Category: Whole School

This Week

Our mini IDL learning theme is Cake Fest, and in our groups we have continued preparations this week. Mrs. Gordon brought in a huge supply of apples from her garden and these were used to do some practical cooking skills. We made apple crumble which was delicious, whilst developing our knowledge of the importance of food hygiene and risks associated with this. With Mr. Logan, we focused on the design aspect for our cakes, producing annotated diagrams and using ICT to create a Lego representation of our chosen structures. Next week we look forward to finalising our designs (the most important criterion is feasibility)  before Mr. Logan and Mrs. Gordon will decide which group will go forward to make their building out of cake.

We have been doing some assessment work for numeracy, spelling and writing this week. In numeracy, our Second Level baseline will be used to see where our strengths lie and also the areas in which we will be working hard to extend our knowledge this year. We will redo the assessment at the end of this year to see how much progress we have all made. On Thursday we met Mr. Ritchie who will be in class with us one day a week. He provided us with a picture stimulus and music before challenging us to write a creative piece about what lay behind the secret door. Once this writing has been marked, we will discuss our targets with Mr. Logan to ensure our writing continues to improve.

Mr. Logan and Mrs. Gordon swap classes on a Monday and Tuesday afternoon to allow for some skill sharing. With Mrs. Gordon we brushed up on some of previous learning in French and look forward to also learning some Spanish with her in the coming weeks. Mr. Logan is responsible for our P.E, and our first block will focus on Extreme Dodgeball. Last year’s P7s thoroughly enjoyed this activity and we began by gaining an insight into the basic rules and playing some competitive small-sided games. Next week we will develop different ways of throwing the dodgeball, aim to improve our accuracy and play some adaptations of the basic game.

Finally, we have continued our buddying duties this week but allowed our P1s to become increasingly independent. On Friday we were Digital Leaders when teaching our buddies how to turn on/off the laptops, log on, access the internet and play some games safely online. Mr. Logan has been impressed throughout the week with the mature and responsible approach we’ve taken to carrying out this role in school. All of us are determined and motivated to lead by example this year as the senior pupils within school.

Have a look at some photos from this week. Is Charlie reading a big book, or has Charlie shrunk? Who knows.

 

Coming Up in P7b

• Next Monday – Duncan Slater (student from Edinburgh University) commences 5 week teaching placement in P7b
• Orienteering sessions in P7
• Meet The Teacher event – Thursday 7th September at 6pm
• P7b Class Assembly – Friday 15th September at 10am
• Holiday – Monday 18th September
• Risk Factory trip – Thursday 21st September at 9.30am, EE2 forms to be sent out and parental help required
• Parents’ Evenings  – Tuesday 10th and Wednesday 11th October
• October holidays – Monday 16th to Monday 23rd October
• Poppy Factory trip – Thursday 26th October at 12.30pm
• Skiing block (4 weeks) – commences Thursday 30th November until Thursday 21st December

Have a great weekend and enjoy the sunshine!

P7b and Mr. Logan

Hello,  the end of another very busy week!  On Monday we had a lot of cardboard (packaging from our new easel).  The children decided to turn it into a pirate ship – complete with a plank!  I was very impressed with their ideas and at how well they worked together on it.

We have been doing some work on number formation this week, beginning with 0, 1 and 2.  The children have tried forming the numbers through different activities. This has also been very good practise for working independently.

   

Gregor and Roslyn had a great chat about which ‘2’ Gregor had written best, it was a lovely conversation and Roslyn was very encouraging and positive 🙂

For the time being we will concentrate on number work from Monday to Wednesday and on Thursdays we will look at ‘outer maths’ – shape, measure, data handling, etc.  This week we explored 3D shape, beginning to learn their names and their properties – corners, edges, faces.  Can they roll? Why? Why not? As well as working out how best to fit them together.  We also looked at these shapes in our environment, identifying many as common objects – balls, oranges, tin food cans, cereal boxes, etc.

We have also been doing a lot of listening this week, identifying sounds in the environment and then sequences of these sounds as we prepare to learn the sounds of the alphabet and begin to make simple words. We have also had music with Mrs Bain and PE with Mrs Kennedy in the hall.  At the moment we are just changing shoes and taking jumpers off as we build up to changing into our complete PE kit!  Yesterday we created a list of rules for our classroom.  We thought about why rules are important, what it might be like with no rules and what rules would be best to help our class to be a nice place and to help us to learn.  We had lots of good suggestions.

As always, we have a lot of play in the different areas around the classroom and outside.  These are set up with specific learning intentions in mind.  This helps greatly with social skills, problem solving, decision making and many other important areas of development.

Matthew was helping me to work out how to fix the shelf that keeps falling down.  He had some great suggestions and was exactly right in working out what we needed to do to stop it happening again.  Thank you!

I’m looking forward to seeing many of you at the curriculum evening on Thursday.

Have a lovely weekend.  P1B and Mrs Kennedy

They say time flies when you’re having fun, that has certainly been true for the 2016/17 school year.   I’m unbelievably proud of every one of the children, they have all worked extremely hard and played hard too! They’ve been kind to each other and have supported each other throughout.  They have also made me laugh every day! I’ve had such a fun year.  Thank you too to their supportive parents, they are a credit to you.

Here are some photos of what we’ve been up to in the last few days of the year:

‘Springfield’s Got Talent’

Last few pictures from our Tess’ Diary talks.

  

Sports Day.

Teddy Bear’s picnic with our buddies.

Sharing the books we wrote with our friends in P1A and P1/2.

Games in our room during the party.  We then went to P1/2 for a cartoon and snack and P1A for some dancing!

Final class photo 🙂

Have a wonderful holiday everyone.  See you in August.

Love Mrs Kennedy X