Category: Whole School

We began the week combing our transport topic with numeracy when we made paper aeroplanes then raced them in the hall.  We worked on our ordinal numbers as we gave them their position in the race. We also practiced flying our planes around the hall, thinking about how they fly. Back in the classroom we learned more about the parts of a plane and how it works – acting out running very fast to take off, using our wings, engine and tail to keep our plane in the air and to change direction, slowing down to land on our wheels.

In literacy we are doing well with digraphs – ee and ea this week.  Our favourite activity was reading a story and marking all the ee and ae words – the best bit was using a highlighter to mark the words!

We love it when  P7s pop in to help us with our learning.  Neve came to help with literacy and was a great at helping us to decide if the words we were reading were real words or nonsense words.

Our fairtrade shop is up and running.  Thank you for all the packaging donations – keep them coming.  We have been very busy making signs, pricing the products and playing in the shop.  Mrs Kennedy is very impressed with the signs – we even have one saying ‘Park your bike or scooter here’ and ‘free fruit’ while we browse.

On Wednesday we did ‘Walk a Mile’ with P1A.  It was a beautiful day and we all managed five laps round the pitch.

Thursday was World Book Day.  We had ERIC time – Everybody Reads In Class.  We read our own books, then shared them with our friends.  We made bookmarks too.  In the afternoon we took part in a whole school challenge to decorate our door in a book theme (or wall space in our case as we don’t have a door).  We decorated ours with Biff, Chip Kipper and Floppy.  There was a lovely buzz throughout the school as each class busied themselves in making their entry the best they could before Mrs Manlove and some of the Libary Committee came to judge them.  We didn’t win but we are very proud of our efforts.

There was great excitement on Friday – coming to school dressed up is great fun!  Thank you to all the parents for their help.  We each showed our costume and told the class about our character then we had a parade at assembly.  A super end to the week.

Have a lovely weekend.  From Mrs Kennedy and P1B

Here are a few photos of our World War II display. You can see our timeline and leader portraits.

This week the children had to write a letter from the perspective of an evacuee writing home to their parents. They really managed to put themselves into the shoes of an evacuee and used some excellent emotive language. The children then self assessed their letters against the success criteria and a partner peer assessed them. The children are becoming very confident at giving constructive feedback and recognising what they need to further develop.

We developed our ICT skills by exploring Glow and creating sway presentations (like PowerPoint but easier to create/adapt) about evacuees.

In numeracy we added percentages to our decimal and fraction work. The children were working on converting between all 3 measures and this is certainly challenging us. We will continue this next week.

In French we did a listening comprehension based on food and drink. We are working on developing the 4 skills the children will need to continue their language development at the academy (reading, writing, listening and speaking).

In Spanish we learnt about “la familia” and the names of our family members.

P1B have really enjoyed their train topic.  We have created our own train station and have played in it lot.  We also enjoyed learning about trains old and new as well as writing about a magical train journey.  We have a teddy called Tess who has been in our class all year, sitting quietly on the shelf.  She was really enjoying our train topic too and has been writing us letters and postcards and leaving books for us to read.  We are helping her to learn more. She has has us to learn about different forms of transport now.

We have now moved onto learning about aeroplanes (at Tess’ request) We really liked the history of aeroplanes – especially the funny film clips about all the people who tried to build flying machines but they didn’t quite work.  We have been learning about the Wright Brothers and how they invented the first aeroplane.  Daniel and Noah have been playing at being the Wright Brothers and they made a fantastic plane too! 

We have also been learning a bit about Fairtrade.  We have entered a competition organised by the Linlithgow Fairtrade group where we had to design our own faritrade crest, drawing pictures to show what fairtrade is about.  To learn a little bit more about what fairtrade is we have been thinking about where our food comes from before it gets to the shops and supermarkets.  We read a book called ‘The World Came to My Place Today’ which explained it really well and told us lots about where the things in our shopping trolleys come from.  We played with a big map, putting pictures of food in the right countries.  We also had a think about how the food might travel to reach Scotland.

We played a game to help us to understand what ‘fairtrade’ means. Daniel was the owner of a banana farm, we were his workers and Mrs Kennedy worked for a supermarket.  We had to collect lots of bananas very quickly and then we wanted Daniel to pay us for all our hard work.  Mrs Kennedy hadn’t given him much money at all so he had hardly any money to pay us.  Then the supermarket gave Daniel a little bit more money – enough to pay all of his workers.  The workers were much happier then.

Here are some more pictures to show you a little more of what we have been up to.  We have been so busy – even fitting in a visit from a real hedgehog on Friday!

Finally, we were class of the week again last week as Miss Baillie was very impressed by our magical train journey stories (although I think we’re class of the week every week!)   Have a lovely weekend.

We have begun to think about Fairtrade across School in the run up to Fairtrade Fortnight. Primary 3 launched this year’s focus through their excellent assembly yesterday , when children learned about the journey of a cocoa bean and how Fairtrade chocolate is produced.  We understand the importance of giving farmers a fair price for their produce to ensure that we live in a world where we treat others as equals and with respect. Keep your eyes peeled for some more Fairtrade Activities happening in School and around our community over the next few weeks…. Well done to Primary 3 and Mrs Leadbetter!