Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School

November 15, 2019

Primary 6 -w/e 15th November 2019

Maths this week, we have been exploring fractions and decimals, with some of us adding and subtracting decimals while others looked at equivalent, improper and mixed number fractions. We started a mathematical art activity, which we will continue next week.

In music, we have continued to practise some of the songs from Fame.

We had a visit from author Amy Wilson, who spoke to us about how she creates stories and discussed the characters and plots from her novels.

In science we had our first look at electricity and electrical circuits and next time we are going to explore what will happen if we add more light bulbs to a circuit.

On Monday we had a visit from Katie Kerr’s dad, who talked to us about renewable energy.

In literacy we created a visualisation of one of the scenes from Spellchasers.

Have a lovely weekend

Kind regards

Primary 6 and Mrs Kerr

November 14, 2019

Jurassic Fun in P2A

We have went dinosaur mad this week. We have had lots of fun learning about dinosaurs and much more. Please take a look at what we have been up to.

We had some special visitors in our class over the weekend. We discovered dinosaur footprints in our classroom as we came in on Monday morning! We have had fun during free play playing with the dinosaurs in our tuff tray and making dinosaur shows in our theatre. As a class we have been learning what a dinosaur is and what extinct means. We then looked at what animals today are endangered and who could become extinct in the future. We enjoyed working in groups trying to think of animals we know that are endangered. We created our own dinosaur fact cards where we could choose the dinosaur we wanted to find out more information about. Miss Muir played a clip called the Triceratops rap which was funny and very catchy. It helped us remember how many horns they have!

In Literacy we have been learning the sounds: ‘pl’, ‘sl’, ‘dr’ and ‘fr’ this week. We did well in blending our words and writing them in sentences. We were able to think of lots of words with our sounds, we could have done it all day! There weren’t enough frog’s lilly pads for us to write our ‘fr’ words on. Some of us were writing as many words as we could think of with our sounds during free play and creating a ‘pl’ flower in a plant pot. We enjoyed searching for silly words with Miss Muir in a Triceratops text. We learned lots about Triceratops as well as making sure we read the text carefully. Miss Muir was very impressed with how well we could find the silly words and replace them with sensible ones.

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been continuing with our learning of 3D shapes and their properties. We learned new words: faces and edges and counted these on different 3D shapes. We had fun creating 3D shape animals. We had to work out how to make the different shapes to create our animals. In Number Talks this week we were discussing splat questions. Splat is when we see coloured circles, we count them then a splat covers some of them. We then need to say how many coloured circles are under the splat and how we reached our answer. It has been good to hear how people can see one splat in lots of different ways and it is helping us practise our addition skills too.

Thank you for reading our class blog. See you next week!

P2A and Miss Muir 🙂

November 14, 2019November 14, 2019

Vowels, hibernation and Nativity practice in P1B

In Literacy this week we learned about the vowel sounds – a e i o u. Here is a catchy song that helps us to remember them…

We can find the vowel sound in a word and we can select the correct vowel to make a word. We also know that if you change the vowel sound sometimes it makes a new word – dug, dig, dog. This is something you could play about with at home with magnetic letters or the sound cards in the homework bags.

In Writing we learned how to write a sentence. We know that a sentence needs 3 very important things – a capital letter at the beginning, finger spaces and a full stop. Mrs Bell was very impressed as we all managed to write a sentence in our jotters. We need to remember to use a finger space after every word but we will be getting lots of opportunities to practise this.

In Numeracy we continued our work on addition – number bonds to make 2, 3 and 4. We are getting more confident at writing sums using the + sign and the = sign. We love this adding with a pirate song:

This week we finished our hedgehogs (Mrs Bell is very relieved these got home in one piece!) We also learned about hibernation – which animals hibernate and where they hibernate. Ask us and see if we remember any. Ethan taught Mrs Bell that queen bees hibernate underground. Never too old to learn something new! We also went outside and investigated good places to hibernate in the school grounds. We decided up a tree would be your best option as everywhere else would be too noisy!

Our Nativity Practices are now in full swing. As we are P1s we don’t have speaking parts (it will be our turn in P2). We are learning the songs and we’re looking forward to learning the dance moves… this year’s Nativity has a slight Strictly Come Dancing feel to it!

Next Wednesday afternoon we are going to begin making our Christmas crafts to sell at the Christmas Fayre. Any willing helpers are always welcome 🙂

Have a lovely weekend,

Love P1b and Mrs Bell x

November 12, 2019

P4A Blog Week Ending 8.11.19

Literacy and English

In literacy we have been learning to write in the discussion writing genre about a boy and an ant. We learned how to find arguments for and against whether the boy should stand on the ant and give our opinion of which side we agreed with. Before writing we had discussions around whether the boy had the right to act on his more powerful position and whether the ant had feelings.

We did a short read on Monday to fill in the gaps of a story with a word that would make sense. In handwriting we were practising forming the letter ‘i’ correctly. In grammar we learned when to use ‘ier’ and ‘iest’ at the end e.g. happier and ‘happiest’. For spelling this week, we were learning to spell words that have a double letter in the middle and had ‘ed’ at the end and also words that start with ‘re’. We had some ERIC time (Everyone Reading in Class) to enjoy reading of our choice. Our focus for home reading this week has been on non-fiction books.

Numeracy and Mathematics

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been practising our mental maths strategies. This week our focus has been on partitioning numbers to help us add them mentally. We learned that we should put the largest number first and then partition the second number so that we can add on the tens and then the units. We also learned more vocabulary to help us to understand what kind of calculation we were being asked to work out.

Learning across the Curriculum

The Primary 7’s taught us a French lesson to help us to know our colours and numbers better. We have been playing lots of instruments in music with Ms Bain. In Health and wellbeing we have been learning about the different food groups and what proportion we should have of each group to stay healthy. We also talked about food groups that people may not be able to eat or chose not to eat and discussed the reasons. We are still enjoying our book study of Aesop’s fables and finding out the morals in the story.

P4A and Ms McAlpine

November 10, 2019

P3B Week commencing Monday 4th November

This week we completed our entries for the P7 School House competition. The P7’s asked us to design new pictures for the four houses Ochiltree, Hopetoun, Champfleurie and Binns. We looked at various pictures of the houses before coming up with our own designs. The winners will be put on display next to the house “sprig” jars in the corridor.

For our enterprise activity P3 took part in the “Shoe Box” appeal. Between the two classes we managed to collect 60 boxes which were picked up by the charity on Wednesday. A tiggerrific thankyou to everyone who sent in a box or handed in items to make one up. The children from around the world will be delighted to receive one at Christmas time.

In Maths this week we were delighted to welcome so many Mums, Dads, Grannies and Grandads to our class to see us learning using our “Number Talks”. After a short introduction by Mr Ritchie we worked in groups at different maths stations to show the different strategies we used to solve the maths problems. We had Solve the Sum, Target Number, Magic Cup Challenge, Playing Card Challenge and Concrete Challenge. The children all enjoyed working with our visitors.

In reading we have been continuing our work using the new resource called “Reflective Reading”. We have been looking at different texts and playing “Blankety Blank” where we have to work out the missing word and then further challenge ourselves by coming up with an alternative word or words that could be used. We have also played “Silly Words” where we have to identify where an incorrect word has been used and work out what the correct word should be. It is important that when we choose a new word it is still in the context of the story.

In grammar we have been learning about the difference between common and proper nouns. We are trying to remember that we need to use capital letters when we are working with proper nouns.

As part of our outdoor learning we have been looking at the life cycle of an oak tree. We watched a speeded-up video of how an oak tree grows from the seed of an acorn into a spectacular oak tree. We then recorded this information by making an illustrated life cycle diagram. If the weather is better next week, we will be going on an oak tree hunt around the school to see how many we can find.

Mr Ritchie and the Tiggerrific P3B’s

November 8, 2019

P1a’s Weekly News

This week in P1a we have really enjoyed sharing strategies within our Number Talks. We love using the hand signals to show our thinking time, number of strategies and when we agree. In numeracy we have been learning about addition and how it means how many altogether. We also used our addition knowledge to add one more without going back to zero and counting everything again. Mrs Gordon was very impressed when we managed to share some addition strategies during our number talks on Wednesday when we had some parents join us for our open morning. Lots of us have really enjoyed learning how to write number sentences using + and = symbols, and adding together playdough apples, cuddly toys and numicon.

On Wednesday afternoon the second group of children went to the firepit with Mrs Malcolm from the nursery. They loved learning about the fire and toasting marshmallows…Mrs Malcolm said we may make hot chocolate on the fire next…

We continued our hedgehog focus by singing a hedgehog song and learning facts about them. Mrs Gordon even learnt that their babies are called hoglets (she didn’t know that fact before). We also started to make our own clay hedgehogs which we will get to take home. We found it was much harder to mould clay than it is playdough.

In literacy we learnt 2 more new sounds u and b. We are finding b very tricky and keep mixing it up with d. We need to keep practising so we can tell them apart. We also learnt 2 new tricky words the and to. Each tricky word has an action to help us try and remember them. We also used our knowledge of sounds so far to write about fireworks. We drew a picture of fireworks with oil pastels and then wrote what they look like and sound like. Next week we are going to try and write our first sentence…very exciting!

Happy weekend from Mrs Gordon and P1a

November 8, 2019November 8, 2019

A Busy Week in P3A

Another busy, busy week. We began the week continuing our grammar work. Over the past few weeks we have been learning about nouns – proper and common nouns and have been trying to remember to use capital letters when writing a proper noun.

In Science with Mrs Begarnie we furthered our research on forces. Mrs Begarnie left some forces resources in the classroom for us to use during our ‘Learning Through Play’ time. We have had great fun making steeper and steeper ramps! We have also tested different surfaces and tried our which works best to allow our cars to move well.

On Wednesday, we really enjoyed having some parents and other family members in the classroom to see some of our numeracy work. We worked in groups at different problem solving activities, sharing our strategies and understanding as we talked to each other.

We collected an amazing 60 shoe boxes in our Shoe Box appeal! They were collected on Wednesday and are now on their way around the world to children less fortunate than us, there are going to be 60 very happy children – a big thanks to Springfield families for supporting this 🙂

We continued our ‘Reflective Reading’ with a ‘Jigsaw Jumble’ on Thursday. Our activity was based on our Outdoor Learning topic – The Life Cycle of an Oak Tree – (although we didn’t actually get outdoors as the weather was so awful!) We are now really good at explaining the life cycle – ask us! We worked in groups to sort out sentences that had been cut in half. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds – we looked for capital letter and full stops to sort the writing into which strips were at the beginning of the sentence and which were endings. We then had to read really carefully to check which parts went together to make sense, checking tenses and singular and plural words as we worked. Every single group managed this task really well – all got 7 out of 7 sentences correct! We had some visitors from Norway in the classroom during this lesson too, they came to visit Springifled as they had heard about all our wonderful children and they were very impressed 🙂

A few weeks ago P7 set us a challenge to design new pictures to put on our school House display. We looked very closely and the houses – Ochiltree, Hopetoun, Binns and Champfleurie and drew excellent line drawings to submit for the competition. The winners will be put on display in the corridor.

On Friday, we had another French lesson on fruits, it is always good to revisit these words often so we really remember them. We played some games on the smartboard, a corners game and a fun ‘line bingo’ game. Our vocabulary is getting really good.

Have a good weekend everyone, P3A and Mrs Kennedy

November 8, 2019

Fireworks Fun in P2B

In Art and Design this week, we explored colour and shape. We talked about firework displays that we have been to recently and we watched a video of fireworks at Disney World. We discussed the colours and the shapes that we could see and then we created our own fireworks pictures using oil pastels. This week we have also been making fireworks with glitter and chalk in our tuff tray. There is glitter everywhere!

In writing this week we have been learning to write our own poems. We talked about firework displays that we have been to recently and we watched a video of fireworks at Disney World. We discussed the colours and the shapes that we could see and what we could hear. Afterwards, we drew fireworks pictures to help us to plan our writing. On Wednesday and Thursday we created our own acrostic poems about fireworks. We used interesting vocabulary to describe the colours, shapes and sounds and we checked that each line in our poem made sense. Our poems were absolutely fantastic!

This week our new sounds were ‘fl’ and ‘gl’. We created our own ‘fl’ sentences, wrote ‘fl’ words on a graffiti wall and made ‘gl’ words on our magnetic boards. Some of us were also learning the sounds ‘br’ and ‘cr’.

In our Short Read lesson on Monday we completed an activity called ‘Spot the Silly Word’. We listened to a song about a Triceratops and then Miss Harrison showed us a non-fiction text about the Triceratops. Reading the text carefully, we had to spot the silly words and then suggest sensible words to replace them.

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been learning about 2D and 3D shapes. We have been learning about the properties of 2D shapes and we can confidently talk about how many sides and corners each 2D shape has. This week we have also been continuing and creating patterns with 2D shapes and identifying 3D objects. On Wednesday, we had some special visitors in our classroom to watch our Number Talks. We have been continuing to look at ‘Number Sense’ and next week we are going to be using our addition facts to work out how many dots are missing under the splat!

Thank you for reading our blog post. We hope that you have a lovely weekend.

P2B and Miss Harrison xxx

November 8, 2019

Primary 6 – w/e 8th November 2019

This week in our IDL, we started our new topic of The Scottish Parliament. We learned about two types of government – democracy and dictatorship and the differences between them.

In music we have begun to learn some of the songs for our school show ‘Fame’. The lists for auditions will be taken down today and auditions will take place towards Christmas.

In Science, we finished our topic on energy and completed a mini assessment on this – ask us how we did!!!

In story writing we began to explore persuasive writing, looking at the structure and content of an argument. Look out for some of these heading your way soon!

In maths we explored the relationship between improper fractions and mixed number fractions. We also had some parents visit our classroom to see how we do number talks and esti mysteries.

In art we have created self-portraits, which we are hoping to display in class.

As part of our reading tasks over the last couple of weeks, we have been creating story cuboids, which summarise the key features of the books we have been reading.

In badminton, we had the opportunity to practise our grips, feet movements and accuracy.

The choir performed beautifully for our Norwegian visitors yesterday.

Kind regards

Primary 6 and Mrs Kerr

November 8, 2019

Another busy week in P7a

This week has been busy in P7. We had photographs, song rehearsals and SNSA’s. Plus all our normal learning- phew no wonder we are all tired!! 🙂

In Literacy we have started to write our short stories using action verbs and adjectives to add more excitement to them. Some of us “forgot” that a short story should only be a couple of pages and have written mini novels, however we know they will all be amazing and next time we will focus on what short means 😉

In Numeracy we have been solving and simplifying equations, some of us found these tricky to begin with, but we used our growth mindset tools and managed to work through the equations- our minds are getting stronger every day.

In Science, and in class, we started our Jaguar F1 challenge. We have sorted out our groups and written information on who we are and why we have been chosen for each role. Next week we will be looking at logos, team names and the shape and design of our cars.

Our Enterprise groups have now decided what they will all be doing and next week we will work with Mrs Newton and Mrs Durano to find prices for the products we need and then work out a selling price and estimated profit.

Our class photographs are being taken next Monday or Tuesday, we are having our Flu sprays on Wednesday, SNSA’s will hopefully be finished by Thursday and Friday is a Purple for Polio dress down day (so another normal week in P7 🙂 )

Have a lovely weekend, fingers crossed the sun shines.

P7a and Mrs Newton