maths week – Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School

Literacy and English

To tie in with our Brazil learning, this week we have been creating rainforest tankas in writing. Tankas are Japanese poems, similar to haikus, but have two additional lines. They have 5 lines split over 2 verses and always add up to a total of 31 syllables. Often tankas are written about nature, love or sadness and portray strong feelings or emotions. We discussed deforestation and the feelings that this may evoke for both the animals and indigenous tribes living there, as well as the impact that this is having on the natural environment. When reading examples, we also identified the regular use of simile, metaphor and personification within tankas and were encouraged to incorporate figurative language into our own work. Please read one or two of our efforts below:

We have also been working as groups to research the Brazilian city that our tables are named after. Firstly, we had to identify the location of our city on the Brazilian map before marking this on our class wall display. Using our notes and relevant information from our research, we started creating informative posters about each city that detailed various aspects of life in that location. Some of us chose to focus on landmarks and places of interest, whereas others opted for a focus on the natural environment or the artistic influence that can be seen there. These will be completed next week and we will share some photos of the finished articles in our next blog post.

Z and J passing on their knowledge of tanka poetry to M, J, L and F

Numeracy and Mathematics

This week we celebrated Maths Week Scotland as well as continuing to extend our knowledge of multiplication. On Monday and Tuesday, we consolidated our learning of multiplying 4 or 5-digit numbers by a single digit using a standard written method before applying specific rules to effectively multiply by 10, 100 and 1,000. To build on this further, we multiplied decimal numbers by 10, 100 and 1,000, paying particular attention to how many places our decimal place would move to the right. Next week we will continue to strengthen our knowledge and understanding in multiplication before making the link the the inverse operation, division. As part of Maths Week Scotland, we took advantage of the good weather on Wednesday morning to team up with P7b and do some multiplication orienteering. Various multi-step word problems we positioned in 15 different locations around the school grounds where we worked with a partner to solve these using the written method taught earlier in the week. If we failed to do so, or did not include units of measurement, we were given a time penalty or asked to recalculate. Zak and Ambra were our winners, just pipping 2 other groups to the prize.

Health and Wellbeing

We have been focused on one value this week in P7a, resilience. Throughout the week we took the time to refine our class assembly and develop our confidence when presenting to an audience. We hope that you all enjoyed it and would like to thank you for coming along to support us. If you couldn’t make it along today then please feel free to have a look at our presentation by clicking the link (P7a Class Assembly). Resilience is something we are all looking to build during P7 as we prepare for our transition to S1. Next week, we are looking forward to a visit from the RNLI to speak to us about water safety as part of our Keeping Myself Safe learning with Mrs. Newton. We are hoping to further our knowledge of how to respond in an emergency situation near water.

On Wednesday, we teamed up with those in our leadership groups to finalise what our remits will be for this year. From newspaper writers to sports leaders, we’ve got a number of areas in which we will be working hard to develop across school. Each group will be allocated one hour per week to carry out their responsibilities and we’ll keep you updated with our progress over the coming weeks and months. As our new upper school display states there really is a leader in all of us, and we’re beginning to demonstrate the skills and qualities that a great leader might possess: