Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School

A fun start to our week. Miss Baillie came along to our class on Monday morning, and got involved in our lesson on famous Scots. Miss Matos really got into the spirit of things, although born in South Africa, Mrs Matos is proud to call Scotland her home. We discussed things about Scotland that made us proud, and we learnt that Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh and amongst other inventions, he is most famous for inventing the telephone. As part of our learning, we worked together in groups, and did some research on Alexander Graham Bell, we researched facts about his early life, his inventions and his interest in sound. Once we had gathered all our information, we created an interactive poster ( this is a poster that you can stick your head through so that you look just like Alexander Graham Bell). We will be presenting our interactive posters to the rest of the class next week. Emily, Jared and Hannah presented their poster at our Scottish Assembly on Friday.   ( Written By: Evie and Emily)

This week’s  highlight was our trip to the Forth Road Crossing Education Centre.  On Wednesday the, 25th January, Primary 5 went to on a trip to the Forth Road Crossing Education Centre, we were so lucky to have Elaine Barry, a Civil Engineer, to educate us about the new bridge and how different bridges are made. We worked in two teams , Ready 2 Build and Engineering Scotland. In our teams we had to work together to build a bridge. Our project managers were, Andrew and Emily. The Quantity surveyors were, Evie and Anna, and the health and safety officers were Hannah and Barry. The winning team was Ready 2 Build- Well done, their project manager, Emily lead the team to success, everyone worked really well together and had their bridge built in speedy time. After lunch we had the opportunity to walk across the Forth Road Bridge, this gave us the opportunity to have a closer look at the bridge’s construction. It was a wonderful trip, lots of fun and a better understanding of what all is involved in building a bridge.  (Written By: Dayna ).

Numeracy this week we focused on subtraction. The first strategy that we worked with was Bridging. Bridging is when we use a number to help us subtract 2 and three digit numbers. Some of us found this tricky, but after some practise on the white boards we quickly became more confident using this method. We even made some subtraction problems for our elbow partner to solve. In number talks we were given a string of subtraction problems. Using our mental agility we quickly found the link and were able to solve the problems using more than one strategy. (Written by Evie)

In Literacy this week we have been learning about Figurative language. Some of the ones we focused on were, Similes, Metaphors, Hyperbole, Onomatopoeia and Personification. We worked together with our elbow partners to complete a task of deciding which Figurative language each sentence would be. Some of the sentences were a little tricky and we were getting confused between a Metaphor and a Hyperbole, Mrs Matos then got us all up on our feet, and taught us a dance and song to help us remember the differences between them. Our spelling sound for this week was words with the ind and idl sound patterns. ( Written by Emily and Adam).

In science this week we made the colour wheel. We coloured our wheel the 7 colours of the spectrum and then we put it onto a motor. We made the motor spin with our electrical circuit. The colour wheel spun and we saw white.

On Tuesday it will be our last trip to Linlithgow Rugby Club, we all looking forward to what will be in store for us next week.

P5B and Mrs Matos

Yes it’s true P7a switched roles with Mrs Gordon this week as they became teachers whilst she was the pupil.

As part of our Famous Scots focus the children were split into 3 groups and given a famous Scot. They were then tasked with creating and delivering a sequence of 3 lessons that would help Mrs Gordon and the rest of the class learn about their Scot, their place in Scottish history and what they were famous for.

It was a fabulously engaging activity, and armed only with: lesson plan templates, copies of the outcomes and a group discussion on what makes a good lesson, the children duly delivered 3 sets of lessons. I was very impressed by the creativity of the lessons.

They all created different activities to help us learn about either Robert Watson-Watt, Sir James Young Simpson or David Steel. The most entertaining was definitely Ruby’s group who had everyone make a barometer out of tins and test it outside, linking to Robert Watson Watt’s invention of radar.

When asking the children what they found most difficult, the most common answer was keeping their classmates quiet and on task …

Mrs Gordon and P7a

Did you know that we have now covered all of our initial sounds? 🙂 Last week, we looked at the sounds ‘x’ and ‘qu’. We enjoyed playing snap with different CVC words, making a rainbow ‘x’ and ‘qu’, creating our own treasure maps and writing our own sentences using our common words and new sounds.

In our literacy time this week, we have been learning about alphabetical order. Abhinav and Euan were able to arrange the letter pegs in alphabetical order.

We have also been looking at all of the letter names for our initial sounds and practising our letter formation. Using squiggle pads and squiggle sticks, we revised how to write all of our initial sounds. Miss Harrison was very impressed with our neat handwriting!

Last week, we finished learning about 3D shapes. We looked at cubes, cuboids, pyramids, cylinders, spheres and cones. Miss Harrison gave us lots of 3D shapes and we made castles, buildings and trains.

In our numeracy time this week, we have been looking at 2D shapes and have been continuing and creating our own repeated patterns. We enjoyed matching patterns, using shapes to create our own patterns and continuing patterns that Miss Harrison gave us.

This week, we have continued our work on numbers to 20. We can find larger and smaller numbers in a pair, the largest or smallest number in a set and we can order numbers to 20. Next week we will be learning about odd and even numbers.

As we have now finished our Outdoor Learning focus on winter, we started our new Scottish focus on Famous Scots. We are looking at James Watt who helped to make the steam engine. Ruaridh and Charlie told the P1-3 classes at assembly what we know about James Watt. Did you know that he was from Greenock and he was born almost 300 years ago?

Finally, we used the 2D shapes we learned in maths to print and create our own steam trains.

Today, we went to the Scots Assembly. We shared what we have been learning in class with P1-3 and listened to P6 singing different Scots songs and reciting poetry. They were fantastic! As always, we were a great audience!

We hope that everyone has a happy weekend,

P1A 🙂

In literacy this week we have been continuing with our diary writing. We had lots of fun pretending to be  Harry Potter and thinking about all the things which he might do in a day. The magic was continued when we wrote our ideas in our diary entries!!!

In maths, we have been learning our 3 times table. We have had lots of fun playing different games to practice our recall of the 3 times table , and even got the stopwatches out to see how quickly we could answer questions from our friends.

For our Topic we have been looking at David Dale and Robert Owen. We did a bit a research to find out some facts about them and the history of New Lanark. We also looked at some of the inventions in the mills, which helped to improve the production of cotton such as the spinning jenny and water frame. We had lots of fun when we all got the opportunity to be inventors for the afternoon, we designed some really cool inventions…. even a machine which does your homework for you!

We are really excited for our trip next week, and have lots of questions which we would like to ask when we go.

We wish you all a happy weekend.

From P3 🙂 x