expressive arts – Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School

June 7, 2019

P1B – Week ending 7th June

What an exciting week! Our first class assembly!

We have worked very hard over the past few weeks preparing for our assembly. Not only have we been learning our lines but we have also been practising the musical accompaniment, painting artwork, making butterfly wands and designing butterflies to decorate the walls. We have had great fun and have learned lots about the butterfly lifecycle. We hope you enjoyed watching the assembly as much as we enjoyed performing it!

We have had a very musical week as along with our assembly preparation, we also began a block of lessons with a specialist from the National Youth Choir of Scotland. We were very good at keeping the beat and had great fun singing rhyming songs. Our favourite part of the lesson was definitely the singing games with the parachute!

We continued our learning in Literacy this week, revising a selection of digraphs and tricky words and have been practising making up sentences using our digraph words. We have also started working on our diary writing skills.

In Numeracy we have been practising counting up and down in 2s. We looked at the pattern counting in 2s makes when we ‘painted’ our numbers on a hundred square and noticed that we ended up with painted columns of numbers. We were also learning about odd and even numbers, linking this to our counting and did really well playing the ‘coconut’ game.

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/learning-to-count/coconut-odd-or-even

In Maths we continued to learn about data handling and managed to use the skills we have learned to interpret a variety of pictograms.

In PE we continued our Gymnastics block with Mrs Harris. We had to use our listening skills to know which position we needed to get into and had to co-ordinate our bodies to make tunnels or obstacles in the ‘road’. We worked together in teams and had great fun taking turns to tunnel under a whole team!

As part of our Community focus, we were very lucky to have a special visitor in class, A’s dad, Dr Walker! He came in to talk to us about his job as an Emergency Doctor and taught us how to call for help in an emergency. We worked in pairs, taking turns to pretend to call 999 for help. We also talked about the importance of only calling this number if you have a genuine emergency!

Have a lovely weekend!

Mrs Reid and Primary 1B

February 22, 2019February 23, 2019

P7a Weekly Blog

A short week in P7a this week, but still lots of learning to report on…

Numeracy and Mathematics

As we progress towards the end of term 3 and our transition to S1, we have been introduced to some areas and concepts that will be covered within Third Level Numeracy and Mathematics. This week we have continued learning about algebra and solving equations. We began by discussing what algebra we had already been exposed to (without even realising), such as ‘number machines’ and ‘missing value’ type questions. Having consolidated our knowledge of these it allowed us to further extend our learning to replacing values with symbols, finding the value of ‘x’ (or an unknown quantity), simplifying expressions by collecting like-terms and evaluating expressions by substituting known values such as a, b or c. We discovered that one theory behind the use of ‘x’ to represent an unknown quantity came from a 17th century French philosopher, scientist and mathematician called René Descartes. Can you find the values below?

Literacy and English

In Boy in the Striped Pajamas this week, Bruno encountered Shmuel, a prisoner at Out-With, whilst exploring and we have been drawing a comparison between them. Although the boys share the same birthday, we discovered that the similarities stop there. We examined extracts of their conversations and journeys made from the text, highlighting evidence and annotating points of interest.

Another journey we have found out about this week, is that of child evacuees during World War II. Whilst being introduced to Operation Pied Piper we used bullet points to take notes relating to key information shared. These notes will be used to inform our writing planning next week when we write letters from an evacuee’s perspective. To begin entering this mindset, we prepared and delivered a short drama in groups that portrayed the experiences and emotions of these children.

Learning Across the Curriculum

As part of our Skills for Learning, Life and Work programme, we had Pamela Barnes and Teresa Waddington in class to speak to us this week. Pamela works with a local community development trust and Teresa is a Plant Manager with Shell.

We have been continuing to rehearse our songs for our Scottish Opera performance, 1719, which commemorates the Jacobites’ risings where they fought alongside the Spaniards against the Hanoverians. The singing sounds fantastic as we look forward to our workshops and final performance in March.

In Science with Mrs. Tulloch, we completed our STEM invention drawings and continued to construct our moveable buggies. In the coming weeks, these will be finished and our buggies judged on whether they can make it up a series of ramps with varying gradients. A huge thank you to Mrs. Tulloch who works tirelessly to spark our interest and curiosity in engineering.

Finally, it was sad to say goodbye to M last week who moved to her new school. We wish her all the very best and thank her for being such a kind, lovely and warm-hearted member of P7a. We will all miss her!

To all of P7a’s parents, carers and families, have a lovely weekend!

P7a and Mr. Logan

January 18, 2018

P7b Weekly Blog

Numeracy and Mathematics

We have been continuing with our work on angles this week, but our focus has moved to the naming and measuring of them. Mr. Logan is insisting that we use the mathematical language when referring to the ‘lines’ and ‘corners’ of an angle. The lines are arms, and the point where the two arms meet is called the vertex. When naming an angle we have learned that they would have 3 uppercase letters and the vertex would always form the middle letter for the name. On Wednesday we estimated the size of various angles before using a protractor to check the exact size. We tended to find that our estimations were quite accurate. Our final challenge was to hunt for angles of specific sizes around school. Sam and Charlie were the first to return to the classroom having completed this, well done boys!

Literacy and English

Our note taking and summarising skills continue to improve through practise, and we’ve certainly had lots of that this week! Our guided reading task this week was to summarise the key points and main events from our previous reading. We were able to do so; using bullet points to format our work and not writing in full sentences to keep our notes short and concise. On Thursday we had to apply these skills when Mr. Boiling and Mrs. Dallas visited as part of our STEM work with Mrs. Tulloch. As they presented to us and answered the higher order questions prepared in advance about engineering, we took notes to record the information shared.

Health and Wellbeing

In football, we further developed our dribbling skills and close control of the football when moving around the gym hall. At the end of each session we were given the opportunity to apply these skills in 2v2 scenarios. It was highlighted that small, light touches of the ball would allow our opponents less opportunity to win possession from us so we did our best to keep it close to both feet at all times. Next week our focus will move to passing with further consolidation of the skills we’ve worked hard on over the first two weeks of our football block. Our football team embarked on their league campaign on Monday, with 17 boys and girls from P7 playing in 5 fixtures at Xcite Linlithgow. Both teams were hugely successful, with one team managing to remain unbeaten and not concede a single goal! Well done Callum for keeping 5 clean sheets! The other team managed to win 3 of their games with some very impressive team play throughout. The attitude demonstrated, encouragement of each other and sense of fair play shown at all times was particularly pleasing to see. Well done to all involved! Go Team Springfield!

Expressive Arts

As part of our Lion King focus ahead of the school show, we were keen to create character sketches of some of the main characters and animals that will be seen on stage. We used images found online and YouTube tutorials to provide us with step-by-step instructions on how to accurately sketch our assigned character. Mrs. Gordon and Mrs. Matos complimented us on how impressive these all were and Ramsay has even been given the additional role of making headdresses and doing some costume design! Great job! Our rehearsals continued on Thursday and Friday where we have been working on preparing all aspects of the show. Only 7 weeks to go! On Thursday we were also lucky enough to be visited by the Travelling by Tuba music group. They took us on a trip round the world, exploring different instruments found in various countries. Some of these were hundreds of years old.

Have a relaxing weekend!

P7b and Mr. Logan

September 23, 2016

Macbeth Performance

P5-7 were lucky enough to attend a performance of ‘Is this a dagger?’ by Andy Cannon from Red Bridge Arts on Wednesday. This is an adaptation of Macbeth for children, celebrating 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare, and tells a tale full of deceit, witchcraft and murder. The children thoroughly enjoyed the play and some of them even had the chance to demonstrate their skills in drama. I’m sure everyone would agree that Ross was fantastic in his role as Lady Macbeth!

Mr. Logan