Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School

This week our focus has been on art- creating art works for our Ancient Egyptian museum and starting Monet inspired Spring art. We have made Mummified cats, Mummy’s- life size (EEEK),  a couple of life size Sarcophagi, Canopic Jars, curses to keep the Mummy’s away (did we mention they are life size!), Scarab Beetles to protect us from those life size Mummys and necklaces. We also made a few pyramids for our door- hmmm maybe that is where the Mummys came from??

We learned how to write like an Egyptian- tricky at first but we are getting better. We also learned about the Rosetta Stone and how they used it to translate hieroglyphics into English.

In PE we did Hockey, we think we are getting better each week. In Music and in class we have been learning some Egyptian music (The Pyramid Song and Amazing Egyptians).

In numeracy we did estimating and representing using a variety of different measurements. We had a focus on reading skills on Thursday- we watched Tony Robinson talk about his book Weird and Wonderful Egyptians and we then played “Guess my book”. Some of our parents and grandparents joined us for this, we had great fun trying to guess which books we all were.

We have all been entered into the West Lothian Sum Dog contest- it runs from today for a week- we also taught P2/3 how to access and use Sum Dog- we love being teachers!

On Thursday we all shared our class talks, they were all very interesting. Daniel took part in a Russian Poetry competition at the weekend and won an award. Finlay, Hannah, Isla, Amy and Freya took part in a Gymnastic Show and did fantastic. Finlay and Orla took part in the Matt McGinn night, which involved singing. This weekend some of us are taking part in a Music Festival in Glasgow and Katie and Erin are taking part in an Acrobatic show- what a talented bunch P4a are!

PLUS 11 of our girls went to the first Gala committee meeting, more of this after Easter.

Next week is the last week of our home learning wall. All tasks should be in by Friday- although a lot of us have already completed these.

As an extra special challenge (and worth a whooping 10- yes 10- dojo points) Mrs Newton has asked us all to make simple Easter Bonnets for the school Easter Parade. Details of this will be in our home learning jotters on Monday.

Have a great weekend, 3 weeks to go 🙂

P4a

 

Dear All

This week we listened to P2’s assembly on Victorian childhood.

In literacy we learned about strategies. The parents came in and we did our reading. Mrs Lee came in and helped us. We went to the library. We did an apostrophe sheet. We went to Mrs Kerr’s classroom to learn about reading strategies.

In numeracy we did two maths assessments. After that we got asked what strategy we used. We did big maths beat that.

In Health and Wellbeing we did athletics in P.E. With Mrs Reed we did zone hockey.

In Learning across the curriculum we went to music. Some people played instruments and some people sang. On Tuesday we went to N.Y.C.O.S. music. We drew Easter pictures this morning.

With Mrs Begarnie in R.M.E. we drew or wrote about an Egypt based story.

Have a good weekend!

We were learning to create a (rather strange!) combined whole class story. The Library Committee came up with the idea! Sophie in our class, Louise from P5B, Fraser from P7B and Rebecca from P6B gave the whole school a ‘Weird Write All’ story pack. The class were divided into 3 groups to write the beginning, middle and end. Our title was ‘The Amazing Adventure.’
It was so funny to hear our WHOLE story being read out! We created a book to give to the library with our story.

In Maths we were learning to draw arrays to calculate the answer to a multiplication sum. We each came up with a sum and we drew arrays to demonstrate our understanding. We then were introduced to a new multiplication strategy called the ‘Distributive Property.’ We started off questioning what the word ‘distributive’ meant and how this could help us calculate multiplication sums. We were fantastic at calculating the answer and we EVEN managed to multiply a four digit number by a single digit! Waw!!!

In PE we have been doing Volleyball with Mrs Reid and team games with Mrs McCartney. This helps us to assume leadership, cooperate with others; question actions and regulations and accept responsibility for their own behaviour. It was a lot of fun and we demonstrated a team spirit throughout!

Our class novel is ‘Private Peaceful’ and we had a debate whether Tommo was to blame for his father’s death. One half of the class had to create a list of reasons why Tommo was to blame for his father’s death and the other half of the class had to create a list of reasons why Tommo was not to blame for his father’s death. We are becoming very good at explaining our reasoning.

In Art, we were focusing on Romero Britto and created Spring art in the style of him. He is a Brazilian neo-pop artist. He was born in Recife in East Brazil in 1963. He is very famous for his very bright and bold colourful paintings and prints. A lot of people enjoy Romero’s artwork (including famous people) and global companies such as Disney, LG, Mini and 02 have paid Romero to create paintings, portraits and sculptures!
He uses black to create the outline of the main shapes and for some of the features but he makes sure that some patterns do not have a black outline otherwise you would not be able to see the children or the world! For example, the spots and the stripes do not have a black outline but the flowers are painted black. Our art work was amazing!

It was lovely to see visitors to our class for our Reading open afternoon!
We showed our visitors lots of reading strategies that we use and how good we are at showing at demonstrating a deep understanding of the novel.

We won class of the week this week! Well done, P5A! So proud of you all!

Things to remember:
*Easter Bonnet- Wednesday 29th March.

Happy Friday and thank you very much for taking the time to read our blog!
Mrs McCartney and P5A x

This week we had a fencing taster session. The children coped very well and followed the instructions carefully.

In numeracy we have been continuing our work on fractions, decimals and percentages and conversion of these. The children really enjoyed our M&M and Skittles challenges where they had to convert the skittles into fractions, decimals and percentages per colour. This was interesting as the packets had 17 skittles, making things tricky…

As a number talk this week I gave the children a word problem which we worked through together using a real life example of fractions, decimals and percentages and car insurance costs. There was a real buzz in the room as the children helped eachother to find the answers.

In literacy/IDL we learnt about air raids in WWII and wrote instructions of what to do when the air raid siren sounds. We learnt what imperative (bossy) verbs were to do this.

For World Book Day on Thursday we voted to change our door into the book cover of A bear called Paddington. We write some weird stories, where the children wrote one paragraph then passed it on for the next person to continue.

Here we are all dressed up for World Book Day.

Happy World Book Day! Don’t our costumes look fantastic? We have been celebrating books and reading over the last couple of days. With Mrs Hogg and Mrs Begarnie, we decorated our classroom door. We voted for Hairy Maclary and made a giant tree, painted Hairy Maclary and created our own cat and dog designs. At Friday’s assembly, we found out that we won the decorated door competition! Thank you to Mrs Hogg and Mrs Begarnie for helping us to make such a wonderful entrance to our classroom.

This week, we also read lots of books and shared books that we brought in from home with our partners. Some of us also told the class about our books too! We took part in different reading competitions, made book marks and we went to Miss Mudd’s classroom to hear a story there!

Over the last two weeks, we have learned the ‘ai’, ‘ay’, ‘ee’ and ‘ea’ sounds. Today, we impressed Miss Harrison by teaching her about the ‘ee’ and ‘ea’ sounds and we told her how to spell different words containing these sounds!

                

In numeracy, we have been learning about ordinal numbers, number names to 20 and money. We have been learning to add coins to make different totals and have been comparing prices. When learning about ordinal numbers, we made paper aeroplanes and raced them in groups to award first, second and third.

 

We have been continuing to learn about old and new transport. Last Monday, Daniel’s mummy brought in a toy steam car to show us.

 

We continued to look at the different ways that humans have tried to fly throughout history and explored early flight attempts. Using different materials, we made our own hot air balloons. Thomas made a fantastic rocket at home and brought it in to show the class.

   

Last Wednesday, we arrived at school to find that Mr Fluff had been on ANOTHER adventure! This time he had been in a car. We helped him to learn about how cars have changed since they were invented and for writing, we made our own cars and described what they would look like! Some of our cars had wings, could go under water and even smelt of cream cakes and chocolate! We have enjoyed being car mechanics and playing in our Transport Museum.

  

 

In gym, we have been playing different parachute games. Miss Harrison even took part but got stuck under the parachute! Silly Miss Harrison!

Last Friday we had a special visitor in P1A, Sonic the hedgehog. We had to be very quiet as Ruaridh reminded us that hedgehogs are nocturnal so Sonic wasn’t used to being out during the day.

 

This week we won Class of the Week. Miss Baillie told us that we had won because we had been little stars when Miss Harrison was off sick. Miss Harrison was proud of us, as always.

We hope that you all have a lovely weekend. Miss Harrison is going to rest her voice!

P1A and Miss Harrison 🙂

We have had such a fun filled week this week! Here is what we have been up to…

In literacy we have been learning our sound ‘ea’. We have been keeping our eyes open for words which have the ‘ea’ sound in them, and have been practicing them during the week. Here are some photographs of our learning in progress!

  

In maths this week, we finished off our multiplication and began to look at division. We have been learning about what division is and different strategies to help us carry out division. In class we had a go at some sums which involved dividing by 2 and used the cubes to help us visualise what we were doing.

    

On Thursday we celebrated World Book Day. We took part in lots of different activities during the day including designing our classroom entrance, making bookmarks and book tokens as well as reading and sharing our favourite books! On Friday we also got to dress up as characters from our favourite books, it was really funny to see everyone in their costumes!

  

We hope you have a lovely weekend! From P3 x

The weeks in Primary 5 are just flying away, but we are managing to have weeks filled with learning, fun and adventures.

We really enjoyed our fencing taster session. Although some of us are ‘pro’ fencers already, it was great fun learning a new skill and having fun. Our fencing coach was very proud of how quickly some of us had learnt the specific skills needed for fencing. Keep your eyes open , I think we have some potential gold winners in P5B.

During science with Mrs Tulloch we have been learning about sounds. Some of the boys and girls in the class brought along their musical instrument to share with the class. They shared their knowledge on how the sound is produced and also played their instruments so we could hear and compare the different sounds. Some really talented  boys and girls in P5B, thank you for sharing your musical love with us.

We were very privileged this week, to have a very special person come along and talk to the Primary 5’s. Mr Hector Woodhouse came along to our school on Wednesday and shared his stories and experiences when being apart of the civil engineering team who built the Forth Road bridge.  What an amazing talk from Mr Woodhouse, he shared with us some photos , and also his own stories both good and bad during the time the bridge was being built. A very big thank you to Mr woodhouse for taking the time to come and talk to us.

During literacy this week, we have been learning about Direct Speech. We worked with our partner to edit a story that had no commas or inverted commas. We also worked with a partner to edit a dialogue from the story, Good news, Bad news. After some discussions and editing we quickly realised how often we forget to use inverted commas when writing something using direct speech. We have now learnt the rules and are going to try our best to use direct speech in our writing and to make sure we don’t forget to use the inverted comma correctly.

We’ve been learning so much in numeracy this week. We worked with a partner to solve some addition and subtraction word problems. Word problems can sometimes seem scary and tricky. Our first task was to decide if the word problem was asking us to add or subtract. Once we knew what  we were asked to do, we were able to solve the word problems. We learnt that it was important to understand the language or terminology in a word problem for us to be able to answer the questions. We have been very busy learning our times table. We have been singing along to the multiplication mash up song. We have had a looked at arrays and how they can help us to solve multiplication equations. We created our very own city arrays, using the times tables that we found the most challenging. In the next week we will be learning different multiplications strategies, but during our Number talk discussions, some of us are already sharing some effective strategies.

 

We got to celebrate World Book day on Thursday and Friday, the fun started with decorating our classroom door. We all decided and chose a book theme for our door. We all worked together to create the Billionaire Boy – What a fantastic job, and we think it turned out great! In the fun of World Book day we got to dress up, it was so good to see so many boys and girls and even teachers having fun and getting into the spirit, everyone looked amazing. On Thursday we got to spend some time reading our favourite book. We have entered a competition, the competition involved us designing a new book token, all the boys and girls put in a lot of effort , so fingers crossed a winner is chosen from our class. To end off our World Book day celebrations we took part in a scavenger hunt, we did this with P5A, amazing the things you can find in books.

We have three very special girls in P5B, Louise, Anna and Dayna took it upon themselves to raise money for the RSPB. The girls had bought a soft toy Owl, and some chocolate eggs as the prize, over the last couple of weeks, the girls have gone around to the different classes and have asked the boys and girls to guess the owls birthday for 50p. Today the girls announced the winner – L Fryer in P6B!! the three girls have been raising money for the eagle appeal and managed to raise an amazing £64.50. Thank you to everyone for your support, and a massive well done to the girls, Mrs Matos and everyone at Springfield Primary School are very proud of you!

 

What more could we possibly learn next week?

Mrs Matos and P5B