben’s dad), took the time to come along talk to the Primary 5s about world war 1 and world war 2, he shared his stories about his granddad (Ben’s great granddad), who they sadly lost in the first world war. Mr Robison shared photographs and medals to show the Primary 5s how fallen soldiers are honoured and remembered. Thank you very much Mr Robison , you left the primary 5s with a lot  of thought and appreciation for what goes on during the war.

We have also been very busy writing thank you letters to all the guests  that came along and shared their stories about war and the part that they had during the wars. We learnt the difference of a formal and informal letter, and the importance of  having good grammar, punctuation and vocabulary when writing letters.

 

 

We got very creative this week, making our own poppies for remembrance day,  on Friday the 11th November. We really enjoyed getting creative and making something that represents something so important to us.

 

We are continuing with number talks in Math, this week our number talk focus was on addition. We are becoming more confident with number talks!

 

The Primary 5s have been apart of quality dinning during lunch. Quality dinning gives us the opportunity to develop our communication skills. This week we had quality dinning with Primary4s, Primary 6 and Primary 7.

A news letter has gone that Primary 5 are collecting non perishable foods for St Michael Day care centre. We are collecting food to make Christmas hampers. Please support us!

Have a great weekend!