Literacy and English – Page 4 – Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School

February 8, 2018

P7b Weekly Blog

Numeracy and Mathematics

We have been continuing our work on data handling this week. In doing so, we have both asked and answered questions to extract key information from varied data and displayed this by drawing pie charts and creating them using Microsoft Word. Next, we will be looking at measure through learning about area and volume. Making estimations, calculating the perimeter, calculating area using cm/m² and volume using cm/m³, using scales accurately, converting measurements and demonstrating an understanding of imperial units and how they are still used in everyday life. We have set some maths word problem challenges for the upper school and shall wait to see if anyone manages to solve them for a reward!

Literacy and English

Sam was chosen as this week’s Star Writer in P7b after he produced a superb creative piece of writing about the African savanna. Everyone worked incredibly hard on their pieces of writing and we will be peer assessing these next week using our Second Level writing criteria. This will allow us to form our own next steps and targets in writing over the coming weeks. You can now see this on our Star Writer wall, it’s well worth a read. We have been brushing up on our uses of apostrophes for both contraction and possession, and trying to implement this in our own writing. On Yammer, we thought of higher order questions which we would like to pose to members of staff from the Academy and will hopefully have these answered when they visit us ahead of transition.

Health and Wellbeing

In P.E this week, we designed our own football games that incorporated the skills we have developed so far; passing, dribbling and shooting. The children came up with some fantastic ideas and provided a clear explanation and demonstration as to how their game was played. Our focus on internet safety was geared towards online content this week. We had to assess some of the content which you may encounter online, decide on it’s appropriateness and then discuss the effect this could have on people. As a result, we are now aware of how to best respond when we come across something online which upsets us or makes us feel uncomfortable. On Thursday, we had a tour of Linlithgow Academy as part of our transition to S1. It was great to have a look around, meet some of the staff and have some burning questions answered. We look forward to our 3 transition days in June now. Finally, Lion King rehearsals have carried on this week where we have been designing and creating scenery, making costumes and having our first full run through in the hall. The main cast managed this off-script, our lionesses were fierce and our ensemble were singing beautifully throughout. Well done to all involved, and thank you to Mrs. Gordon, Mrs. Matos and Miss Prince for their continued efforts in getting us prepared!

Have a relaxing and restful long weekend everyone, it’s well deserved.

P7b’s Superstars and Mr. Logan

February 4, 2018

P7b Weekly Blog

It’s been another busy week in P7b, here’s what we’ve been up to…

Numeracy and Mathematics

This week we began a unit of work on data and analysis. We have been selecting appropriate ways to gather and sort data for given purposes and justifying our choice of method, for example, a survey, questionnaire or group tallies. Having gathered this data, we used a variety of methods to display it, including frequency tables, vertical bar charts and line graphs. These displays of data included suitable titles, labels on both axes (which are the fixed vertical and horizontal reference lines) and an appropriate scale. Next week, we will continue to explore different ways in which to gather, organise, analyse and display data including through the use of digital technologies.

Literacy and English

Having reached the floor with their compliment chain, P7b were lucky enough to escape homework this week and consolidated their learning of previous spelling patterns and rules. In writing, we wrote thank you letters to the STEM engineers who visited us and were interviewed ahead of our work to build movable buggies. We adhered to a set structure for our letters before redrafting and printing these using Microsoft Word. On Thursday, we started on an assessed piece of writing with only a picture stimulus to get our creative juices flowing (see below).

Having completed our initial planning, we will continue with the writing of our stories next week. As we write, we will be self-assessing our work alongside the criteria for a Second Level piece of work. Mr. Logan is looking forward to reading these once they are completed.

In reading this week, we continued our group novel studies and developed our reading skills using the comprehension box. We chose from a variety of texts before answering different types of questions. When faced with literal questions we looked carefully to find and lift the answer directly from the text. When answering inferential questions we tried to read between the lines using context clues and asking questions to help us make sense of the text. And finally, when posed with evaluative questions we offered our own ideas and opinions, or related our answer to our own personal experiences.

Health and Wellbeing

P7b visited Bonnytoun Nursery this week and enjoyed interacting with our youngest learners. We enjoyed drawing, paired reading, using ICT, building towers, playing with the slime and making sand castles. It was lovely to spend some time with them and we’ll be sure to visit again soon.

As we approach the end of our block of football for P.E, we have been further developing our ability to pass the ball accurately and introduced to shooting. We explored different ways to pass the football before establishing that the inside of our foot is most accurate. However, when shooting, the inside of our foot can be used to improve accuracy but we attempted to use the ‘laces’ to increase the power of our shot. Next week we will be applying these skills in small sided games, analysing our performance and officiating matches.

This week we started our focus on internet safety in the lead up to Safer Internet Day on Tuesday 6th February. We took part in a speed friending game which explored the nature of ‘friendship’ on social media, allowed us to identify risks and danger and taught us how to interact safely with others online. When we do encounter something online which upsets or offends us, we now know what to do in order to get help.

Coming Up

Monday 5th February: P7 after school football
Tuesday 6th February: Parent Council meeting, 6.00-7.00pm in library
Tuesday 6th February – Thursday 8th February : Lion King tickets on sale to all parents, carers and families from 3.15-3.30pm
Thursday 8th February: S1 transition tour for all P7s, 9.30-11.00am, please return EE2 forms by Tuesday
Friday 9th February: Pupil Voice Committees
Monday 12th February & Tuesday 13th February: HOLIDAY, return Wednesday 14th February

Have a fantastic weekend everyone!

P7b 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

January 14, 2018

P7b Weekly Blog

Numeracy and Mathematics

This week we started learning about angles and coordinates. We were reminded that an angle is when one line rotates onto another line and is measured in degrees rather than centimetres. The five main types of angle we consolidated our learning of were acute, right, obtuse and reflex angles as well as straights lines. We came up with definitions of how to identify each of these angles, for example, a straight line has to be exactly 180° otherwise it is not a straight line. After spending some time identifying angles in class we moved outside the classroom in small groups using our clipboard to find examples around the school building. We noticed that when you find an example of an acute angle, you have also found a reflex angle. Next week we will be looking for examples around the playground and outdoor areas before discussing uses of angles in the wider natural and built environment. For homework, we consolidated our learning of algebra from before the Christmas holidays by creating our own algebraic problems for a peer to solve. Some of these look incredibly tricky!

Literacy and English

In spelling, we are continuing to extend our learning of unfamiliar spelling patterns and rules, and applying this learning in our written work. We recapped on where we are with our groups novels by summarising the stories so far. In guided reading we have been developing a range of reading skills through our varied independent tasks. Two of our key focuses in writing this term will be note taking and report writing. We are becoming increasingly competent in taking concise notes before using these for other purposes. When engineers, including Hannah’s Dad, visit us next Thursday as part of our STEM work with Mrs. Tulloch, we will be taking notes as they speak and using these to write a follow up report about their visit. We will also be posing them with some pre-prepared higher order questions which we discussed last week with Mrs. Doran. Over the coming weeks we will be learning about creative Scots, particularly famous Scottish musicians from 1970 to the current day. During this time we will be split into groups and provided with the opportunity to plan, prepare and deliver a series of lessons on a musician, band, genre or era of music of our choice. We understand that presenting to an audience is an important life skill and we are looking forward to developing our skills in this area.

Health and Wellbeing

In P.E this week we began a block of football. As many of us have played football before, we spent a brief period of time recapping on the basics before practising our dribbling. It is important when dribbling that we take small, light touches of the football and keep it close to our feet at all times. We were encouraged to use both our feet and have a look around every 2/3 touches in order to move into free spaces. Moving on from this, we used varied surfaces of both our left and right foot (inside, outside, sole, laces) to manipulate the football. Next week will continue our focus on dribbling and close control of the football before applying these skills in small sided games. For homework this week we have been taking selfies doing the actions for our new school values of being kind, respectful, resilient, confident and included. We emailed these to Mr. Logan using Glow and now have them displayed in class on our Health and Wellbeing wall. Come in and have a look!

Coming Up…

Monday 15th January – Football league meeting, Xcite Linlithgow, 4.00 – 5.30pm
Thursday 18th Janaury – Interviewing engineers as part of STEM project, 9.00am
Monday 22nd January – Netball league meeting, school hall, 4.00 – 5.30pm
Thursday 25th January – Scots Family Quiz, 6.00 – 9.30pm
Tuesday 30th January, Wednesday 31st January, Thursday 1st February – Lion King school show tickets on sale outside P7b, 3.15 – 3.45pm
Tuesday 6th February – Parent Council meeting, library, 7.00 – 8.00pm
Thursday 8th February – Linlithgow Academy tour, parent help required, 9.30 – 11.00am
Monday 12th February, Tuesday 13th February – HOLIDAY
Have a fantastic weekend!

P7b and Mr. Logan

December 17, 2017

P7b Weekly Blog

It has been another exciting week in P7b. On Monday we started off by creating a Christmas haiku poem. We have now come to the end of our poetry block of writing. This was followed by guided reading and continuing with our group novel studies. After break we got into our enterprise groups and figured out the gross and net profit that we had achieved from the Christmas Fayre. In total we made £1,186 and £851 of this goes towards our end of year Leavers 2018 trip. Our P.E session of Monday was basketball in the Community Wing and it was really fun. We were playing small sided games to demonstrate the skills we have been developing since October.

On Tuesday we started off our brilliant day by reading in our groups while the rest of us started our reading tasks and completed our grammar and punctuation. We have been using connectives, they are used to join up sentences and extend/vary the length of them. We were asked to up-level our connectives, for example; meanwhile, additionally and furthermore. Near the end of the day we started on algebra in maths, we were talking about number machines. The very last thing we did on Tuesday was practising Last Christmas by Wham! and Feliz Navidad, a Spanish Christmas song, for Carols Around the Tree next week. Please come along and watch us perform at 10.25am on Friday!

Then on Wednesday we had more algebra. We tackled some problem solving questions with a partner and these were from the GCSE tests from England, some of the questions were really tricky but we enjoyed the challenge and were pleased when we got to the correct answer. Later on in the day, we had science with Mrs Tulloch, some of our parents came in to see us learning about chemical and physical changes.

On Thursday morning we went to Midlothian Snowsports Centre in Edinburgh for our second skiing session. We’re all getting better each week and can’t wait for the next one. It was snowing all morning and made us feel Christmassy! After skiing we had our Christmas lunch in Mrs Gordon’s classroom. Both classes were here so it was packed, but the food was great. Thank you Jessie and the kitchen ladies.

Then on Friday, we had singing practise in assembly and after break we had committees . The Sports Committee were tidying and reorganising the P.E cupboard as it was a bit of a mess!

We hope you all have a nice weekend.

Struan, Ailsa and Ross Wi

November 17, 2017

P7b Weekly Blog

It’s been another busy week in P7b, so here’s a brief summary of the goings-on…

Numeracy

P7b have been working hard when applying their decimals knowledge when using money. This week we have been focusing on bills and calculating total costs through various word and multi-step problems. Our enterprise projects have allowed us to use these skills in a practical context when resourcing items required and providing Mr. Logan with a total cost for our order. In doing so, we were asked to make price comparisons and attempt to gather quality resources at a reasonable price. On Tuesday we were lucky enough to have Mr. Fryer (Lois’s Dad) in to visit both P7 classes. Mr. Fryer works as a Senior Mortgage Manager for TSB was was able to share his wealth of knowledge around budgeting. He worked closely with each enterprise group, discussing their projects and offering some support to the calculation of their costs and potential gross/net profits.

Literacy

We are continuing to enjoy our group novels in guided reading; from Adolphus Tips to Alex Rider, and Gangsta Granny to The Hunger Games. Now that some groups have finished their first novel, they have been given the choice as to what text they read next. In P7b we promote an enjoyment of reading through the opportunity for personalisation and choice. Mr. Logan has been impressed with the level of expression we are beginning to use to engage our audience when reading. On Wednesday, we looked at our first ‘shared reading’ text as a whole class. We were studying a poem called ‘Wind’ by Dionne Brand. The poem was written in the first person and brought human-like qualities to the wind through repeated uses of personification. The higher order discussion was great to hear and we were amazed by how many features of the text came to our attention the more we read. On Thursday, we began using our new Big Writing Adventures resource with Mrs. Doran and look forward to more of these lessons in the coming weeks!

Health and Wellbeing

This week was our anti-bullying and racism focus in school. With kindness being one of our school’s values, we must always ensure we treat each other with the utmost respect and in a way which we would like to be treated ourselves. Mrs. Matos delivered our first two Respect lessons where we discussed gender equality and what respect means to us. We compared our definitions with the dictionary definition and rewrote what this looks like in our classroom. This will be used throughout the year to refer back to and promote positive behaviour and relationships in the classroom. We demonstrated kindness by dressing down and donating money to Chlldren in Need on Friday. Thank you to Mrs. Gordon and the Pupil Council Committee for organising such a successful event, and of course to those who baked. The cakes and sweets were delicious! We will let you know in due course how much we have raised.

Coming Up This Term

Road Safety Week next week
Enterprise project orders to be placed next Monday
Pupil Voice Committees next Friday
Big Write event in class on Tuesday at 9.30 – 10.30am
Last session of futsal on 27.11.17
Skills for Learning, Life and Work focus group on 29.11.17 at 7pm
Skiing block begins on 30.11.17 at 8.30am – 1.15pm (4 weeks)
PTA Glitter Ball and Christmas Dress Down Day on 1.12.17
Nativity performances on 6.12.17 and 7.12.17
Christmas Fayre on 8.12.17 at 9.30am – 12 noon
Learning Showcase in classes on 13.12.17 at 1pm
Christmas Service at St. Michael’s on 19.12.17 at 6.30 – 7.30pm
Carols Round the Tree and Christmas jumpers on 22.12.17
Christmas holidays from 22.12.17 – 9.1.18

To all our parents, carers and families, have a fantastic weekend!

P7b and Mr. Logan

September 9, 2017

P7b Weekly Blog

Numeracy

From our baseline assessments in Numeracy, we could see that we needed to strengthen our knowledge and understanding of Fractions, Decimals and Percentages. This week, we consolidated on previous learning by identifying basic fractions and reminded ourselves of how to use a fraction wall to find equivalence. We were able to remind Mr. Logan that the top number of a fraction is called the numerator and the bottom number is the denominator. We found out that the middle line in a mathematical calculation is called the vinculum, but is more commonly known as the division or fraction bar. Our targets have been set for Numeracy and Mathematics in Term 1 and we will revisit these before the October holidays to evaluate on our progress and identify our next steps in learning.

On Thursday, we enjoyed carrying out some mental maths and problem solving activities with Mr. Ritchie and Mr. Slater. Next week we will continue to extend our knowledge of equivalence before finding quantities of a set and adding/subtracting fractions. Soon, we will be able to establish the link from fractions to decimals and percentages.

Literacy

We are continuing to enjoy reading our class novel, Grandpa’s Great Escape. Will Jack be able to prevent his Grandpa from being banished to Twilight Towers? Will he ever realise his dream of flying the legendary Spitfire aircraft? And, will Miss Verity’s romance with the gorilla-like security guard from the Imperial War Museum continue to blossom? We shall find out next week…

In writing we have been working hard in attempting to up-level our own, and others’ work. This is when you take a piece of written work and make it more interesting and exciting for the read. We learnt that this could take the form of using ambitious examples of vocabulary (WOW words), connectives to extend and vary the length of sentences, openers to maintain the reader’s interest or the use of correct punctuation to ensure our writing makes sense. This will be one of our main focuses in writing this year, along with developing the ability to proofread and Spellcheck our work independently, using ICT to word process and edit and extending the length of our written work.

Next week we can expect to be given our new group novels which we will be studying during this term and some spelling homework. We will also have some lines to learn in preparation for our class assembly next Friday 15th September. Hope to see you all there! Remember it is also Sports Dress Down Day, so bring £1 with you to help fund some new sports equipment for school.

Next Week

Assembly preparations
Cake Fest design presentations and baking
P.E on Monday, no P.E on Tuesday
Orienteering sessions in P7
Sports Dress Down Day on Friday, bring £1 to fund new sport equipment

Hope everyone is having a relaxing weekend, see you all Monday.

P7b and Mr. Logan