Spring Forward in Learning and Life – Becoming. Belonging. Believing.
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
I was delighted to see the progress that our P2 children are making in Writing. Here are three of Mrs Burton’s lovely pupils; Akiera, Harrison and Ella Rose who came along to my office to show me their hard work. We have been working hard to develop children’s writing at all levels this session and progress is evident. We are committed to raising standards in Literacy and giving all children the support that they need to succeed.
Miss Baillie x
Thank you to Miss Mudd and P1/2 for their lovely assembly about friendship that we all had the pleasure to watch yesterday. It was great to see all children speaking confidently and taking part in a variety of ways. The importance of being a good friend was relayed to the audience through the story of The Rainbow Fish. Well done to all involved and a special mention to the P6 and P7 children who helped along with Miss Prince!
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT8cv9LjFus
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
Numeracy and mathematics
We continued with our work on decimals this week in numeracy, dividing them by 10, 100 and 1,000 and applying our prior knowledge of place value to assist us with this. Having established that when dividing, our decimal point moves to the left and when multiplying to the right, we moved on to sequence and order decimal fractions with up to 5 places after the decimal point. We were also able to multiply and divide decimals using a calculator before rounding to the nearest whole number which aided us with some work on estimation and approximation. Next week, we will be looking at percentages and real-life contexts where these may be used.
Literacy
Our literacy work this week started with the study of a shared text on The Tudor period. This period of British history is a particular interest of some pupils and we took the opportunity to discuss and annotate a passage written by Lady Marsden. In this, she reflected on Mary Queen of Scots’ execution and the array of emotions that coincided with this. We were able to effectively find examples of where she was sympathetic towards Mary, and in contrast, where she was openly critical of Queen Elizabeth I. Additionally, we identified, discussed and annotated figurative language and instances of emotive language within Lady Marsden’s recount of events. Our writing lesson this week was inspired by The Great Escape and we have been creating instructional texts detailing a plan for an escape from the prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag Luft III. Our ideas were incredibly creative and the level of detail certainly left nothing to chance. I think it’s safe to say, P7b would have managed to elude the German guards!
IDL
As of last week, we have been continuing to put together our personal projects and are making excellent progress with these. Mr. Logan cannot wait to read these; a huge amount of hard work is being put in to meet both the criteria and deadline. Both P7 classes were very lucky to have two visitors in class this week to discuss different aspects of WWII. Firstly, Mrs. Gordon’s Aunt visited us to speak about primary and secondary sources of information from WWII, highlighting the difference between the two and sharing some local stories. We also welcomed in Mr. Boiling (Andrew’s Dad) who is a college lecturer in Glasgow. He delivered a presentation on The War at Sea during WWII. P7b enjoyed hearing about the naval warfare between the two sides, and how Germany’s most powerful warship, the Bismarck, was eventually sunk in an act of vengeance ordered by Winston Churchill.
Friday
We did our best to give Mr. Logan the fright of his life as he stepped out the door this morning with our crazy and wacky hairstyles in aid of Red Nose Day and Comic Relief. As a class we brought in just over £28 and donated in addition to this through our purchases at the bake sale organised by the Pupil Council. A huge thank you to them for organising this, along with Mrs. Gordon. We celebrated another successful week in P7b, winning the Peg Challenge for the second week running and also the Class of the Week trophy. This was as a result of them moving round the school sensibly and quietly, and for sharing such a depth of knowledge relating to WWII. P7’s quality of higher order questioning was particularly impressive, and caught the attention of both our visitors to class. They demonstrated their inferential and evaluative thinking when presented with a wealth of information. Well done P7b, I am incredibly proud of you, demonstrating again what an asset and credit you are to our school. With the weather being so nice, we finished up our day with Golden Time outside. Mr. Logan’s football team missed out on victory in a well contested 5-5 draw. To be continued next week…
Next Week
Thanks again for taking the time to read our class blog, we hope you all have a lovely weekend. One week to go!
P7b and Mr. Logan
This week we have been very creative. We worked on spring art by drawing daffodils. We had to consider shape, proportion, shade, colour etc. We also made creations for “La fete des meres” in French.
We were also very lucky to have 2 visitors this week to talk to us about WWII. My Auntie Linda came in on Tuesday to tell us about the first air raid in WWII which my grandfather was involved in, being on the HMS Southampton in the Firth of Forth when it took place.
On Thursday Andrew’s dad Mr Boiling came to tell us all about the war at sea, in particular the sinking of HMS Hood and the Bismarck. The children were thoroughly engaged with both talks, and both visitors commented on the level of engagement and questioning and response from the children.
A huge thank you to all parents, carers, children, teachers and pupil support workers, who helped bake and prepare for our first fundraiser – Red Nose Day.
We have not counted all the money yet, but it looks to have been a huge success…watch this space for the total.
Here are some photos of the happy shoppers… 
There is always something new we are learning in Primary 5.
Over the last two weeks we have been concentrating on multiplication. We’ve been learning various different strategies that can help us to solve multiplication problems. We’ve enjoyed learning different strategies and applying them to help us solve mental problems as well as word problems, We concentrated a bit of time on multiplication word problems, We used the Bar Modeling strategy to help us to understand what was being asked in the word problem. We went outside and used chalk to demonstrate how we would use Bar modelling when being faced with a multiplication word problem. After learning various different strategies we started to learn the multiplication algorithm. When doing the multiplication algorithm we realized how important it was that we knew our times table facts. Learning our times tables is something we will continue to learn and practice. One way that we have been learning our times table facts, is through song and dance.
In literacy this week we have been looking at the meaning of a suffix. We looked at the suffixes, er and est. We played games on the smart board to help us learn the spelling of the words when we add suffixes to the words. Our class novel we are listening to is Private Peaceful. The novel takes us back to world war one, although it’s not all based on the war, but more about a boy, Tommo Peaceful, who forms different relationships when he is younger and before he goes off to the war. We have spent some time analysing and discussing these different relationships and we have compared our relationships to Tommo’s . We worked together with a partner and drew up the relationship triangle that Tommo is in ,we discussed how their relationship had started and how it appears to change throughout the story. Again using the class novel, we looked at the format and style of informal letter writing. We stepped into character and went to war, we then used what we learnt and wrote a friendly letter home.
We’ve had plenty of fun in PE this week. We’ve been playing volleyball with Mrs. Reid. We are having great fun learning new skills and learning the importance of playing as a team. PE with Mrs. Matos we have various different stations that we had to work through. We needed to use different skills, muscles and fitness for each activity. We practiced using the hula hoops, balancing, skipping, and jumping over hurdles. We were having so much fun, we didn’t even realize how hard we were working.
On Sunday the 26 March is a very special day, it is day that we get to say thank you to the special ladies in our lives, it could be a mum, gran or a special aunty. We had a talk in class about the special ladies in our lives and what makes them so special to us. We have made these special ladies something special to say thank you for all that they do for us.
What a way to end off the week, with some fun for red nose day! Thank you to the pupil council for organising the dress down, crazy hair day and for the yummy cake sale!
Next week we will be looking forward to Tom from the British Legion coming in to have a talk with the Primary 5s.
Last week before our Easter break, I wonder what we will get up to?
P5B and Mrs Matos
This week, in P1A, we have been learning two new sounds, ‘oa’ and ‘ow’. We have been highlighting ‘oa’ words in stories, using our sounds to write ‘oa’ words, matching ‘oa’ words to pictures and practising how to write the ‘oa’ sound. When learning the ‘ow’ sound, we played bingo (Miss Harrison also enjoyed this activity), drew pictures containing the ‘ow’ sound and made sentences with ‘oa’ and ‘ow’ words.
We have been continuing to learn subtraction facts to 10. This week, we learned to take away from 3, 4 and 5 and we even looked at tricky subtraction word problems. We are working very hard with our subtraction facts. This week, we finished learning about analogue and digital o’clock times. We were able to write o’clock times on digital displays.
This week, we started our football block in gym. We were learning to dribble with the football and enjoyed playing Follow the Leader and working in groups to dribble round the cones.
We made fantastic Spring pictures – our art lesson was very messy! We put our hands in yellow and green paint to make our background and then dipped our fingers in blue and orange paint to make the rabbits. Once the paint was dry, we used a pen to add the eyes, nose & whiskers. Some of us need to finish our pictures next week.
Miss Harrison didn’t recognise some of us today! We came to school with crazy hair, red noses, hairbands and dressed down to raise money for Red Nose Day. After break, we went to the bake sale and bought some delicious cakes! It was strange eating a cake in class! Well done to everyone for their fundraising efforts.
We hope that everyone has a lovely weekend and a happy Mother’s Day on Sunday,
P1A and Miss Harrison 🙂
On Tuesday we went on a trip to Scottish Parliament. We went on a tour of the building where we saw a committee meeting, the debating chamber and the garden lobby. We met MSP Fiona Hyslop and MSP Jeremy Balfour who answered our questions and talked to us about what it’s like to be an MSP. When we got back to school we watched a live debate on Parliament TV, it was cool to see a debate taking place where we had stood that morning.
On Wednesday we took part in the K’Nex Challenge, working in teams to design and build a wheelbarrow. Miss Prince was really impressed with how well we worked together.
On Thursday we went to the Cracking Easter event at St Michael’s Church, it was a great opportunity to learn more about Easter and interact with P6 children from other primary schools.
We finished our crazy week with crazy hair for Red Nose Day!
Have a lovely weekend,
Love from Miss Prince and P6B x
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