Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School

January 20, 2019

The Researchers in P2B

We began the week as researchers as part of our focus on Famous Scots. We used the netbooks to find out about the life of Eric Liddell – the famous Scottish runner who won a gold medal at the 1924 Olympics, even though it wasn’t the race he had trained for. We took notes and then wrote up a fact file. Found out lots of facts.

Then we looked how our legs and arms move when we run and used strips of paper to make running models. Lots of fun and amusement but some great results.

In Phonics we learnt about the power of the magic ‘e’ and by sprinkling a little bit of magic a word can change, for example ‘car’ becomes ‘care’. Get your child to give you some examples. The other group in the class did the sounds ‘igh’ and ‘y’.

We have been working with money this week and can recognise the coins up to £1 and what coins to use for different amounts, although some of us need to remember that we don’t get 4p’s and 6p’s!!

We visited the new library for the first time this week and can choose a new book on a Wednesday, so need to return our books on a Wednesday.

So joined up writing has begun in P2B and we made a very good first effort joining our e’s to other letters like d and g.

E.B celebrated his success with the class by bringing in his football trophy to show them. A.O and A.D also celebrated their success on the Hall of Fame.

Have a lovely weekend everyone and looking forward to our Our Burns celebrations on Thursday afternoon. If anyone has skills they can share with us, in Highland dancing, Burns poetry or Scottish songs, we’d love to hear from you.

Love from P2B and Mrs.Burton

January 18, 2019

P4/5 Week commencing 14th January 2019

We have been busy practising our class assembly and feel we are now ready to perform to the whole school and our families. We have made a centipede to dance along to our fabulous song. We hope you will enjoy our performance!

On Tuesday we took part in the second workshop provided by NYCOS (National Youth Choir of Scotland) where we learned how to perform new songs, singing skills, rhymes and movement. We learned the first and second verses of the “Coca Cola” rhyming song.

During ICT we practised our maths skills using SumDog and completed our Health and Wellbeing surveys..

In Science we learned about the function of the heart and we made a stethoscope and listened to our heart beats. We also made blood and looked at how the heart pumps it around the body.

In Maths we started to look at directions using the compass and describing the different types of angles and turns required to reach a destination. We also did “outdoor maths” using chalks to make a compass and give each other questions about the different directions.

In reading we have formed our new “Literacy Circles” and have learned about the different roles we will have within our reading circle. We are looking forward to getting together in our reading circles next Thursday and discussing our new reading books and performing our different roles. We will get a different role within the circle each week.

In handwriting we were practising how to get the letter “t” at the correct height in our sentences and words.

This week we also changed tables and classroom responsibilities so we all have a new job to help look after the classroom.

By Mr Ritchie and all the “Tiggerrific” P4/5s.

January 18, 2019May 8, 2019

Star Gazing, Time and New Library! (P3B)

We began the week researching Williamina Fleming as part of the whole school ‘Famous Scot’ focus. I showed the children a picture of Williamina and they discussed their thoughts on her – the date of the photograph? Do her clothes tell us anything? What do you think she was famous for? We then looked at a picture of the Horsehead nebula and asked what they thought it was and how the two pictures could be related? The children had some great ideas – quite a few thought Williamina was an artist and the nebula was her painting, someone thought the nebula looked like a volcano and maybe she was the first person to discover it.

Image result for horsehead nebula

On conducting an internet research, the children quickly discovered that the picture was the Horsehead nebula and it was first recorded in 1888 by Scottish astronomer Williamina Fleming at the Harvard College Observatory. The children made notes on Williamina’s life and we used these notes to learn how to write a report. This was quite a new concept and we worked hard to use headings and sub-headings as well as write in paragraphs, using our notes to help. The children were quick to realise that although Williamina did not always have an easy life she worked hard and became successful.

On Wednesday we had our first visit to the new library. Mrs Manlove and some very helpful parents have made it much more welcoming and easy to use. The children really enjoyed choosing a book, especially as there are quite a few new ones. We will visit the library each Wednesday so please try to remember to bring books back that day.

In numeracy we are continuing with subtraction – moving onto subtracting a single-digit from a 2-digit number, and subtracting multiples of 10. In outer maths we have been looking at time. Reading digital and analogue clocks – O’clock, half past, quarter past and quarter to. While we are pretty good at it. Some of us have to keep practising quarter to and quarter past and thinking about the size of the hands on the analogue clock to help us. maybe you could practise this at home and when you are out and about – can you find any clocks to read?

On Friday, we were consolidating counting to ten in French and learning how to read the number words in French. We played some good games on the smartboard, sang some songs in French and then worked with a partner to match the words to the numbers and played a pairs game together. At the end we played hangman with french words – it is amazing how well this helps to learn to read the words as the children begin to think about where the letters come in each word in order to be the first to guess correctly. Lots of enthusiasm this morning – great work!

Have a good weekend everyone, more bright, cold days would be nice 🙂

P3B and Mrs Kennedy

January 18, 2019

This Week’s News at SPS and Bonnytoun

We have been busy continuing our Scots focus in school this week. Today, P4/5 held a great assembly about ‘New Year’ which ended with all children singing a Scots song about a centipede. Thank you to Mr Ritchie for his efforts which saw all children speaking out and performing well.

Next week, P7 will be holding a Burns’ Supper on Tuesday afternoon and P2 will also be having an afternoon of Scots poetry and activities.

Our Nursery children have been developing their ‘forest skills’ this week by roasting marshmallows on our brand new fire pit.

Tomorrow, a group of staff and P6 and P7 pupils are off to Newcastle to spend the day undertaking football related activities.

Each of our school Houses; Champleurie, Binns, Hopetoun and Ochiltree have now earned over 1000 ‘springs’ and have chosen to cash these in on a trip to Dovecot Park! This means that each class will be allowed to visit the park for a play session over the next week or so. Keep posted for more news.

Have a super weekend everyone!

Miss Baillie xx💖

January 18, 2019

Primary 5 w/e 18th January 2019

This week we enjoyed our visit to The Peel. We played games, hunted for birds, learned about migration and made bird feeders. When we came back, we wrote a report about our adventures.

We started to look at our Famous Scot- this week we researched lots of information about Alexander Graham Bell.

In maths, we looked at negative numbers and how they are used in real life.

Have a lovely weekend

Primary 5 and Mrs Kerr

January 18, 2019

P4

This week we started learning about John Logie Baird. My lightbulb moment this week is learning to do division with my 4 times table. KP
I now know where to put an apostrophe when the noun ends with an “s”. MS
I learnt to tell the time using the analogue clock. NJ
I didn’t know that you can use the 5 times table to tell the minutes.SM
I now understand how to tell the time to/ past the hour. EM
We learnt about John Logie Baird and how the first TV was invented. AM
I learnt how John Logie Baird’s TV worked. CC

January 18, 2019

Trips, singing and artefacts!

Monday saw both P6 classes visit the Scottish Parliament. We had a very enjoyable trip and would recommend that everyone goes for a visit if they can- it is free 🙂

On Tuesday afternoon Caro and Stuart, from the Linlithgow Museum Song Project, came in and we started working on our song. This week we used an old bottle as a stimulus, discussed what it might have been used for, who might have used it and what it would tell us if it could talk. In two weeks time we will start the song writing process.

More music on Thursday, this time Opera, with the other P6 class and both P7’s. We have 6 weeks to learn the songs for this before Scottish Opera come into school, we know we will be excellent, we just need a bit more song rehearsals!

In PE we did Boccia and practised our throwing and catching skills. We also did the Beep test, over the next few weeks we are going to work on our stamina and see if we can run further.

Next week we are going to be starting the Industrial Revolution, doing a report on Robert Owen and continuing fractions work.

Have a lovely weekend,

P6a, Mrs Newton and Mrs Hutton 🙂

January 18, 2019

P1a Block Play and ICT skills

Another fun filled week in P1a with lots of help from our P7 leaders and the P3 playleaders.

Literacy

This week we learned our first digraph ‘sh’ we learnt that when these 2 letters are together they make 1 sound. We all had fun making shape ships’s and writing sentences with our sh words.

Numeracy

We started our block on subtraction by eating marshmallows to demonstrate “taking away”, we really enjoyed that! Our focus this week was on using concrete materials including blocks, pasta, fingers etc to show what subtraction means. We also used number lines to demonstrate jumping back when subtracting.

HWB

In PE with Mr Logan this week we started a football block by doing some ball skills. Have a look at our concentration when we are catching the ball….

We also did some more work on growth mindset where we focused on 2 things we could do and 1 we couldn’t do “yet”.

P3 and P7 Leader activities

Some of the P7 leaders are doing a 4 week block with us on ICT skills. This week we learnt how to log on and off the computer. We really enjoyed this.

The P3 block play leaders helped us create some structures with our new blocks, we even made a church!

Happy weekend, Mrs Gordon and P1a

January 18, 2019

Time, Williamina Fleming and Play Leaders (P3A)

In Numeracy this week we have been continuing to look at subtraction. We learned different strategies to subtract a teens number from 20 and we looked at using different subtraction vocabulary such as ‘minus’ and ‘find the difference’. Some of us were learning how to subtract multiples of 10 and near multiples of 10 from a two-digit number and some of us were linking our addition and subtraction facts and using these to solve problems.

This week we also started to look at time. We revised using o’clock and half past times and then we learned how to use quarter past and quarter to times. We played a game on the computers called ‘Stop the Clock’ where we had to use our knowledge of times to match analogue and digital clocks.

In Literacy this week we have been looking at non-fiction texts. We have been listening to and reading different non-fiction texts and on Monday we learned to find information in non-fiction texts. On Tuesday we used non-fiction texts on the internet to find out information about Williamina Fleming, our Famous Scot focus. We recorded our research notes and then on Wednesday, we used them to write a report about the life of Williamina Fleming. We used interesting titles, subheadings for each section of our reports, an opening paragraph to tell what our reports were about and a closing sentence to round off our reports. Two of us will be sharing our reports at the Scottish assembly next Friday.

This week we were also looking at using different linking words. We completed an activity where we had to select the correct linking word to complete the sentence. Afterwards we chose the correct linking word for different sentences and then we wrote our own sentences using the linking words that we had learned.

On Wednesday we went to our school library. We will be visiting the library every Wednesday just before lunch. We really enjoyed our first visit to our new library and enjoyed reading our new books with our friends.

On French Friday we started to revise our numbers in French. We listened to a French numbers song, played different French numbers games on the Promethean board and matched the words in French to the correct numbers with a partner.

In PE this week, we have been continuing to practise our football skills. We developed our dribbling skills and worked on looking up whilst dribbling by trying to balance cones on our heads. We also practised passing to a partner and then we played a dribbling game against the other teams.

This week we have been continuing to lead play in P1. We really enjoy being play leaders and helping to support free play in both P1 classes. This week we have also been leading block play. Our block play leaders have been taking groups of P1 pupils and leading their learning.

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

P3A and Miss Harrison xxx

January 18, 2019

Eric Liddell, ‘magic e’ and money in P2A

This week we learned about Eric Liddell, the Scottish runner who won gold for Scotland in the 1924 Paris Olympics. On Monday we used the computers to carry out research about Eric, then on Tuesday we wrote fact files using the information we found. Ask us about him, we know lots of fascinating facts.

On Wednesday we created abstract art of Eric Liddell running, his running technique was unique – ask us to show you how he ran!

In Phonics we began learning about ‘magic e’, we’re all doing really well with this. It helps to sound out the word before and after adding the ‘magic e’ for example;

mad

…sprinkle on the magic e…

made

Here’s a ‘magic e’ song we’ve enjoyed singing in class:

In Maths we began learning about money. We are all able to recognise coins up to £1. Now we are counting coins, remembering to start with the biggest coin. Some of us are getting muddled when adding 10p and only adding 1p. We will continue to work on this next week. Here’s a game you can play at home to practise this skill:

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/money/coins-game

In PE with Mrs Bell we worked on our fitness and coordination. We loved working out to music and having a go at each of the stations.

On Wednesday we visited the new library for the first time. We will be going to the library every Wednesday so if you would like a new book remember to bring back the old one on Wednesdays.

Next Thursday afternoon we are having a Burns celebration in Primary 2. We will be tasting shortbread, weaving tartan, singing Scottish songs, highland dancing and performing Scots poems.

The children have been given a selection of Scots poems. If they would like to, they can learn and perform one of the poems at our Burns Celebration. If your child has anything tartan, please send it in for them to change into. Please don’t buy anything especially for this as we have some tartan sashes the children can wear.

If you have any Scottish books, artifacts or skills please get in touch! I have been hearing from the children that we have lots of parents who can highland dance. It would be fab to have an expert to show us how it’s done 🙂

Have a great weekend!

Love P2A and Mrs Bell x