Our Primary 6 and 7 school footballers are continuing to train hard ahead of their upcoming league meetings and cluster tournaments. We are currently still training indoors on Mondays from 3.15-4.15pm but will be returning outside on Monday 5th March, at which point both P6 and P7 will train together again. Any P6 and P7 boys and girls are more than welcome to attend, just let Mr. Logan know if you would like to join.
Here are some important dates for the footballing family calendars:
Monday 12th February – HOLIDAY
Monday 19th February – Football league meeting (2), letters to follow
Monday 26th February – P6 training (indoors)
Monday 5th March – P6 and P7 training (outdoors)
Monday 12th March – Football league meeting (3), letters to follow
Monday 19th March – P6 and P7 training (outdoors)
Monday 26th March – HOLIDAY
Monday 2nd April – HOLIDAY
Monday 9th April – Football league meeting (4), letters to follow
Monday 16th April – NO TRAINING
Monday 23rd April – P6 and P7 training (outdoors)
Monday 30th April – P6 and P7 training (outdoors)
Monday 7th May – HOLIDAY
Monday 14th May – P6 and P7 training (outdoors)
Monday 21st May – P6 and P7 training (outdoors)
Monday 28th May – P6 and P7 training (outdoors)
Monday 4th June – NO TRAINING (P7 Camp)
Monday 11th June – P6 and P7 training (outdoors)
Monday 18th June – P6 and P7 training (outdoors)
Monday 25th June – End of year awards ceremony in P7b’s classroom
It’s been another busy week in P7b, here’s what we’ve been up to…
Numeracy and Mathematics
This week we began a unit of work on data and analysis. We have been selecting appropriate ways to gather and sort data for given purposes and justifying our choice of method, for example, a survey, questionnaire or group tallies. Having gathered this data, we used a variety of methods to display it, including frequency tables, vertical bar charts and line graphs. These displays of data included suitable titles, labels on both axes (which are the fixed vertical and horizontal reference lines) and an appropriate scale. Next week, we will continue to explore different ways in which to gather, organise, analyse and display data including through the use of digital technologies.
Literacy and English
Having reached the floor with their compliment chain, P7b were lucky enough to escape homework this week and consolidated their learning of previous spelling patterns and rules. In writing, we wrote thank you letters to the STEM engineers who visited us and were interviewed ahead of our work to build movable buggies. We adhered to a set structure for our letters before redrafting and printing these using Microsoft Word. On Thursday, we started on an assessed piece of writing with only a picture stimulus to get our creative juices flowing (see below).
A dark picture of a savanna plain.
Having completed our initial planning, we will continue with the writing of our stories next week. As we write, we will be self-assessing our work alongside the criteria for a Second Level piece of work. Mr. Logan is looking forward to reading these once they are completed.
In reading this week, we continued our group novel studies and developed our reading skills using the comprehension box. We chose from a variety of texts before answering different types of questions. When faced with literal questions we looked carefully to find and lift the answer directly from the text. When answering inferential questions we tried to read between the lines using context clues and asking questions to help us make sense of the text. And finally, when posed with evaluative questions we offered our own ideas and opinions, or related our answer to our own personal experiences.
Health and Wellbeing
P7b visited Bonnytoun Nursery this week and enjoyed interacting with our youngest learners. We enjoyed drawing, paired reading, using ICT, building towers, playing with the slime and making sand castles. It was lovely to spend some time with them and we’ll be sure to visit again soon.
As we approach the end of our block of football for P.E, we have been further developing our ability to pass the ball accurately and introduced to shooting. We explored different ways to pass the football before establishing that the inside of our foot is most accurate. However, when shooting, the inside of our foot can be used to improve accuracy but we attempted to use the ‘laces’ to increase the power of our shot. Next week we will be applying these skills in small sided games, analysing our performance and officiating matches.
This week we started our focus on internet safety in the lead up to Safer Internet Day on Tuesday 6th February. We took part in a speed friending game which explored the nature of ‘friendship’ on social media, allowed us to identify risks and danger and taught us how to interact safely with others online. When we do encounter something online which upsets or offends us, we now know what to do in order to get help.
Coming Up
Monday 5th February: P7 after school football
Tuesday 6th February: Parent Council meeting, 6.00-7.00pm in library
Tuesday 6th February – Thursday 8th February : Lion King tickets on sale to all parents, carers and families from 3.15-3.30pm
Thursday 8th February: S1 transition tour for all P7s, 9.30-11.00am, please return EE2 forms by Tuesday
Friday 9th February: Pupil Voice Committees
Monday 12th February & Tuesday 13th February: HOLIDAY, return Wednesday 14th February
An exciting netball practice this week. The netball girls were very fortunate to have Rachel Johnston, from West Lothian Wild Cats, come along to practice and help the girls further develop their netball skills. Rachel helped the netball girls to focus on ball passing skills, as well as some footwork. We very grateful to have had this opportunity with Rachel, and Mrs Matos and Miss Harrison know that the girls have taken on board what they were shown , and are going to show their skills at the next upcoming netball tournament.
Just a reminder there is no Netball on Wednesday, 7th February 2018, but that training will be on Wednesday , 14th February 2018.
This year’s P6 and P7 school show, The Lion King, takes place on Tuesday 6th March and Wednesday 7th March at Linlithgow Academy from 7.30-9pm. Tickets will be on sale next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday outside P7b’s classroom from 3.15-3.30pm for ALL parents, carers and families of Springfield.
Please come along if you would like to purchase tickets, they are priced at £5 for adults and £3 for children. You’ll need to get them fast though as they’re selling out quickly!
Another busy week has been and gone at Springfield and Bonnytoun, ending with our Scottish assembly last Friday. During assembly, we talked about what we think of when we say the word “Scotland” and what it means to be Scottish. We then sang some Scottish songs such as ‘Yeh cannae shove yer granny aff a bus’ and ‘Three Craws.’
Our Primary Seven children all received certificates for their achievements over the past while in skiing. It has been a pleasure to take these children to Hillend and watch their confidence grow on the slopes.
We sang our birthday song to Lucy in P3 and presented our Values certificates to a host of children.
Here is A in P5 with her cheerleading achievement from this week…
Next week most classes will begin their Social Subjects, interdisciplinary learning focus which has a historical context. I wonder what your child’s class will choose to learn about? We continue to work hard to let all children make choices in and lead the direction of their learning . I hope too, that you have now received your child’s ‘Sharing the Learning’ sheet from their class teacher to keep you up-to-date with planned learning.
This week we started our new topic of “Information and Data Handling”. We realised there were lots of links to real life, and reasons why we need to learn the skills to present and interpret data. In this first week we have been selected the best graph to display our data and drawing frequency tables and graphs.
Literacy
Hamburger paragraphs were a key feature this week, essentially allowing us to structure and create quality paragraphs. The initial or topic sentence introducing the concept is the “top bun”, the details are the “fillings and burger” and the conclusion or ending is the “bottom bun”. We all wrote “hamburger paragraphs” and peer assessed them.
After the fantastic Stem Engineer interviews last week, we revisited our notes and made a start on a report about engineering. There was lots of decision making required as we had to decide which were the key ideas, and how to present these using sub-headings in a report. Some of us realised we had not taken enough/detailed enough notes during the interviews, which made it difficult to plan a report. Luckily we all worked together to share our key information and make sure that everyone then had the key facts.
French and Spanish
J’aime et je n’aime pas…were the focus of French this week, where we learned how to say what we like and dislike. In Spanish we started to learn “los numeros de 0-50” by singing a catchy song. We noticed that there were similarities to English and French numbers.
IDL Social Studies – Creative Scots
This week we worked in our decades to finalise the planning and creation of our lessons for next week. Each group was given a decade from the 70’s until current day and have been tasked with becoming the teachers, and teaching their classmates and Mrs Gordon about Scottish music and musicians in that decade. This week involved lots of planning of lessons and creation of activities. We can’t wait to learn all about it next week…
Quick reminder that tomorrow’s football training session will be for P7 only with next week’s session for P6. See below for upcoming sessions and league meeting dates:
Monday 22nd January – P7
Monday 29th January – P6
Monday 5th February – P7
Monday 19th February – League meeting 2 @ Xcite (P7)
We have been continuing with our work on angles this week, but our focus has moved to the naming and measuring of them. Mr. Logan is insisting that we use the mathematical language when referring to the ‘lines’ and ‘corners’ of an angle. The lines are arms, and the point where the two arms meet is called the vertex. When naming an angle we have learned that they would have 3 uppercase letters and the vertex would always form the middle letter for the name. On Wednesday we estimated the size of various angles before using a protractor to check the exact size. We tended to find that our estimations were quite accurate. Our final challenge was to hunt for angles of specific sizes around school. Sam and Charlie were the first to return to the classroom having completed this, well done boys!
Literacy and English
Our note taking and summarising skills continue to improve through practise, and we’ve certainly had lots of that this week! Our guided reading task this week was to summarise the key points and main events from our previous reading. We were able to do so; using bullet points to format our work and not writing in full sentences to keep our notes short and concise. On Thursday we had to apply these skills when Mr. Boiling and Mrs. Dallas visited as part of our STEM work with Mrs. Tulloch. As they presented to us and answered the higher order questions prepared in advance about engineering, we took notes to record the information shared.
Health and Wellbeing
In football, we further developed our dribbling skills and close control of the football when moving around the gym hall. At the end of each session we were given the opportunity to apply these skills in 2v2 scenarios. It was highlighted that small, light touches of the ball would allow our opponents less opportunity to win possession from us so we did our best to keep it close to both feet at all times. Next week our focus will move to passing with further consolidation of the skills we’ve worked hard on over the first two weeks of our football block. Our football team embarked on their league campaign on Monday, with 17 boys and girls from P7 playing in 5 fixtures at Xcite Linlithgow. Both teams were hugely successful, with one team managing to remain unbeaten and not concede a single goal! Well done Callum for keeping 5 clean sheets! The other team managed to win 3 of their games with some very impressive team play throughout. The attitude demonstrated, encouragement of each other and sense of fair play shown at all times was particularly pleasing to see. Well done to all involved! Go Team Springfield!
Expressive Arts
As part of our Lion King focus ahead of the school show, we were keen to create character sketches of some of the main characters and animals that will be seen on stage. We used images found online and YouTube tutorials to provide us with step-by-step instructions on how to accurately sketch our assigned character. Mrs. Gordon and Mrs. Matos complimented us on how impressive these all were and Ramsay has even been given the additional role of making headdresses and doing some costume design! Great job! Our rehearsals continued on Thursday and Friday where we have been working on preparing all aspects of the show. Only 7 weeks to go! On Thursday we were also lucky enough to be visited by the Travelling by Tuba music group. They took us on a trip round the world, exploring different instruments found in various countries. Some of these were hundreds of years old.
Happy New Year and welcome back from holidays ! It was lovely to get back to school and find out all about our holidays and resolutions.
Target Setting
In Literacy and Numeracy we reviewed our targets from last term, evaluating ourselves against them and then using this information to create new targets for this term. We also created reflection triangles where we were able to think about what we had learned last term, what we had improved at and what had challenged us. As a class we shared some of these targets and successes.
New Years Resolutions
Also along the same thread of review and new beginnings, in health and wellbeing we created our resolution and broke it down into little steps. We will monitor our progress of these resolutions/goals and once we achieve a mini step we will put it on the wall to chart our progress towards the final goal. The children could choose anything they wanted, and many chose health and fitness options which was very encouraging.
Numeracy
In Numeracy as we draw our work on fractions, decimals and percentages to a close, we focused on converting between the different measures. In our problem solving Mrs Gordon gave us a real-life budgeting project, where in teams of 3/4 we were given a scenario about a family of 4 planning a once in a lifetime trip to Sydney. We had to find out about flight costs, accommodation, car hire, passport costs etc This was part of our continued work on “skills for learning, life and work” and it allowed the children to use lots of different skills whilst completing a fun activity.
Literacy
In literacy we continue our focus on our class novel “Wonder” and began our guided reading groups again for this sessions. Our focus for writing this term will be note taking, questioning, summarising and report writing. Mrs Gordon gave us a quick talk about her career and we had to take notes, she spoke very quickly to test us! This was to prepare us for taking notes next week when we have our 2 engineers coming into to talk to us about their careers as part of our STEM project. We also worked on effective questioning and have created high level questions for our visitors.
IDL – Lion King
In IDL we started our “Lion King” focus with rehearsals for all cast members, song practice, acting/drama and costume design. First efforts on scenes 1-7 were fantastic, and we are all very excited about this project.
This week we started learning about angles and coordinates. We were reminded that an angle is when one line rotates onto another line and is measured in degrees rather than centimetres. The five main types of angle we consolidated our learning of were acute, right, obtuse and reflex angles as well as straights lines. We came up with definitions of how to identify each of these angles, for example, a straight line has to be exactly 180° otherwise it is not a straight line. After spending some time identifying angles in class we moved outside the classroom in small groups using our clipboard to find examples around the school building. We noticed that when you find an example of an acute angle, you have also found a reflex angle. Next week we will be looking for examples around the playground and outdoor areas before discussing uses of angles in the wider natural and built environment. For homework, we consolidated our learning of algebra from before the Christmas holidays by creating our own algebraic problems for a peer to solve. Some of these look incredibly tricky!
Literacy and English
In spelling, we are continuing to extend our learning of unfamiliar spelling patterns and rules, and applying this learning in our written work. We recapped on where we are with our groups novels by summarising the stories so far. In guided reading we have been developing a range of reading skills through our varied independent tasks. Two of our key focuses in writing this term will be note taking and report writing. We are becoming increasingly competent in taking concise notes before using these for other purposes. When engineers, including Hannah’s Dad, visit us next Thursday as part of our STEM work with Mrs. Tulloch, we will be taking notes as they speak and using these to write a follow up report about their visit. We will also be posing them with some pre-prepared higher order questions which we discussed last week with Mrs. Doran. Over the coming weeks we will be learning about creative Scots, particularly famous Scottish musicians from 1970 to the current day. During this time we will be split into groups and provided with the opportunity to plan, prepare and deliver a series of lessons on a musician, band, genre or era of music of our choice. We understand that presenting to an audience is an important life skill and we are looking forward to developing our skills in this area.
Health and Wellbeing
In P.E this week we began a block of football. As many of us have played football before, we spent a brief period of time recapping on the basics before practising our dribbling. It is important when dribbling that we take small, light touches of the football and keep it close to our feet at all times. We were encouraged to use both our feet and have a look around every 2/3 touches in order to move into free spaces. Moving on from this, we used varied surfaces of both our left and right foot (inside, outside, sole, laces) to manipulate the football. Next week will continue our focus on dribbling and close control of the football before applying these skills in small sided games. For homework this week we have been taking selfies doing the actions for our new school values of being kind, respectful, resilient, confident and included. We emailed these to Mr. Logan using Glow and now have them displayed in class on our Health and Wellbeing wall. Come in and have a look!
Coming Up…
Monday 15th January – Football league meeting, Xcite Linlithgow, 4.00 – 5.30pm
Thursday 18th Janaury – Interviewing engineers as part of STEM project, 9.00am
Monday 22nd January – Netball league meeting, school hall, 4.00 – 5.30pm
Thursday 25th January – Scots Family Quiz, 6.00 – 9.30pm
Tuesday 30th January, Wednesday 31st January, Thursday 1st February – Lion King school show tickets on sale outside P7b, 3.15 – 3.45pm
Tuesday 6th February – Parent Council meeting, library, 7.00 – 8.00pm
Thursday 8th February – Linlithgow Academy tour, parent help required, 9.30 – 11.00am
Monday 12th February, Tuesday 13th February – HOLIDAY
Have a fantastic weekend!
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