Congratulations to Finlay Biggar in P3 for venturing underground at St Andrew’s Castle during his summer holidays! You are very brave Finlay! Well done!
Miss Baillie x
P7A’s Bake Off Assembly
Well done to P7A for their excellent assembly this week. We all really enjoyed seeing The Great British Bake Off come to Springfield. What a talented lot you are! All of those cupcakes made us feel very hungry! Yum!
Thank you to Mrs Gordon for her hard work.
Miss Baillie x
P7a’s “Bake Off” Week
What a busy week we all had in P7a. In French we played a game where you had to find someone who had done certain activities during the holidays eg “tu as fait du camping? ” (did you go camping?). The winner was the first to find 12 different people for each of the activities. The focus was on asking and answering questions.
In numeracy we did 3 inspirational maths lessons from Professor Jo Boaler at Stanford University. The focus of these is on growth mindset and starting with good principles of teamwork. One of the tasks involved the children working in groups to complete the four 4’s (they had to find numbers from 0-20 only using four 4’s), not as easy as it sounds…As next week is maths week we will continue to challenge ourselves with some of these problem solving activities.
As part of the Cake Fest project we made Victoria Sponge Cake this week. The focus was on using the all in one sponge method and on making buttercream icing. Weight and measurement was important again as was: oven temperatures and timing during baking and consistency for the sponge and icing. Every child took part and then ate their end product. 100% of the class agreed that our sponges tasted better than shop bought !
In PE we continued extreme dodge ball with Mr Logan and started a 2 week mini orienteering course.
In literacy and expressive arts our main focus was on creating and performing our “Great Springfield Bake Off Assembly”. Thank you all for coming along and leaving such positive feedback ! Mrs Gordon was very proud of the final performance and everyone worked really hard to learn their words and speak loudly and clearly. Each group created their own mini act to help everyone find out more about baking and food hygiene, along with a few fun acts to showcase our skill-set in comedy and ICT.
Have a great weekend from Mrs Gordon and P7a.
P7b Weekly Blog
Numeracy
From our baseline assessments in Numeracy, we could see that we needed to strengthen our knowledge and understanding of Fractions, Decimals and Percentages. This week, we consolidated on previous learning by identifying basic fractions and reminded ourselves of how to use a fraction wall to find equivalence. We were able to remind Mr. Logan that the top number of a fraction is called the numerator and the bottom number is the denominator. We found out that the middle line in a mathematical calculation is called the vinculum, but is more commonly known as the division or fraction bar. Our targets have been set for Numeracy and Mathematics in Term 1 and we will revisit these before the October holidays to evaluate on our progress and identify our next steps in learning.
On Thursday, we enjoyed carrying out some mental maths and problem solving activities with Mr. Ritchie and Mr. Slater. Next week we will continue to extend our knowledge of equivalence before finding quantities of a set and adding/subtracting fractions. Soon, we will be able to establish the link from fractions to decimals and percentages.
Literacy
We are continuing to enjoy reading our class novel, Grandpa’s Great Escape. Will Jack be able to prevent his Grandpa from being banished to Twilight Towers? Will he ever realise his dream of flying the legendary Spitfire aircraft? And, will Miss Verity’s romance with the gorilla-like security guard from the Imperial War Museum continue to blossom? We shall find out next week…
In writing we have been working hard in attempting to up-level our own, and others’ work. This is when you take a piece of written work and make it more interesting and exciting for the read. We learnt that this could take the form of using ambitious examples of vocabulary (WOW words), connectives to extend and vary the length of sentences, openers to maintain the reader’s interest or the use of correct punctuation to ensure our writing makes sense. This will be one of our main focuses in writing this year, along with developing the ability to proofread and Spellcheck our work independently, using ICT to word process and edit and extending the length of our written work.
Next week we can expect to be given our new group novels which we will be studying during this term and some spelling homework. We will also have some lines to learn in preparation for our class assembly next Friday 15th September. Hope to see you all there! Remember it is also Sports Dress Down Day, so bring £1 with you to help fund some new sports equipment for school.
Next Week
- Assembly preparations
- Cake Fest design presentations and baking
- P.E on Monday, no P.E on Tuesday
- Orienteering sessions in P7
- Sports Dress Down Day on Friday, bring £1 to fund new sport equipment
Hope everyone is having a relaxing weekend, see you all Monday.
P7b and Mr. Logan
‘You can’t blend in, when you were born to stand out.’ R.J Palacio
‘I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you are thinking, it’s probably worse’. These words come from our class novel, Wonder by R.J Palacio. Before listening to the novel, we were grouped into three’s, Mrs Matos gave each group a tube of toothpaste, a toothpick each and a plate. You can imagine we were just as confused as you are. Mrs Matos asked us to empty out all the toothpaste into the plate, that was a lot of fun, still left confused the next instruction was to put ALL the toothpaste back into the tube…..with only the TOOTHPICK!! It was impossible. We learnt from this activity that the tube represents our mouths, and the toothpaste our words. We realised that any words that are spoken, especially unkind words we can not take back, just like the toothpaste couldn’t go back into the tube. This activity was fun and messy but we learnt something special before embarking on our journey through the book called Wonder.
This year we want to focus on having a positive growth mindset towards Numeracy and Maths . A lot of us sometimes feel anxious or don’t enjoy Maths because we worried about getting the answer wrong. We watched an important video on why challenges are good for us and how, when we find things difficult, that by trying our brains are growing and by excepting the challenge and making mistakes that is how we learn. To help build our confidence and mental agility, we have Number talk discussions. Number Talks help us to solve problems mentally and then to share our strategies with the class, this has helped us to see that it’s not how fast we get to the answer or even if we get the answer wrong, it is about sharing our strategies and finding our errors, and that is how we learn, because we all see numbers differently. Over the last week we have been learning to analyse and interpret graphs. We have looked at bar and line graphs, but just for that extra challenge we worked in pairs to analyse and interpret a graph we have never seen before…..A ‘cross graph. We took on the challenge, worked well with our partners and managed to identify all the information that we needed. ‘Never give up, no matter how difficult it may seem.’
Being in Primary 6 comes with some responsibilities. We have taken on the roles of having P2 Buddies. We know that sometimes using the netbooks can be difficult, so we went along to Mrs Burton and her P2 class to help them research the closest sea side resort to Linlithgow using the netbooks. We needed to show our buddies how to switch the netbooks on, we explained how and why we were using google, and then helped them to type and search. We enjoyed spending some time with the P2’s and we hope to help throughout the year with various other activities.
As part of our weekly research this week, we worked with a partner to research Treacher_Collins syndrome, as this is the condition that the main narrator in the book, Wonder, has. We had to find facts about the syndrome, this will help us connect better with the narrator and will help us to understand his condition better.
In 1+2 this week we made our own French vocabulary flash cards, which we will use throughout the year to help us remember the meanings of the words and to practice the correct pronunciation.
Another busy week has past, what will be in store…….I ‘WONDER’
P6A and Mrs Matos
P4 class had a fantastic week!
We started the week by exploring the use of punctuation, margin and indentation. We also studied sentence and paragraph construction.
- We had our first Tae Bo session on Tuesday which was quite challenging but also enjoyable.
- We used our netbook time to search for facts about our “deserts” topic. We found many interesting information about animals, people, climate etc.
- We had two math competitions throughout the week. The first number bonds competition winners were E and H. The second one was won by R . It was a lot of fun!
New Sounds, Library and PE
On Monday morning some of us made new play dough. We followed the recipe, using cups and a table spoons to measure the ingredients. We put lavender from Mrs Kennedy’s garden in it to make it smell nice and it worked! We have had lovely squashy, nice smelling dough all week. I wonder what other smells we could try?
We began the week learning the ‘a’ sound. We are very good at the ‘Ants on my Arm’ song and action. I’m sure we could sing it if you ask us. We practised writing ‘a’ in lots of different multi-sensory ways.
On Wednesday we introduced the ‘t’ sound and started using magnetic letters to help us to build and read words. We made ‘at’ by listening for the sounds, counting how many sounds we needed and then finding the right letters. We also practised reading the word, sounding out and then blending the sounds together.
On Tuesday we had PE in the hall. We have been learning how to move around the hall safely, sharing the space and making sure our ‘bubbles’ don’t pop if we go too close to another person. We traveled in lots of different ways – walking, running, hopping, skipping and galloping. We also practised basic moves too – throwing bean bags and balls, balancing on a beam and jumping over hurdles.
We have been working with number 3 this week, singing number songs to begin to think about counting up and down and one more, one less. 3 is quite a tricky number to write so we have been practising in lots of different ways and went outside to write 3s all over the playground with chalk.
On Friday we had our first visit to the library. Mrs Manlove gave us a very warm welcome and we enjoyed choosing and reading our books. We are looking forward to visiting each week.
As always we have been busing playing this week. Here are a selection of pictures of what we have been up to:
Enjoy your weekend.
From Mrs Kennedy and P1B x
Class of the Week for P1A!
This week we have started to learn our initial sounds. We have been working very hard to read, make, say and write the ‘a’ sound and the ‘t’ sound. On Wednesday, we used our new sounds to build a word! We were able to make, say and write ‘at’. To learn our sounds, we used play dough, played ICT games, made our sounds with paint and practised writing our sounds with rainbow writing, graffiti walls and whiteboards.
On Friday, we had our first visit to the school library. We will go to the library every Friday so that we can choose texts from a wide range of genres.
In numeracy this week, we have been continuing to work on our number formation. We revised writing 0-2 and learned about the number 3. We used jewels, counters and Lego to make 3, practised formation on the car mats, smartboard and whiteboards and used pipe cleaners to make the number 3.
This week we continued to learn about 3D shapes. We played 3D shape games on the smartboard and laptops, used 3D shapes to build, used our play dough to make 3D shapes and used our multilinking cubes to make different cubes and cuboids. During our outdoor play on Wednesday, we used our construction materials to make cubes, cuboids and triangular prisms!
On Friday we found out that we won Class of the Week! As a reward, we got five minutes extra play time. Later on Friday we also found out that we won the peg challenge! Miss Harrison was extremely proud of us.
Thank you very much for reading our blog post. We hope that you have a lovely weekend.
P1A and Miss Harrison 🙂
Primary 2B
We have had our first reading books in Primary 2B and all the class are doing very well with their reading. We have been revising some of our Phonics sounds before we start on our new ones. This will be spread over the next 4 weeks. Next week sees the start of homework and all children will have a homework jotter with their sounds to learn. There will be a suggestions sheet with ideas for the children to practise their sounds, as well as a sheet with suggestions for Maths activities. I have also enclosed a sheet of ideas to use when questioning children on their reading. Hope this helps.
We have continued to work on sequencing numbers to 100, as well as identifying and naming 3D shapes.
We have begun our topic on the Seashore and talked about what we already know and what we want to know.
Maybe the highlight of the week was when our P6 pals came to join us and help us with logging in on the netbooks and doing our first piece of research – finding out which is the nearest seaside resort to Linlithgow. I think the general consensus was Aberdour. We also played some Maths games.
We started to learn how to write postcards by working on descriptive sentences.
Today we enjoyed Primary 7A’s Assembly on Food. So another busy week at Springfield and I enjoyed meeting all the Parents who attended the” Meet the Teacher” last night.
P3/4 Message video to families
Enjoy!
