Category: Primary 5

We have certainly been very active this week!

Rugby

We walked to the Rugby Club this week for the start of a block of 3 sessions of Rugby. We all played Tag Rugby. It is a non- tackle, minimal contact version of rugby. The objective of the game is to be the team that has accumulated the most points at full time by scoring trys. A try is scored by the attacking team when they place the ball on ground on or over the try line. A try is worth one point. Mrs McCartney really enjoyed watching us and was very impressed with our positive attitudes! We are looking forward to the next couple of rugby sessions.

Sweeties in a Jar

Mrs McCartney is so proud of Zara, Joseph Moon and Joanna! They have been raising money for the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh. They have gone around the classes for the last 2 weeks and lots of the children have guessed how many sweets are in the jar. We are going to announce the winner at assembly this morning!!!
Thank you everyone who supported this wonderful cause!

Maths

We have been learning how to calculate addition sums using the standard written method (ie. chimney sums) after we have developed some mental strategies.
We found this useful for dealing with larger numbers as mental calculations can be tricky. We have persevered and helped each other if we get stuck. Chimney sums provide an accurate and quick means to the answer.

Literacy

In Grammar this week we were focussing on Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’ song. We were exploring the use of figurative language. We had to identify, label, and explain the type of figurative language used in the song lyrics. Example included: imagery devices such as metaphors, similes and personification. We are going to follow up this lesson next week by using similes, metaphors and personification to describe a family member!!

Street Dance

We had a taster Street Dance session on Thursday with Sam! We learned a whole dance routine and Mrs McCartney joined in too! We learned that no beat sounds go beyond 8 and how important it is to listen to the beat of a song-what a lot of fun!!

Things to remember:

*Rugby on Tuesday 24th Jan
*Forth Crossing Education Centre trip on Wednesday 25th January- packed lunch and snack is required please.

Have a fabulous weekend!

P5A and Mrs McCartney x

What a busy week our first full week back!

Birds

We have been studying birds for our ‘Outdoor Learning’ focus. We have been learning to use a map to locate the world’s countries, continents and oceans and to understand why some animals travel long distances around the world. Mrs McCartney asked us to show our understanding by plotting the migration route of a bird, name the countries, continents and oceans the bird will fly over and to identify the hazards that a migrating bird might encounter. We have been working really well in our small groups and are looking forward to seeing each other’s presentations! Our RSPB workshop on Thursday was great, we even had snow when we were exploring the outside school grounds when we were identifying birds!
Thank you very much to our parent helpers who came along to help with this workshop and to Mrs Law for organising it!

Maths

Mrs McCartney is very impressed with the strategies that we are using to asdd 4/4 digit numbers. It has really helped us having ‘solid, logical’ ways to add 3 digit numbers and lots of us have used the same strategies for larger numbers. We are working well to support each other, especially when we are calculating the missing numbers in addition sums!!

Literacy

We have been focusing on adverbs this week for Grammar. We worked in pairs and were given a verb. We had to think about 5 adverbs that we could use for our given verb. Lots of us were very creative and came up with games to guess these, such as Charades etc! We were asked to use adverbs in our story writing this week, ‘If I Were In a Snow Globe’. We ‘chunked’ down what our writing would look like by answering 4 questions during the planning process. We had to think about, How did I get in there? What was it like inside? How did I get out or will I stay inside forever?
We are looking forward to our Rugby sessions that start this Tuesday!

All of P5A are wishing you all a happy, snowy weekend!

Things to Remember:
*Rugby sessions start on Tuesday 17th January-please return the Rugby permission slips by Monday 16th January.

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

 

P5A’s Political Week…

What a busy week ‘Saving Our School!’

We heard an incredible, true story that gave us an inspirational lift this week. We watched a video of children that live in the desert region of Cholistan, Pakistan who are in a battle for their education. They are often expected to work with their family’s livestock instead of going to lessons and many girls are kept out of school completely. Even if their parents want them to go, a lot of children in Cholistan live so far away from the nearest school that it’s dangerous for them to travel there.
In 2009, the regional government announced funding for 75 schools in Cholistan. This project changed the lives of 5,500 children over five years before disaster struck: it was announced that the project would end in March 2014 and that the schools would all have to close. Even though many of their classrooms were not fully built and they had to have lessons on the dusty floor outside, the children of Cholistan loved their schools. They needed to fight back against these closures. We found this story inspirational as they were successful, fighting for their cause. In Cholistan, the media helped to make change happen. The Governor couldn’t ignore the issue as so many people were talking about it.
In a democracy, we can all help to hold leaders to account for their actions by reminding them of things they have promised to do. We explored democracy and how people take part in it. We looked at how we would fight to keep our school open and how important education is.
We created our own political parties where we had to decide on the following:
*Make up a party and decide on a name.
*Decide who will be your candidate.
*Produce a manifesto.
*Write a speech for your candidate.
*Create posters for display.
* Write a press release.
We delivered our speeches and voted today for which party we thought would be best. The political party that won was W.W.W ‘What We Want- well done!! Sophie was their candidate and they all worked really well as a team! Primary 5B were our audience and voted also, thank you so much P5B! Fantastic effort by all!!
It left us realising that we have a voice and how lucky we are to get educated daily. There are still millions of children around the world who are without access to education.

You can watch the videos that inspired us on the Action Aid website.

Have a fantastic weekend everyone! The countdown begins to Santa coming…

Mrs McCartney and P5A x ho ho ho

Things to remember:
*P5A ‘Christmas Activity Afternoon’ 1.15-3.15pm on Monday 19th December (‘party clothes’ many be brought in and your child can get changed before party.)
*St Michael’s Family Carol Service 7pm on Tuesday 20th December
*School stops for holidays on Wednesday 21st December at 3.15pm
School returns Wednesday 4th January 2017.

Christmas Countdown…

St Michael’s Day Care Centre

What a proud moment singing to St Michael’s Day Care Centre. We all sang beautifully and Mrs McCartney and Mrs Matos were delighted with our singing. Adam and Oliver filmed us singing, we will share with you soon! We all felt very Christmassy!!!
We wish the Day Care Centre a very, very Merry Christmas!

Nativity
We thoroughly enjoyed ‘The Inkeeper’s Breakfast’ Nativity play on Tuesday. Lots of us had siblings that were in the performance. We thought it was very funny and amusing! Well done to all involved!

Tesco

Primary 5 all made wonderful Christmas tree art for Tesco. We wanted to add lots of detail and considered how we would achieve this task. Mrs Mellon is going to send our art work to Tesco and hopefully it will be in their windows soon!!

Bubblegum and Fluff
We all had a fantastic time at St Michel’s Church on Thursday morning. It was jam packed with lots of fun activities to do!! We made candle mosaic tiles, we learned that it is all about giving at Christmas time, not about what is inside the present.

Science
Mrs Tulloch was amazing and let us have our Science lesson on Wednesday rather than our usual Thursday because we had a trip. We made prototypes for our parachutes that we are going to make next week. We had to consider how it would float, if Santa would stay in it and what materials we would use to make it.

Twelve Days of Christmas Problem Solving Challenge

We had a sing-along to the Christmas Carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas’ then Mrs McCartney gave us a challenge! We had to think about the different characters that appear in the carol and then calculate how many legs are there ALTOGETHER in the carol. We also had to calculate how many gifts. Mrs McCartney asked us for our suggestions, if there was a method to how we calculated the answer and how we chose to record the results. We all worked really well in our teams!

Things to remember:
*Wednesday 14th December- Handball Festival at Linlithgow Academy *Wednesday 14th December- School Christmas lunch

Have a lovely Christmassy weekend and a good rest!
P5A and Mrs McCartney x

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

 

Christmas is coming…

Well, what a week preparing for the Christmas Fayre!

Enterprise/Christmas Fayre

Primary 5A have been brainstorming ideas of what we thought would sell at the Christmas Fayre, evaluating our ideas. We researched what resources what we thought we would need and how much they would be to buy. We looked at how to market our product and if we thought that it was something that our ‘customers’ would buy. We spent a lot of time considering how much to sell our product.
By 10.50am we were sold out!!!! What a brilliant success!! Mrs McCartney was overwhelmed with how enthusiastic we were, even singing Christmas carols beside our stall, we are already counting down to next year and wondering what to make???!!
We will be reflecting on our week next week thinking about what we personally thought of our Enterprise Project, which parts we enjoyed and if we were going to do it again, what would we change and why- well done to all and thank you so much for all your help and support!!

St Michael’s Day Care Centre
We have started to sing the songs that we are going to sing next Tuesday to the Day Care Centre! Our teachers think that we are doing a great job! We can’t wait for next Tuesday!

Things to remember:
*Christmas post begins on Monday 5th-16th December- there is no charge for the post
*Tuesday 6th December – singing to Day Care Centre. Children can wear Christmas hats that day if they wish.
*Thursday 8th December- Bubblegum and Fluff trip- please remember to bring a packed lunch.

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

 

 

 

 

P5B dazzled us today with their acting, dancing and singing as they provided an account of life in WW2. The children acted out the story of an Evacuee and described the feelings of children who would have been in this position. Well done to those involved! Thank you especially to Mrs Matos and all parents and carers who provided costumes and came along to support the children today.  Excellent work everyone!

Have a lovely weekend everyone!

Kind wishes,

Miss Baillie x