Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School

February 6, 2020

Scotland Loves Languages Week in P1B

Bonjour! Hola! This week we have been celebrating Scotland Loves Languages Week. On Monday the Language Ambassadors taught us the game ‘Poissons pêcheurs’ which helped us to practise our numbers in French:

On Tuesday we ordered our lunches in French.

On Wednesday MS taught us how to sing happy birthday in Spanish to BP (feliz cumpleaños):

And on Thursday AK read a poem to us in Polish!

We also learned this song, Ma Famille:

In Phonics this week we have been learning the ai/ay sound. These spelling rules help us to remember when to use which one:

‘ai’ – shy i likes to go in the middle of words

‘ay’ – toughy y likes to go at the end of words

We found this quite tricky and will need lots of practise sounding out words to select the correct spelling. Here are some words to try at home:

rain pay gain bait say tray

Ask us: Is it the ‘shy i’ or the ‘toughy y’?

We also learned 2 more common words – are, they

In Numeracy we are getting super confident at subtracting. Some of us are beginning to recognise that if we know one subtraction fact we can find another by rearranging the subtracting number and the answer, eg: 10 – 6 = 4 so 10- 4 = 6

Next week we will be looking at missing numbers in a subtraction sum and continuing to work on recognising and counting coins.

In IDL we learned what a timeline is and looked at different forms of transport through time. EM took his time to cut out very carefully to complete his transport timeline:

Thank you to all those who have already returned the slip with their chosen character for our class assembly. So far we have witches, fairies, an oompa lumpa and even a Frieda Khalo! If you are still to decide then please hand this in on Monday so that we can start writing our story, thank you 🙂

Have a lovely weekend!

Love P1B and Mrs Bell x

January 31, 2020

‘th’ and ‘wh’, money and transport in P1B

In Phonics this week we learned 2 new digraphs – ‘th’ and ‘wh’. Our common words were ‘she’ and ‘be’.

We know that ‘th’ is the rude sound, we have to stick out our tongue a little bit to make this sound. We are getting good at telling the difference between ‘f’ and ‘th’.

The ‘wh’ sound is often used at the start of a question word (when, where, why, which). Some of us had a go at writing a question, very impressive!

In Numeracy we have been continuing our work on subtraction. We are getting more confident at selecting strategies to solve subtraction sums. We loved the subtraction bus game:

In Maths we started learning about money. We learned the value of each coin and explored what each coin looks and feels like.

A simple activity to do at home is to tip out your purse/wallet and let children sort coins. Also, here’s a good online resource to play:

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

On Monday and Tuesday afternoon we started our new IDL topic – the history of transport. We are very excited about this and can’t wait to learn more. If we have any transport experts or parents/family members who work in this industry, we’d love to hear from you!

We met Mrs McAulay this week, she will be with us again next Tuesday afternoon and is enjoying getting to know all of us.

Here are some photos of our free play this week, we enjoyed exploring ice and snow on Tuesday:

Have a great weekend!

Love P1B and Mrs Bell x

January 31, 2020

P1a weekly news

Another very busy week in P1a. This week we learnt 2 new digraphs “th” and “wh” and 2 new common words “she” and “be”. We are finding it quite tricky getting the difference between these digraphs. We also keep saying “f” instead of “th” lots of bafs and pafs. Mrs Gordon taught us to make sure that our tongue sticks through our teeth when saying “th”. Some words to practise making and writing are thin, thick, bath and path. With “wh” Mrs Gordon was getting us to hold up our hand infront of our mouth. If the word blows on our hand it is a “wh” word if not it is a “w” word. Some examples to try are wind, when, wand and which.

In numeracy we continued our subtraction journey. We played lots of board games with partners where we had to roll dice and subtract numbers from eachother. We are getting better at finding the answer to subtraction problems, but still sometimes get tricked when subtracting zero…

We started a focus on money this week which was very exciting. The first step was to start to recognise the coins from 1p to £2. We loved playing guess the coin where Mrs Gordon hid a coin and we had to ask her questions to guess which it was. She could only answer yes or no. We had some great questions like is it bronze?, does it have 7 sides? etc It would be great if we could practise as much as possible with real money at home.

H got a chance to practise money skills when she held a mini bake sale for the class. She was raising money for Bethany Christian Trust who help homeless people.

M lent us her fabulous storybook called “My Little Orsay”. It is a fabulous book about works of art in the Musee D’Orsay in Paris. Each part is about a different work of art. We let the children choose between 3 different pieces and they recreated their own versions. Mrs Gordon was blown away by how well we did. Have a look at our art gallery below, It is full of wonderful work!

In French this week we learnt all about “ma famille”, we learnt how to say ma mere, mon pere, ma soeur et mon frere. This was quite tricky so we will keep practising. We can now order our lunch in French too which is pretty impressive for P1. This week our S6 Language Ambassador from Linlithgow Academy came along to do a little Spanish lesson with a few of us. We learnt some colours in Spanish.

We also launched our new topic….transport. We were very excited about this and drew our favourite mode of transport. We can’t wait to find out all about different modes of transport through the ages.

Bon weekend, Mrs Gordon and P1a

January 31, 2020January 31, 2020

Snow, Secret Doors and Stories in P3A

We had fun in the snow on Tuesday morning as we went out to enjoy it before it melted. It was a lovely way to start the day with some daylight and fresh air 🙂

On Tuesday we did some planning to help us to write an imaginative story. On our tree in the library corner a small door has appeared, our stories could be about anything that was behind that door. We had a story starter:

On a quiet day, you can sometimes hear them. Every now and then, there’s a tapping or a scraping or a rustling from behind the door. Occasionally, movement can be glimpsed through the dark windows. One day the door began to slowly creak open…

We listened to sound effects of the door opening and took some time to put our imagination to work and think about what might be behind it. We wrote our ideas on ‘grafitti walls’ to share them with others and to help our thoughts develop further. We then wrote notes on the beginning, middle and end of the story. We also created our own word banks of descriptive words that we might need in our stories. On Wednesday wrote stories using our notes. They are certainly imaginative and I really enjoyed reading them. We will continue to work on imaginative writing over the next couple of weeks, hopefully seeing progression as we further develop our story writing skills.

We learned more about healthy eating on Thursday, again focusing on where our food comes from. We looked at dairy farming and examined some of the products we have in our supermarkets that begin as milk from the cows in dairy farms. We also learned about how calcium is good for our teeth and bones. We had some cheese, butter and oatcakes as a snack.

It is Scotland Loves Languages week next week and we are looking forward to a visit from our P7 Language Ambassadors who will teach a French lesson and we will be learning about French culture with Mrs Kennedy.

Enjoy the weekend, P3A and Mrs Kennedy

January 31, 2020

The Vikings have landed in P4B

We began to learn about the Vikings this week. We began by discussing what we already know about Vikings – which was quite a lot then we went onto talking about what we would like to find out. We know where they came they came from and why they came and next week we will investigate the longships and create our own designs. We also have a little surprise on Tuesday!!
In Literacy we completed our focus on poetry by creating our own Limericks. We made up one as a class first which was great fun:
There was a young man from Springy,
Who went to school in a dinghy.
He fell into the sea,
And got stung by a bee.
Then never again returned to Springy.
Not bad for a first attempt!
Then we made up our own, having listened to some by Edward Lear. Mrs.Burton was very impressed as we picked up the A,A,B,B,A rhyming very quickly. They were very funny and flowed really well.
We also worked on pronouns and now recognize when and where to use them. Our Short Read was on the Vikings, filling in the blanks and we did a literal comprehension exercise on dinosaurs.
In Numeracy, we have continued to work on division and some of us have progressed to remainders. We completed our bar charts, although needed reminding how to set it out.
We have continued with circuits in P.E and in N.Y.C.O.S we have continued to work on differentiating pulse and rhythm.
Have a lovely weekend everybody.
Love from P4B and Mrs.Burton

January 31, 2020

Terrific Toys, Magic ‘e’ and P6 Pals

This week we have been busy learning about toys, time and subtraction. We can’t believe we are at the end of January already!

Look below at what we have been doing in our play based learning…

In Literacy we have begun looking at magic ‘e’. We have learned that it is very powerful and makes the vowel in a word sound longer. We also found out that it can change words like cap to cape. We were amazed by this. We had fun thinking of as many ‘a-e’ words as we could. Some of us have been learning: ‘st’ and ‘sw’ this week. We enjoyed writing different ‘sw’ words on the sweets. In our writing we read a book called ‘The Toy Shop’. It was about an old man who ran his own toy shop who would say “hello” to his favourite toys when he opened the shop. We then thought of our favourite toys and when we had been to a toy shop before. We had lots to say in this discussion, it could have lasted for days! Miss Muir set us the task of writing an imaginative story about creating our own toy shop. We had lots of ideas of which toys would be in our shop and who would be in charge of it. We had to include adjectives to describe the toys in the shop and joining words to make our writing flow better. We think our toy shops would be really fun to visit. They would definitely give Smyth’s a run for their money! In our Short Read this week we watched a Toy Story trailer where we answered different questions after watching it. We then played ‘blankety, blank’ as a class where we had to fill in the missing words from what was said in the trailer.

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been recalling subtraction facts between 13 and 15. Some of us have been subtracting within 100. We have been explaining the strategies we use to get to our answer in class discussions and when we are helping each other with our work. We also started learning about time this week in Maths. We learned that there are two different clocks: analogue and digital. We discussed where we see clocks in our everyday lives and why we think time is important. We then went over o’clock and looked at half past on an analogue and digital clock. This was a little tricky on an analogue clock as the little hand is between two numbers when the big hand is at 6. We enjoyed playing time board games with each other during the lesson and when we were playing.

Our new IDL topic for this term is Toys. We have done lots on this topic already from completing a class Short Read to writing our toy shop imaginative stories. We also had a class discussion on what we already knew about toys and were able to write/draw our ideas. We were asked if there was anything we would like to know about toys. We had lots of ideas for Miss Muir to write down.

Our P6 pals came to visit us this week. They were learning about electricity and had made games for us to play using batteries and wires. The games had lots of different questions for us to answer. We had so much fun playing the games and seeing our pals again.

We hope you enjoy your first weekend of February!

P2A and Miss Muir 🙂

January 31, 2020

P7b Class

Today was our assembly day. Most of us were excited but nervous at the same time.

We are all sad that Mrs Durano is leaving and we hope that she is successful at her new school. AW

We have been practising the stage directions and what we’re doing for FAME. LD

We all enjoyed skiing on Tuesday. The instructors did a good job at teaching us new skills and I’m excited for next Tuesday. HL

The instructors were nice and I learnt how to walk on skis. PK

In Maths we learnt how to exchange rates.

January 31, 2020

Primary 6 w/e 31st January 2020

This week our trout eggs arrived and they are safely installed into our tank. We hope to release them into the wild in a few weeks time, once they have hatched and developed.

In maths our new topic is time. Some of us are converting between digital and analogue and 24hr time. Others have looked at time zones and how the time is different around the world.

Our comprehension this week was based around a poem written by Rudyard Kipling, called Smuggler’s Song.

We have written newspaper reports about the mishaps of Tam ‘O’ Shanter.

In Science we shared the games we made with Primary 2. They enjoyed playing our games and gave us feedback about them.

Our rehearsals for Fame are continuing, with lots of practise happening for this!!

Have a lovely weekend

Kind regards

Primary 6 and Mrs Kerr

January 31, 2020

Toys, Toys, Toys (P2B)

This week we have started our new IDL focus on the history of Toys. We started by looking at toys in the present so we can make comparisons. Using our iPads, we looked for our favourite toys on Safari. We added our photos to our iPads and then opened them on an app called Puppet Edu. Using Puppet Edu, we recorded ourselves talking about our favourite toys. We enjoyed using digital technology to enhance our learning.

For writing this week we have been creating our own imaginative stories. We read a story called ‘The Toy Shop’ and we discussed the events and the characters in the story. Using our own experiences of toy shops and knowledge of toys, we planned our own imaginative stories and drew pictures of the beginning, middle and end. On Wednesday we used our pictorial plans to write our stories. We worked hard to ensure that we included a character throughout, used connectives to join our ideas and used adjectives to describe our characters. Afterwards we shared our fantastic stories with the rest of the class.

In our Short Read lesson we explored the trailer for the film ‘Toy Story’. We watched the trailer and then we answered different types of questions about the characters and the setting. Afterwards we played ‘Blankety Blank’ and we were able to work together to find the missing words from the trailer.

This week we had a special visit from our P6 pals. They have been creating their own quiz games and they wanted to share these with us. We enjoyed seeing our P6 pals and playing their quiz games – we even gave them constructive feedback about their games!

Our new sound this week was ‘a-e’. We have been looking forward to learning the ‘magic e’ patterns. Using our magnetic boards, we made ‘a-e’ words and on Thursday, we wrote sentences containing ‘a-e’ words. Some of us were also learning the sounds ‘st’ and ‘sw’.

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been learning subtraction facts for 13, 14 and 15. We have been continuing to discuss different subtraction strategies and we have been using these strategies to solve missing number sums. Some of us have also been learning to subtract a teen number from a two-digit number. This week we also started to learn to tell half past times on digital and analogue clocks. We revised telling o’clock times and then we learned how to identify half past times. At the end of our lesson, we played a game called ‘Clocking In’ on Education City.

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

P2B and Miss Harrison xxx

January 31, 2020

|Primary 5/6 week ending 31.1.20

This week we began to look at the Scottish Wars of Independence, in particular what Scotland was like over 700 years ago. We researched important key figures on our Scottish history that included King Alexander III, Margaret, the maid of Norway and John Balliol. Learning about these important people has helped us set the scene for learning about what any why the Scottish Wars of Independence began. The class made good use of their internet research skills to create fact files.

During our Literacy lessons we worked in small groups to develop our skills of reading for information and using that information to create a diagram. This week each group had to read an extract which explained the Water Cycle and then created a diagram that was annotated. Each group then confidently explained their diagrams to the rest of the class.

On Tuesday, we had great fun playing with the Sphero’s. We began a Sphero challenge to code the Sphero’s into moving in different directions and changing colours. We hope to continue this next week.

The class have been developing their understanding of decimals this week and how we can write a decimal as a fraction. We enjoyed talking about mixed numbers and how these looked written in digits, words and a diagram. Next week we are going to move onto adding decimals. For maths we were drawing different angles and next week we will look at compass directions.

Primary 5 started making their spaghetti bridges. The STEM challenge involved making a bridge to carry half a bag of sugar. We have grouped the spaghetti into bundles to make it stronger. We will let you know how we get on next week assessing and testing them.