Category: Primary 3

What a great start to the holiday weekend! – I’m sure you are extremely proud of your assembly stars today – I couldn’t have asked any more of them, they performed in such a professional way, remembered all their lines and where they should be at exactly the right times.  We have had many lovely comments from others in the school too – A massive well done to all the children 🙂

You will not believe that even after all the rehearsals and two shows today, I do not have one photograph!  Miss Baillie has uploaded one to her blog post and has written a little piece about it.

In other news – as part of ‘Scotland Loves Languages Week’ we welcomed Miss Baillie and two Springfield language ambassadors to our classroom on Tuesday for a Spanish lesson.  We listened to The Gruffalo in Spanish and learned the names of the animals in Spanish then we sang ‘Head Shoulders Knees and Toes’ – ‘Cabeza, Hombros, Rodillas y Pies.’  We then learned the numbers to five and played a game.  Thank you to Mrs Gordon for all her planning and organisation this week, and to Miss Baillie and the girls for our great lesson, we really enjoyed it.

On Wednesday we had a real treat when Prismatic Winds came to school and performed for us.  We learned all about the oboe, flute, clarinet, bassoon and tenor horn.  As well as playing some really cool tunes – including The Simpsons theme tune, because they were in Springfield – they taught us a lot about each individual instrument and how they work to produce such lovely sounds.  The children really were captivated by the music, I tried to get pictures of their faces, it was lovely to see.

Here is the weblink if you would like to know a little more about the quintet https://prismaticwinds.com/

As P3s we have special jobs in the infant part of the school.  Each Monday and Wednesday we are given the opportunity to be Play Leaders and 2 of us each time collect four P1 or P2 children from their classroom and take them for block play.  We help them to make structures and to put the blocks away again – the blocks need to be organised very well to fit back on the shelf correctly so this is not as easy as it sounds.  The interactions between the children is lovely and the creativity is excellent too. P3 are doing a great job.

In PE this week we did a little yoga, it was nice to have some quiet time in all the build up to the assembly.

On Friday, we had an extra long reward time as we had worked so hard on our assembly.  Some of us made, and then played with, play dough and some played games that Mrs Kennedy brought from home that she thought  we might enjoy – again it was so busy there are very few photos!  It was good fun though.

Have a really good long weekend everyone, it was lovely to see so many of you this morning.

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

We were looking forward to our holiday weekend today, as P3 led a superb assembly about ‘forces.’ Thank you Mrs Kennedy for putting on such an informative assembly which was a lovely way to end a busy week.

We are very proud of our children’s  knowledge and abilities in Science at Springfield, thanks to the expertise of Mrs Tulloch and Mrs Begarnie. Mrs Tulloch is busy working with P7 on their STEM project this term, which is to build a moveable buggy. Our STEM family learning event will take place in Term 4 where you will be able to take part in a STEM challenge with your child.

Achievements this week:

-Well done to D in P3 for his success with Linlithgow Rose Football Team.

-Congratulations to F in P4/5 for his efforts at Cubs and to A in P1 for the same in Beavers! Well done boys!

-Finally, we are extremely proud of a group of our P7 children who came second (by one point!) in the Linlithgow cluster schools, Inter-house Quiz!

Have a lovely long weekend everyone!

Miss Baillie xx💖💫

We began the week with some grammar, learning about proper nouns.  Once we got into the swing of things we came up lots of proper nouns and learned that they ALWAYS begin with a capital letter.  Mrs Kennedy will be looking for this in our writing jotters from now on.

On Tuesday, we had our house treat – a trip to the park.  It really was a treat , we had great fun and played together really well.  We’re hoping to get out and about  again soon.

We are continuing our cameras history trail.  We learned about some of the first cameras which were pinhole cameras, these are simple cameras  with a tiny pinhole – essentially a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through the hole and projects an upside down image on the opposite side of the box, this is known as the camera obscura effect.  To help us to understand this we made our own pinhole cameras.  This was also a good technology lesson as we had to work hard to make sure our tube did not let in any light – including securing paper over the end with no gaps.  We also had to make two tubes – one slightly smaller than the other so it could fit inside the larger one.  All the groups managed it, with a few re-starts and adjustments.  There was great excitement as we tried them out.  Great teamwork too.

At the end of our History of Cameras project we will be presenting our learning to P3A.  We have begun powerpoints to help us to do this.  We will add one or two slides per week to build up our presentations as we go rather than do it all at the end.  This is a good way of recording what we learn each week for us to look back on too.  This week we worked in pairs to design title slides and produce one slide about pinhole cameras.  We used a check list to make sure we completed the task correctly.  A great start!

In numeracy, we continued our subtraction and time topics.  We really are improving our mental subtraction skills.  We looked at quick ways of subtracting teen numbers from 2-digit numbers by subtracting the 10 then the units.  Some of us have been subtracting a single digit from a 2-digit number, with bridging.  To do this mentally we took away the number of units to reach the multiple of ten, then subtracted the remaining units (e.g., to calculate 35 – 8 mentally, we would do  35 – 5 = 30, 30 – 3 = 27).

We have a new time wall display, it has a real clock and labels to help us to read the clock throughout the day.  Some of our clocks from last week are on the wall too as well as examples of digital clocks.  We will continue to practise quarter to the hour, especially on a digital clock.  We will move onto ordering times next.

We are also continuing our ‘French Fridays.’  We are now great at numbers to 10, we can count out loud, as well as read and write the number words.  We have begun to learn numbers to 20.  Today we played a game where we rolled dice, said the numbers in French, added the numbers, said the total in French and then coloured the number on our sheet.  The person with the most numbers coloured was the winner.  This got quite competitive!  I heard great French too.

In between all of this we have been very busy rehearsing our assembly.  Thank you very much for helping the children to learn their lines and for help with props.

See you next Friday 🙂

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

This week we helped P1 children with Education City.  We showed them how to log onto a netbook, helped them to find the website and type in their usernames and passwords and then helped them to play some games of their choice.  Mrs Kennedy was very impressed with how patient we were and how well we explained what to do. We were also mindful not to do everything for the P1s but to help them to do it for themselves – they will learn much better that way.

In literacy, we worked on our spelling pattern – ‘ed’ ending words and revisited alphabetical order.  Some children were becoming more secure with finding words in the dictionary – trying to open the book near the letter they wanted according to where that letter comes in the alphabet.  Some children were putting words in alphabetical order – sometimes having to look at the third letter to do this as the first two were the same.

We also began our History trail topic.  Last week the children chose the camera as the invention they would like to learn more about.  We will look at the history of cameras, a little on how they work and how cameras are used today.

We began by thinking about all the ways cameras feature in our lives today.  Together we came up with lots of answers.  For example, to communicate – pictures in newspapers, magazines and on the internet, speed cameras, x-rays, to name a few.

Next week we will learn about the very first cameras and begin to think about how they work.

In numeracy and maths, we have been continuing with subtraction.  It was quite tricky this week as we were learning mental maths strategies of subtracting near multiples of 10 (9, 11. 29, 31…) from 2-digit numbers.  We were subtracting the nearest 10 and then had to remember to add one if the original number ended in a 9 and to take another away if it ended in a 1.  This required a lot of resilience as quite a few had to keep trying when their first answers weren’t correct.  We kept at it though and we’re getting there now.

On Thursday we looked again at time.  Concentrating on quarter to and quarter past.  Some children were learning am and pm times.  When Mrs Kennedy marked our work, she discovered that  a lot of children were struggling to read the correct hour when it was quarter to.  To help us we made clocks and practised setting them to ‘quarter to’ times read the times out loud, explaining where the hands were.  This seems to have helped and we are much more confident now.

We have also been very busy coming up with ideas and writing the script for our assembly – words will come home next week and I might be asking for some props too!

Have a lovely weekend, wrap up warm.

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

During reading on a Monday, while each group is getting their new book, the others have reading tasks to work on.  This week we looked at identifying the main features of a story – the main characters, supporting characters, setting/s, the problem in the story and how the problem was resolved.  The children worked in their reading groups, deciding together which book to use for the task.  The groups worked well  and there was lots of good discussion as they studied the stories closely.

On Tuesday we looked again at punctuation – our learning outcome is to use capital letters,  full stops, question marks and exclamation marks correctly every time we write. The tricky part is transferring our learning into all of our writing and not just the lessons when we are specifically looking at punctuation.  The activities were good fun and hopefully memorable enough for us to remember correct punctuation, the first time, every time we write.  A brought in the balloons from his birthday party last weekend, we had great fun trying to make as many words as possible with the letters.  We wrote a long list of words and this was a very popular activity – thank you!

In numeracy we have been trying some problem solving at the beginning of each lesson – applying the skills we have been learning.  This week we had to use our mental subtraction knowledge to think of as many ways to make a different number each day.  We will continue with various problem solving activities to encourage the application of our learning to help us to deepen our understanding.

We finished our mini topic on Williamina Fleming this week.  We did some space chalk drawings.  It was good to work with chalk and we created some very good effects when we gently rubbed the colours together.

We also wrote diary entries of a day in the life of Williamina.  We made the date 1888 and described what Williamina’s day might have been like the day she discovered the Horsehead nebula.  We thought about what life might have been like in 1888, food, transport, etc and how Williamina might have felt on that day.  We worked with a partner and typed our diary entries onto word.  Our checklist helped us to remember to write the date, write in first person and to describe the day in the correct order.  Everyone produced a very good diary entry and our word processing skills are getting quite good too.

On Thursdays I have been taking the children outside for PE.  Last week we were very fortunate to have Mr Fyfe with us, who is an experienced football coach and referee.   He took us for some drills and refereed a game at the end.  I learned a lot too and I will be able to add the drills into my lessons.

On Friday, N, S and C presented at our ‘Famous Scots’ assembly.  N read his detailed Williamina Fleming report and S and C read the very good diary entry they wrote together.  Great work boys and well done for being so confident today too.

Have a lovely weekend, enjoy your haggis 😉

P3B and Mrs Kennedy