Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School
Spring Forward in Learning and Life – Becoming. Belonging. Believing.
A massive well done to Lewis, Michael, Aidan and Catriona for coming Second (by three points) in this year’s Linlithgow Rotary, Inter-Schools Quiz! I accompanied the children along to Linlithgow-Bridge Primary for the event yesterday and was bursting with pride at their accomplishement, effort and good manners. What Clever Clogs they are! Well done also to Torphichen Primary who took First prize-the first ever Quiz win for the school. Great effort! Go team Springfield!!!!
Miss Baillie x
We started our World War II topic this month, and the children are all very engaged. Quite a few knew some facts about the war from their conflict topic last year. The children are keen to find out more about weapons, evacuees, concentration camps, rationing, key battles and much more over the next month. We created a washing line of the key events of WWII in chronological order and completed amazing pencil portraits of the leaders of the Axis and Allies.
In French we have focused on food. We could use what we already knew from likes/dislikes to create role plays in cafe’s and ice cream shops using je voudrais, c’est combien etc
In maths our focus for the last few weeks has been fractions. We have been simplifying, exchanging to equivalent fractions, fraction problems, conversion to decimals and much more.
Don’t forget to bring in your “Reflections” photos on Monday for the Rotary competition. The very last day they can be accepted is Tuesday 21st February. Each child can enter a maximum of 2 photos and they must be a minimum size of 6″x4″ and a maximum size of A4.
Bon weekend
Mrs Gordon and P7a
You may have already heard about the line-up for this year’s Gala Day… We were so proud to hear the news that Ruby Cardie, one of our lovely P7 children, will be Queen! Our congratulations and best wishes go to Ruby and her family! We are delighted that we also have so many children from Springfield who are in the main retinue. Well done to Emma Preston, Chief Lady in Waiting, Catriona Simpson, First Lady, Fraser Preston, Lord Provost and Esther Begarnie, Second Lady! We are so excited that Springfield will be so well represented at this year’s Gala and we look forward to working with you all to make this a special day for all of our children.
You may notice that our amazing Primary 6 and 7 children are featuring in Linlithgow Gazette this week as they display their talents In the Scottish Opera performance of Tam O’Shanter. Scottish Opera spent the whole day in School on Monday 23rd January to help pupils to turn the songs, that they have been learning for months , into a musical extravaganza! A wonderful performance was put on for staff, pupils, family and friends. Thank you to Scottish Opera for their work with the children on the day.
Miss Baillie x
Yes it’s true P7a switched roles with Mrs Gordon this week as they became teachers whilst she was the pupil.
As part of our Famous Scots focus the children were split into 3 groups and given a famous Scot. They were then tasked with creating and delivering a sequence of 3 lessons that would help Mrs Gordon and the rest of the class learn about their Scot, their place in Scottish history and what they were famous for.
It was a fabulously engaging activity, and armed only with: lesson plan templates, copies of the outcomes and a group discussion on what makes a good lesson, the children duly delivered 3 sets of lessons. I was very impressed by the creativity of the lessons.
They all created different activities to help us learn about either Robert Watson-Watt, Sir James Young Simpson or David Steel. The most entertaining was definitely Ruby’s group who had everyone make a barometer out of tins and test it outside, linking to Robert Watson Watt’s invention of radar.
When asking the children what they found most difficult, the most common answer was keeping their classmates quiet and on task …
Mrs Gordon and P7a
Primary 7a had a great morning outside on Thursday with the lovely ladies from the RSPB. We learnt about how we can provide homes for animals and insects and how this can improve the environment.
The children took part in teams, in a dragons den style “design a habitat” game. The winner was the hedgehog with a webcam within its new purpose built home.
The children are now very keen to see if we can try our any of their ideas…watch this space…
P7 have been very busy this week with the start of our visits from professionals. Within Curriculum for Excellence it is important that children learn skills for life, learning and work. As part of this we invited our very talented and diverse group of parents to come in and talk to our P7’s about their careers, and how they got there. P7 have been asking some great questions, and have been fully engaged throughout these sessions.
Our guests range from dentists, solicitors, transport planners, investment consultants, Procurator Fiscal’s and many more. Here are some photos of some of this weeks visitors. We look forward to meeting more professionals over the next couple of weeks.
P1, P1/2 and P7 were very busy today helping design a new sleigh for Santa. It was lovely to see the children working with their buddies. P7 listening well to their buddies ideas, and P1 and P1/2 had lots of fabulous suggestions for the design as you can see from some examples below.
A great activity for our last day ! Merry Christmas from P7, P1/2 and P1.
P7a took part in the worldwide “Hour of Code” campaign. The aim of this was to show that anyone of any age or ability can learn computer science or coding.
We all had great fun trying out different games, as expected the children could certainly teach Mrs Gordon a thing or two…To try it at home just go to this site : https://hourofcode.com/uk/learn
This week we continued to write our French penpal letters learning how to say what our favourite sports were. In numeracy calculator skills were order of the week and the children had fun creating restaurant menus and then ordering lots of food to test those skills !
Skiing week 3 was a huge success with everyone moving further up the hill, even Mrs Gordon !
We started our discussions around democracy and have 4 parties setting up a campaign and creating manifestos, watch this space…
Happy weekend from Mrs Gordon and P7a
