Category: Whole School

We have a number of children across school who act as ‘reading buddies’ to each other. Here is Sean in P3 who loves to read each week to Bailey in P1B. I caught the boys sitting quietly reading as I passed by this week and it warmed my heart. Hoping that it warms your heart too!

Have a lovely weekend in the Spring sunshine everyone,

Miss Baillie xx

 

 

 

We got a lovely surprise this week when a card arrived in the post from Lauren and Alex’s grandparents.  They have been enjoying our blog and like to see what we get up to in P1B.  The card even had boats on it – the mode of transport we have been learning about recently.  Alex told us all about the scene on the card.  Here is a little clip of us saying thank you:

We did some peer assessment of our writing this week.  We were looking at our friend’s work to check for capital letters, full stops, finger spaces, writing on the line and well formed letters.  It was nice reading our written work to our friends and we were very honest in our assessment!  We used the ‘tickled pink’ and ‘green for growth’ method by colouring pink the areas they had achieved and colouring green the things they should still work on.

A lot of what we’ve been doing this week is top secret – so there are no photos to show of us making surprises for Mother’s Day.  We have all worked very hard to draw, write and create a couple of nice things for our mum’s and we hope they all have a lovely day on Sunday.

Continuing our transport topic we furthered our investigation into boats by carrying out a ‘Does it float of does it sink?’ investigation.  We each chose an object from around the classroom, made a prediction as to whether it would float or sink and gave the reason why we thought this.  We then carried out our investigation and compared the actual results to our predictions – most of them were accurate, the few that weren’t gave good opportunity for further discussion. We will look more at the reasons why objects float or sink next week, including making our own boats.

   

We were awarded class of the week again this week 🙂  Miss Baillie was really pleased to see all the play that has been happening in the classroom and she thinks that we play very well together.  Play is important to us as it fosters curiosity, imagination and experimentation and helps us with concentration. It also gives us opportunities to speak and listen, often processing and putting into practice what we have been learning.  We also learn to share resources, explain actions, negotiate plans and take turns.

We were working on balance, control and coordination in PE this week.  Lots of activities whilst balancing beanbags on our heads – throwing and catching were quite tricky! We also had a few games of ‘Cups and Saucers’ which we love.

As promised last week, here are a couple of the finished spring pictures:

They turned out really well and the sheep are full of character.

Finally, two children brought in achievements this week.  Clara brought in her swimming certificate and Haley won the Enjoy-a-Ball trophy – well done girls!

    

We hope you have a good weekend and the sun continues to shine.

From P1B and Mrs Kennedy

P7a have been very busy this week. We started the research on our personal projects during our ICT slot this week. Our projects will be based on an aspect of World War II that we are interested in finding out more about.

In numeracy we were finishing off our learning on fractions, decimals and percentages with an assessment of the full topic. From this we could all see our areas that need more work and we will work on some of those next week.

In French we learnt how to count to 100, and how to write out the french words for the numbers. In Spanish we played happy families and learnt how to ask for a card using some new language and some of the family vocabulary we had previously learnt, eg tienes la madre roja?, si lo tengo, gracias.

In PE with Mrs Gordon we continued our handball learning by giving feedback whilst we watched other teams on their skills and strategies. By picking one player to mark, we improved our technique.

Our class had 3 award winners in the Scottish Maths Challenge. Well done to Oliver with Gold, James C with Silver and Ruby with Bronze. A fabulous effort.

Hello from P1B, it has been lovely to see all the parents at parents night this week and talk about all the progress the children are making.

Last week we did a mini topic on the book Dogs Don’t Do Ballet.

This is a funny story about Biff the dog who fulfills his dreams of becoming a ballet dancer despite continually being told Dogs don’t do Ballet.  Using the Thinking Reader approach we looked at many different aspects of the book.  We drew pictures and wrote about Biff’s feelings when he was sad and happy, made cards and wrote him messages to cheer him up, sequenced the story, designed front covers for our own books, looked at jobs that real dogs do and looked closely at the vocabulary – identifying and discussing interesting and unusual words.  We made a huge list – 48 words!

 

     

Hayley and Lauren read their messages to Biff.

Tess the teddy wrote us another letter, asking us to learn about a different form of transport – boats this time!  She left us a book called Peter the Cruise Ship.  We worked in groups to draw and write about the different kinds of boats we know.  We shared our knowledge of ferries, kayaks, canoes, submarines, sailing boats and many more.  We have also been learning about the history of boats – from hollowed out tree trunks to what the have today.  We will continue with our boat theme next week.

Last week we learned the sounds ‘igh’ and ‘-y’.  They are tricky sounds to hear and use in words but we worked hard and practised in lots of different ways.

This week there were no new sounds but we took the time to use the digraphs we’ve been learning recently and to consolidate our tricky words.

  

We have also been enjoying the (slightly) better weather and thinking about Spring.  We had fun playing outside and have been trying some new art techniques as we make some pictures to go on display in the school corridor.  I’ll upload photos  of the finished pictures when they’re dry and mounted!

We have a school achievement wall in the corridor outside Miss Baillie and Mrs Malcolm’s offices.  We display achievements from within and outside school here.  Please encourage your child to let us know of any achievements outside of school.  Although it can be, it doesn’t have to be an accolade from an organised club – it could be learning to ride their bike or baking a cake, anything they are really proud of.  Last week Imogen and Daisy took part in a gymnastics display and brought their medals in to show us and Ruaridh and Cohen both received trophies from their enjoy-a-ball classes.

  

Well done guys!

Happy weekend, from P1B and Mrs Kennedy