Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School

P5A’s Political Week…

What a busy week ‘Saving Our School!’

We heard an incredible, true story that gave us an inspirational lift this week. We watched a video of children that live in the desert region of Cholistan, Pakistan who are in a battle for their education. They are often expected to work with their family’s livestock instead of going to lessons and many girls are kept out of school completely. Even if their parents want them to go, a lot of children in Cholistan live so far away from the nearest school that it’s dangerous for them to travel there.
In 2009, the regional government announced funding for 75 schools in Cholistan. This project changed the lives of 5,500 children over five years before disaster struck: it was announced that the project would end in March 2014 and that the schools would all have to close. Even though many of their classrooms were not fully built and they had to have lessons on the dusty floor outside, the children of Cholistan loved their schools. They needed to fight back against these closures. We found this story inspirational as they were successful, fighting for their cause. In Cholistan, the media helped to make change happen. The Governor couldn’t ignore the issue as so many people were talking about it.
In a democracy, we can all help to hold leaders to account for their actions by reminding them of things they have promised to do. We explored democracy and how people take part in it. We looked at how we would fight to keep our school open and how important education is.
We created our own political parties where we had to decide on the following:
*Make up a party and decide on a name.
*Decide who will be your candidate.
*Produce a manifesto.
*Write a speech for your candidate.
*Create posters for display.
* Write a press release.
We delivered our speeches and voted today for which party we thought would be best. The political party that won was W.W.W ‘What We Want- well done!! Sophie was their candidate and they all worked really well as a team! Primary 5B were our audience and voted also, thank you so much P5B! Fantastic effort by all!!
It left us realising that we have a voice and how lucky we are to get educated daily. There are still millions of children around the world who are without access to education.

You can watch the videos that inspired us on the Action Aid website.

Have a fantastic weekend everyone! The countdown begins to Santa coming…

Mrs McCartney and P5A x ho ho ho

Things to remember:
*P5A ‘Christmas Activity Afternoon’ 1.15-3.15pm on Monday 19th December (‘party clothes’ many be brought in and your child can get changed before party.)
*St Michael’s Family Carol Service 7pm on Tuesday 20th December
*School stops for holidays on Wednesday 21st December at 3.15pm
School returns Wednesday 4th January 2017.

What a busy couple of weeks we have had in P1A!

Last week, we performed our nativity, ‘The Innkeeper’s Breakfast’ to our friends and family. Some of us were a little nervous but we tried our best and Miss Harrison was very proud of us. Sammy thought that our nativity was great!

One afternoon we watched The Snowman and looked at the shapes and colours of all the different snowmen. We created our own snowmen using crayons, chalk and oil pastels.

This week, we have been looking at the story ‘The Stick Man’ by Julia Donaldson. We listened to the story and identified some of the rhyming words and we also discussed how the Stick family might be feeling when he went missing. Miss Harrison put us into groups and we completed different activities relating to the story.

We created postcards from the Stick Man to send back to his family about all the adventures he was having:

Using puppets, we tried to remember all of the main parts of the story:

We made our own comic strips and drew pictures of the beginning, middle and end of the story:

Finally, we drew our own pictures of Stick Man and his adventures:

Over the last two weeks, we have been continuing to learn our sounds and common words. We can use our sounds to make words and we can even write sentences! In maths, we have been learning number bonds for numbers to 10 and 20.

We would like to wish everyone a very happy and safe Christmas!

P1A 🙂

We have had a busy week in class. We have been learning about fractions, super hero times tables and some fun Christmas maths.

We wrote letters to Mabel MacRae Anderson. Mabel kindly allowed us to use some of her poems for inspiration and we wanted to thank her. We have made a book of all our poems for her and Mrs Newton is hoping to meet Mabel during the holidays. We have also asked Mabel to come to our school so we will let you know what she says.

Most of us had Christmas Lunch this week- it was very yummy and we all got a popping candy Freddo bar to finish with.

We have been rehearsing the songs for our carol service next week- Mrs Newton has told us we are better than her P4’s last year!

Next week we have our Christmas Activity afternoon on Monday- we can change into party clothes after lunch time if we want. We are watching Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on Tuesday morning and we have our Christmas Carol Service on Tuesday evening, we need to wear school uniform for this. Wednesday is our last day before the Christmas Holidays and we are all excited about this.

This will be our last blog this year. Have a great holiday and we will return in 2017 🙂

P7a took part in the worldwide “Hour of Code” campaign. The aim of this was to show that anyone of any age or ability can learn computer science or coding.

We all had great fun trying out different games, as expected the children could certainly teach Mrs Gordon a thing or two…To try it at home just go to this site : https://hourofcode.com/uk/learn

This week we continued to write our French penpal letters learning how to say what our favourite sports were. In numeracy calculator skills were order of the week and the children had fun creating restaurant menus and then ordering lots of food to test those skills !

Skiing week 3 was a huge success with everyone moving further up the hill, even Mrs Gordon !

We started our discussions around democracy and have 4 parties setting up a campaign and creating manifestos, watch this space…

Happy weekend from Mrs Gordon and P7a