Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School

Dear All

This week in literacy we wrote letters to Santa, Rudolph and Cupid. We have been reading a Hamish McHaggis book called ‘The Skirmish at Stirling’. It was about William Wallace. We got our own personal dictionary and we write any words we have learned to spell in it. We edited our literacy jotters and gave feedback about what our next steps are.

In numeracy we checked our place value, estimation and symmetry assessments to see what we still need to learn.

In health and wellbeing we did PE with Mrs Reid and did some dancing and played Christmas games. We did two plays. The P3’s acted the ‘The Penguin’s Lost Scarf’ and the P4’s acted ‘The Lonely Snowman’. It was fun! Everyone enjoyed acting or watching and they were both good. We had our Christmas parties this week. We really liked them! They were awesome! It was really noisy! We had ice cream. We put up a little Christmas tree in the class. Thank you to Calan’s gran for letting us borrow it.

Hope you have a good holiday, a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! The P4s have worked extra hard this week as they have been given the responsibility of collecting, sorting and delivering christmas cards to all the classess in Springfield Primary.   On Thursday, Miss Durano and some P4 children had their christmas dinner together in the lunch hall.  It was quite a novelty!

Here is a list of lessons the P4s have explored this week:

• Literacy-  Revision lesson on plural forms of a word.  Children were able to indentify when to add -s or -es to change from singular to plural form.  The children also engaged in imaginative writing wherein they have to write a diary (Christmas themed).  The children also played a game of story- telling where they worked as a team to create their own storyline.  For spelling, the children learnt to spell words with the sound pattern -ou.
• Numeracy- Mental Math focused on adding doubles and and near doubles.  The children learnt to add 2 digit with 2 digit numbers with bridging.  Towards the end of the week, the P4s moved on to adding 2 digit numbers with 3 digit numbers( with and without bridging).  This lesson also reiterated the children’s understanding of place value as they had to add numbers which belong in the same place value.
• Health and Wel-being focus was on kindness.  “How would you fell if…” was the question the P4s had to reflect upon.  Children also spoke about what are the ways they can deal with bullying and unkind acts.

Thank you to all the parents who managed to join us on the Family Learning Showcase. It was a pleasure to see all of you!

Many thanks,

Miss DUrano

This week we finished our block on fractions within numeracy by doing an assessment. This will help identify an areas we still need to work on. We then started work with percentages. Mrs Gordon was delighted that a few children recognised that “percent” means per 100, and that cent in French is 100!

In literacy we wrote diary entries from the point of view of an animal, plant or person living in the Amazon Rainforest or Brazil. We had to really put ourselves into our characters shoes, and do some research as to their life style to ensure it was authentic.

In French we designed our own Christmas jumpers and then wrote a few sentences to describe them. We had some lovely designs and learnt some fabulous words like robin – rouge-gorge (red throat) again some links to the English language.

We also started Spanish by working out what we knew, counting to 20, greetings and asking and saying our name. We found some links with masculine/feminine endings that we understood due to our work on that in French lessons.

In IDL we are at the end of our focus on Brazil, and we were very lucky to have some parents and grandparents join us for the learning showcase on Wednesday. We did an apprentice style activity where each group had to choose their team leader and then complete a Scotland/Brazil comparison task. There were a few twists along the way, and each section  was timed to add an element of urgency. At the end each team presented a “persuasive presentation on either Brazil or Scotland” trying to convince the audience to visit. The children did a great job, and some of the visitors commented on how well they gave each other feedback! Our peer assessment is working !

We had our second session of skiing on Thursday at Hillend, where we had real snow, making it more authentic! Everyone really pushed themselves and did so well. After an exhausting few hours, it was time to get back for our Christmas lunch. Lunch for 62 was served in our classroom, it was a bit of a squeeze, but very tasty!

Mrs Gordon and P7a