The children have had the excitement of Halloween this week. They all enjoyed their party on Tuesday -thank you to Miss.Baillie and the P.T.A. Great costumes -Well done everybody. We made 3D Halloween figures, in line with our work on 3D shapes last week.
We have been learning the new sounds of “ng” and “nk” and doing lots of work connected to these sounds.
The children painted their hedgehogs and now just need to put eyes on them. They look really effective.
We have been learning colours and instructions in French and playing games and singing songs.
In Maths we have been continuing with addition and designed our own function machines. Super work everybody.
We read our new reading books with our Primary 6 Pals and then with their help did some guided reading work on our books.
Have a whizzing weekend with the fireworks and stay safe.
This week the children have been very excited about all things Halloween! They had a great afternoon at the Halloween disco, thank you to the PTA for organising.
In Phonics we have been learning words that end in ng and nk. All of the children did very well in dictation and they were all able to independently write a sentence using words with these sounds in. Here is a good game to practise reading ng and nk words at home:
In Maths this week we have been working on addition to 20. We can now add a single digit number to a teen number. We made a bus to help us to visualise what these sums would look like.
We know we can somersault addition sums. Starting with the bigger number helps us to solve sums quicker on a number line or in our head. For example,
3+14 =
14+3 =
In Art we made our own Halloween monsters using chalks on black paper. It was a challenge not to smudge the chalk, especially for the left handed (Miss Prince struggled with this too!) They have turned out brilliantly, what a creative class we are.
We have finished making our hoglets, they are living in a tuff tray in our classroom. If you go out walking this weekend and find any good leaves for them to hibernate under then please send them in.
The children were very excited to find a real life hedgehog on the pitch on Thursday; they were very sensible and gave the hedgehog lots of room to scuttle away.
Next week…
We have a new boy starting in our class on Monday, he came to visit on Wednesday and we were all very kind and welcoming.
Next Wednesday is our Phonics/Spelling opening morning, hope to see you then.
Thank you to everyone who has already supported our P3 Shoe Box Appeal. A special thank you to HD who has donated 4 boxes!
P3 are in charge of the shoebox appeal this year. By handing in a shoebox with a few gifts inside, you will allow a child to receive a Christmas gift. These boxes will be sent to areas of the world where children are less fortunate than us.
Suggested items:
Toiletries (no talc)
Toothbrush
Hat, scarf, gloves
Small toy
Sweets (no chocolate)
Stationery
It would be great if you could wrap your shoebox in Christmas paper with the lid separate to the bottom with an elastic band around it.
Please attach a checklist which can be found at the link below or by visiting the Blythswood Care website. You can also get one from school if that is easier.
In grammar and punctuation, we have been consolidating our knowledge of past, present and future tense verbs this week. After reading jokes written in the past and present tense we were asked to convert and rewrite them in the future tense. Following on from this we came up with some of our own jokes using varied verb tenses.
Ahead of November 11th, we extended our knowledge of Remembrance Day and the reasons as to why this commemoration came about. We explored different informative texts before responding to varied questioning to demonstrate our knowledge of events that took place. It is important to remember those who died in the line of duty and sacrificed their lives in order for us to live as we do today. We read For The Fallen, a poem by Robert Laurence Binyon, which stirred our emotions and promoted our thinking on the subject. P7 will be coming round classes each day over the next 3 weeks to sell poppies for the Scottish Poppy Appeal. Please give generously to support war veterans and their families. Minimum donation is 20p.
Next week we will be beginning our literacy book focus on Holes by Louis Sachar. We are looking forward to reading this text and will begin by analysing the initial chapters and predicting events in the story next week. Why are the boys sent to Camp Green Lake being asked to dig Holes in the searing Texan heat? We will find out in due course…
Finally, a quick shout out to Joanna who wrote an essay titled ‘My Inspiration’ for the Rotary essay writing competition. Joanna structured her work well and explained in great detail why she has been inspired by Elaine Thompson, a famous sprinter, to take up athletics. She has been chosen as P7a’s Star Writer for October. Well done Joanna! We’re very proud of you! Have a read of her essay below.
JB’s fantastic essay entry for the Rotary’s ‘My Inspiration’ competition
Numeracy and Mathematics
This week we have been reintroduced to fractions, which we will be learning about alongside decimals and percentages in the lead up to Christmas. We began by finding the fraction of a set using Skittles. After counting the number of each colour we were asked to write this as a fraction before simplifying it if possible and answering word problem type questions based on our findings. We have been ensuring that we use mathematical language at all times; the top number is the numerator, the bottom number is the denominator and the line separating the two numbers is called the vinculum. As well as finding the fraction of a set, we have also been ordering and sequencing fractions. Next week we will consolidate our learning of simplification and equivalence.
During Big Start activities we have been applying our learning of our times table facts. One example we tackled this week was a Mystery Matrix. Well done to Lily, Millie, Luke and Sophie who managed to solve the matrix and fill in every missing value. Next week we will begin to discuss this year’s Christmas Fayre enterprise work. Once we have considered who we would like to work with, we will be deciding on our product or service and beginning to put together a resource order form. Each group will be working on a strict budget of £20 with the aim of making the greatest net profit. We are aiming to develop our entrepreneurial skills, experience running a small business and increase our financial awareness. The Fayre will be on Friday 7th December, so please put it in your diaries to come along and support P7. All money raised will be put towards our Leavers 2019 events.
MH and LG worked hard to solve the Mystery Matrix
One of this week’s Big Starts
Skittles fractions
Skittles fractions
Health and Wellbeing
Below you will see us participating in our third session of futsal. This week we were developing the ability to pass accurately to our peers through the use of varied parts of the foot and communicating effectively. Next week is a games week where we will be able to demonstrate the skills we have developed so far in small-sided match situations.
Congratulations to PM below who brought in his Linlithgow Fun Run achievements to share with me. He placed highly in the race given his age and continues to excel in all things sport. P is one of our new Sports Leaders, a member of the Sports Committee and integral part of our school football team. Well done P!
Finally, FB and RD have also won medals for their efforts at rugby. They attended at tournament in Musselburgh recently; winning every game, scoring tries and working well as part of a team. Excellent job boys, keep up the good work! RD is our current Sports Committee Chairperson whilst FB is an enthusiastic member of our Sports Leaders group. Great examples of young sportsmen for their peers from P1-6.
Communicating with peers to pass the ball successfully
Futsal passing exchanges
PM Fun Run achievement
RD and FB rugby achievements
Learning Across the Curriculum
Lastly, we ended the week with a trip to Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory on Thursday. We had a brilliant day and found the experience to be incredibly informative and thought-provoking. The morning began with a WWII presentation from Peter, an ex-Sergeant Major, who put us through our paces and certainly woke anyone up who may still have been half-asleep! This included Mrs Manlove, our parent volunteer, who was dressed up as a paratrooper deployed behind enemy lines. JS demonstrated confidence to come forward and dress up as a Commando and was one of our values certificate winners this week. Well done JS! We then went back downstairs and managed to manufacture over 2,000 poppies in a short space of time. ZP and SK gathered these in a huge box as these poppies will be sent out during next year’s Scottish Poppy Appeal. Some of the boys asked to be shown round the factory and had a look at the various pieces of machinery used to create poppies, wreaths and other items. We’d like to say a huge thank you to all of the workers here for being so friendly and welcoming during our visit. P7a demonstrated our school values throughout the morning and were an absolute credit to us all! Have a look at the happy, smiling poppy makers pictured underneath.
“Can we stay here for the rest of the day?”
Happy boys at this table
Working hard to manufacture poppies for the 2019 appeal
Next Week
SNSA testing all week in P7
Monday 29th October – Homework grids (term 2) and Sharing the Learning Overviews in school bags
Monday 29th October – NO school football
Tuesday 30th October – JASS Parent Launch event (see app)
Wednesday 31st October – P7 NHS dental checks
Thursday 1st November – Mr Logan in class, futsal session
Friday 2nd November – Deadline for skiing EE2 forms, payment can be made before Tuesday 27th November
Today we had our second Wellbeing assembly of the year which was on being healthy. The main message from our assembly was that ‘good health’ is about having a healthy body and a healthy mind.
We talked about the components of a healthy diet and the importance of being active to keep our bodies fit and well. We then learned about how to stay mentally well. It’s important that we recognise that all feelings are normal and that we seek support from our grown ups when we feel ‘big’ or overwhelming feelings.
Here are some of our infant certificate winners who gained an award for showcasing our school values:
Thank you to Sheena, Carol and all of the lovely PTA volunteers who organised the Halloween disco for our P4-7 children this week. Our infant disco takes place in school next Tuesday (30th). We are looking forward to seeing all of the children’s costumes and are grateful to Alison from the PTA for helping us. Our nursery children are invited to dress up on Wednesday (31st) should they like to do so.
I only have only one pupil achievement this week and it is the turn of D in P3 who has been busy winning a trophy with her pony. Well done D!
After a lovely week long October break, we were back on Tuesday and ready to learn.
Literacy: This week in Literacy we have been thinking about who inspires us! We have entered the Jim Clark Memorial Writing Competition. We brainstormed our ideas on what, who, when and how we have been inspired. The title for this year’s writing competition is ‘My Inspiration’. While writing, we concentrated on using interesting and descriptive vocabulary. We focused our writing on emotive writing, to help give the reader a sense of how we felt about our inspiration.
Numeracy:Who knew fractions could be so ‘sweet’? During numeracy this week, we completed some fraction introductory activities. Using real life items that Mrs. Matos brought in, we discussed and shared what we understood about fractions and how using concrete or real- life items can help us with calculating fractions. The highlight of our week was using skittles to show our understanding of fractions. Next week we will be learning about equivalent and simplifying fractions. Challenge this week, to see how many times you would use or see fractions around the house, at the shops etc.
Sweet Fractions – Using skittles to show our understanding.
HWB: It’s a new term and a new start. We spent some time this week to evaluate our targets that we set for ourselves in Term 1. We discussed with our partner what went well and learning we may need to improve on. We set new Numeracy and Literacy targets for Term 2 – we all very determined to work hard and reach our targets, using confidence and resilience.
PE: During PE this week consolidated and played our ‘Final’ rounds of basketball. This term our PE/ active focuses will be Athletics and Skiing.
1+2:In French this week we are revising the objects of the classroom. We had the privilege of being joined by an S6 language ambassador from Linlithgow Academy, Alexander. Thank you Mrs. Gordon for all your help in making sure we are ‘French’ ready for the Academy. ( Dayna – Language Ambassador)
It was lovely to be back at school after the October holidays. We started our week by sharing news about our adventures during the holidays. Everyone was very busy! We even managed to write a sentence about our travels using a capital letter, full stop and finger spaces, wow!
Our new sounds for this week were “g” and “f”. We have been making lots of words using our new sounds on our magnetic boards.
In numeracy we started work on addition within 10. We talked about addition being how many altogether. The children will enjoy practising this at home by adding things together around the house.
We did some outdoor learning this week. We were learning all about hibernation. We started by doing an autumn hunt outdoors and found lots of lovely autumn leaves. We learnt about what hibernation is, which animals hibernate and why they do. We made some hedgehogs using our leaves and some puppets of hibernating animals.
Autumn Hunt
Autumn Hunt
Autumn Hunt
Leaf hedgehogs
In French we revised our colours with Camembear, we had to spot the colours in his photo album.
In Health and Wellbeing we talked about being different and that it is normal to like different things. Everyone agreed it is more interesting when we like different things.
This term we have music with our specialist Mrs Bain. The children really enjoyed playing instruments like tambours and tambourines.
Today we got some very exciting news as we won “Peg Bear” for walking quietly around the school. We also won Class of the Week for our fantastic behaviour and learning, this meant we got extra break time which was very exciting!
In our Reading Groups we have been focusing on trying to improve our comprehension skills by looking closely at the text to try and find all the clues to answer the questions.
In handwriting we have been working on the diagonal join to tall and small letters. We have also been trying our best to keep our work very neat. We have also been working on our pencil control techniques to help us.
In Maths we took part in the BIG Maths challenge to improve our mental maths skills. We also did “outdoor maths” to practice our times tables by “chalking” them out on the playground. We have also been taking part in a SumDog maths challenge.
In PE we have been learning how to dribble when playing basketball. We also completed a Health & Wellbeing questionnaire.
We have also been talking about what equipment we would need to take with us to support our family for a period of three days if our house was destroyed by a monsoon in India.
In RME we have been continuing our work on the Ten Commandments and made videos about Jerusalem.
In Science we have continued to monitor our plants growing in the different areas of the school and recording the results. The plants have now been placed in the windows so they can get more light.
In our class novel entitled “School Ship Tobermory” Ben and Thomas tried to get a main part in the movie but Shark and Hardtack got them instead. The movie is about pirates and it is being filmed on a new ship called the Albatross.
A great start to the second term, we have ‘hit the ground running’, as they say. All the children have come back with lots of holiday news and are as eager to learn as always.
Our numeracy focus for the beginning of this term is addition. We have been consolidating our number bonds to 20 and some have been adding multiples of 10 to 2-digit numbers. We began with some problem solving – revisiting our prior knowledge to help us as we learn new things. We have enjoyed playing games on the smartboard and netbooks, these help us with our mental maths and recall of number facts. We have also used text books; writing sums in our jotters and solving word problems.
In literacy, we have been concentrating on punctuation. Although many of us know when to use capital letters, full stops, question marks and exclamation marks we sometimes forget to use them correctly when writing longer pieces of work. We played a game call ‘Rapid Rounders’ on Education city – correcting lots of sentences, then we had a go at correcting sentences in our jotters. We will continue to discuss this and think about it when we are writing next week. In French, we began to learn parts of the body and will continue with this next week too.
On Tuesday, we had PE with P7 Sports Leaders who were teaching us ball skills. They were good teachers and we enjoyed the session. We also had PE with Mrs Kennedy on Thursday, our benchball skills are developing really well and we will be more than ready for the festival next month.
We have enjoyed comparing the climate in Australia to the Scottish climate. We looked at weather websites and weather news reports from both countries, then created our own weather maps and presented them to the class in the style of TV weather reporters. Each report was very professional and informative, with some wild weather on the way according to some!
This week we have continued to work on decimals in Maths. We have been thinking about autumn and made some pictures using leaves. Some of the class went to golf at Kingsfield. Our Assembly today was all about being healthy – do we eat well, sleep enough and exercise regularly? And also do we take care of our mental health and look after our friends, especially if they don’t seem like themselves? We are not alone.
We continue to work hard on the First Minister’s Reading Challenge. Our class is helping to log books for the younger children. We are concerned that we need to read more if we are to meet the target of 10000 books. We are designing posters to put up around school to remind everyone to read and log the books we read. Family members can log books too. The link is: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=oyzTzM4Wj0KVQTctawUZKR-Dl-1GHsVKvmaSsUcIHCtUREQ3OE1FV0NDSDBISThZOVBPRzA5T1lWOS4u
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