P7b Weekly Blog

Numeracy

  • Established the difference between a pattern (shapes) and a sequence (numbers)
  • Explained and used rules to extend well known number sequences including square numbers, triangular numbers and Fibonacci sequences
  • Applied knowledge of multiples, factors and square numbers to generate and continue number sequences
  • Challenged peers to solve our own pattern and sequence problems

Literacy

  • Completed our personal projects on an aspect of WWII and received our feedback
  • Beginning to summarise our personal projects ahead of our class talks
  • Carried out research on the blitz in Scotland and how this affected those in Glasgow and the surrounding areas
  • Used the Literacy Box for comprehension challenges and consolidated our learning of grammatical rules and punctuation
  • Began reading and exploring the themes within our new WWII related class novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
  • See examples of our propaganda below

WWII

  • Created a display around our classroom door using our propaganda posters
  • Produced blitz artwork using watercolour paints and silhouettes of British and German aircraft
  • See examples of our artwork below

Health and Wellbeing

  • Continued improving our physical fitness as part of a fitness and track athletics block in P.E
  • Completed a fitness circuit with various activities and exercises
  • Recorded and tracked our progress using score sheets at each of the 8 stations
  • Football team trained in preparation for this year’s George Allan tournament on Sunday 20th May, 7-a-side games with a formation/shaping focus
  • Netball girls participated in their final league meeting of the year, finishing 3rd in the cluster league standings
  • MF and LC successfully led our Cheerleading after school club for their younger peers ahead of their showcase event

Skills for Learning, Life and Work

  • We welcomed Mr. Vereker into class to speak about his job in rope access
  • Mr. Matheson also visited us to speak about his job as Software Writer
  • Putting together our list of professionals and local businesses ahead of our P7 Careers Fayre on 1st May at 6pm

Lion King

  • Final preparations and rehearsals taking place for our Lion King performances at Linlithgow Academy next Tuesday and Wednesday evenings
  • All tickets now sold out for the Tuesday evening and a very limited number remaining for Wednesday
  • See photos below of us rehearsing below
  • Next Week

  • Monday 23rd April – After school football training outdoors at 3.15pm
  • Tuesday 24th April – Full day dress rehearsal at Linlithgow Academy and Lion King performance at 7.30pm
  • Wednesday 25th April – Lion King performance at 7.30pm
  • Thursday 26th April – Mr. Boiling visiting for WWII at Sea presentation, rugby taster sessions to begin, sports leaders to assist at Minikickers football for P1 at 3.15pm

As always, have a great weekend when it arrives!

P7b and Mr. Logan

P7b Weekly Blog

Numeracy

  • Identifying multiple lines of symmetry from 2D shapes and patterns
  • Creating our own designs reflected across vertical and horizontal axes of symmetry
  • Carrying out rotational symmetry in a clockwise and anti-clockwise direction
  • Designing symmetrical mascots for Team Scotland at Commonwealth Games
  • Consolidating our knowledge of inverse operations with Mrs. Doran

Literacy

  • Developing our comprehension skills through the interpretation of WWII propaganda
  • Discussing the main themes, purposes and reasons for use of varied propaganda
  • Making our own examples of propaganda on a theme of our choice
  • Consolidating our knowledge of similes, metaphors and personification
  • Applying this knowledge to create poems with Mrs. Doran

Health and Wellbeing

  • Started our block of fitness and track athletics for P.E
  • Carried out baseline assessment of our fitness levels using Cooper Test method (12 minute run)
  • Springfield 1 remain unbeaten after 3 wins and a draw at our final football league meeting on Monday
  • Springfield 2 put in an outstanding performance to beat Linlithgow Bridge 3-0

Skills for Learning, Life and Work

  • Visits from various professionals this week
  • Mrs. McKellar – Speech and Language Therapist
  • Mr. Sexton – Project Manager (Scottish Water)
  • Mrs. Waldron – Landscape Planner
  • Mrs. MacKenzie – Police Scotland
  • Ms. McLeod – Bauer Academy (Media)
  • Developing the Young Workforce event at SRUC Oatridge Campus

Have a great weekend everyone!

P7b and Mr. Logan

P7b Weekly Blog

Numeracy and Mathematics

  • Consolidating our use of written methods for all four functions
  • Carrying out WWII written addition problems involving money
  • Ensuring we always show our working in response to questions
  • Tackling multi-step problems and sharing our strategies

Literacy and English

  • Writing our STEM letters to be sent off alongside our annotated inventions
  • Researching for our personal projects and beginning to collate these
  • Continuing with our group novel studies and tackling inferential and evaluative questions

Health and Wellbeing 

  • Further developing our skills in football with additional BMT skills introduced
  • Celebrating achievements of CMcK and our gymnasts
  • Attending our S1 information evening at Linlithgow Academy ahead of our transition
  • Reflecting on our learning and progress during term 3 ahead of parents evening

Skills for Learning Life and Work

  • Visits from S6 World of Work ambassadors electrical engineer, Procurator Fiscal, Merchant Navy and project manager

Thank you to everyone who attended parents evening. I’m delighted with each and every member of P7b and the progress they are all making. Let’s make it a final term to remember!

P7b and Mr. Logan

P7b Weekly Blog

Numeracy and Mathematics

Capacity – ‘the maximum amount something can contain’
Volume  – ‘the space that an object or substance occupies’

We’ve been reminding ourselves of the difference between these terms this week and building on our learning from last week. On Monday and Tuesday we rotated round a carousel of activities; estimating volume, measuring volume, converting between different units of measurement and ordering volumes by size. Robbie proved to be the most accurate estimator of volume as he found 500ml and 750ml of water exactly. On Wednesday we all became baristas as we made some mocktails. We had to carefully follow each recipe to ensure we included exactly the right amount of each coloured juice. Having made the mocktails from the menu, we concocted our own and named it! We found there to be a number of factors that could influence the accuracy of our measurements, and we improved as we progressed through the recipes.

Next week we will be consolidating our learning of written methods for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Health and Wellbeing

Our brains were put to the test again this week in football. We worked with a partner to carry out some mirrored dribbling exercises. One person had a football whilst their partner was the leader. As the leader moved, the other person had to mimic this, e.g. they move forwards = move back, to their right = move left. We then switched the roles and the person dribbling became the leader. Mr. Logan noticed we were getting the hang of this, so our footballs were exchanged for tennis balls with a focus on using the sole of the foot to manipulate a smaller object. We finished with some 2v2 attacking and defending situations and will progress to 2v1 attacking scenarios next week. Have a look at SF and RWi below as they demonstrate mirrored dribbling with a tennis ball.

In Health and Wellbeing, we also finished with our series of lessons focusing on internet safety. This week’s lesson was called ‘Codebreaker’ and we were tasked with trying to create strong passwords. Firstly, we were given two random children and some basic details about them. From the clues provided we had to make reasoned guesses as to what their passwords would be. The fact that we were able to do so highlighted the importance of using random combinations of upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers and symbols to create passwords which are difficult to predict. We have a greater understanding of how to protect our online accounts and data, and it was interesting how many people said they would be changing some passwords when they got home.

Fairtrade

Mr. Logan was delighted to see that everyone had made the effort to dress down in something wacky in support of Fairtrade on Friday. The costumes and outfits were brilliant, and made it very tricky to choose 5 winners. MF was given 5th place for her banana costume effort and AS was 4th in her Hawaiian gear. HR scooped 3rd place for his random assortment of dressing gown, school tie, sunglasses and cap whilst AE-C was second with too many hair baubles to count! Our class winner was RD who took bright colours and wackiness to a whole new level. Well done everyone! Great effort for a great cause!

World War II

We began our studies of World War II this week to much excitement from the class. Hearing the radio broadcast from Neville Chamberlain declaring war on Germany really made us think about the emotions people would have felt at this time in 1939. Having listened to this, we carried out some research on the Allies and Axis, countries within these factions and who their leaders were. It was noted that in 1940, Great Britain changed Prime Minister to Winston Churchill whilst Russia, or the Soviet Union, changed allegiances after a surprise invasion. We finished the week by sketching World War II leaders with Mrs. Doran. This was tricky as we were only given half of the leaders picture and had to sketch what we thought the other half would look like. You’ll see these displayed in class soon, so come and have a look!

Happy Weekend!

P7b and Mr. Logan

P7b Weekly Blog

Numeracy and Mathematics

This week in Numeracy and Mathematics, we have been continuing with our work finding area and perimeter. Our work this week involved us applying our skills in real life contexts using floor plans for different properties. We successfully measured the perimeter of individual rooms, found the length of missing sizes and dimensions using the information provided, calculated the area for flooring needed with costs and examined proposed extensions to existing buildings. Next week we will further extend our learning and the use of appropriate formulae in order to calculate the volume and capacity of varied 3D objects.

Literacy and English

Having previously taken notes with Mrs. Doran, we used these to begin creating a different text in the form of a written report. This was based on the Winter Olympics which have been taking place over the past couple of weeks. These will be completed next week before carrying out a self-assessment of our work against our writing targets and success criteria. In grammar, we enjoyed learning more about prefixes and suffixes. These are used to extend root words and alter their meaning. A prefix is a letter(s) placed before a root word, for example, play > replay. A suffix is a group of letters placed at the end of a root word, for example, playing. Have a look at examples we came up with below.

Health and Wellbeing

In football for P.E this week, both our feet and brains were put to the test. After getting some great ideas from the teachers’ Better Movers and Thinkers session last Friday, Mr. Logan used these to get us moving and thinking in a more cohesive manner. Now that we have developed the ability to dribble confidently with good close control, we were given the additional challenge of rotating a tennis ball around our waist in a clockwise and anti-clockwise direction. Whilst doing so, we had to take 5 touches forward, sideways, backwards then repeat. We also tried dribbling whilst tossing the tennis ball in the air in one hand and swapping both balls with a partner. Finally, when the whistle was blown we stopped our football, threw our tennis ball up and had to complete different clapping sequences before catching it. We needed a good rest afterwards! Here are our schools footballers in action on Monday.

The Lion King

Mr. Logan’s programme team polished off their final draft this week and it is looking superb! Well done to the pupils involved for creating such an impressive piece of work, it looks very professional. With just 2 weeks to go, our rehearsals continued this week. Mr. Logan was blown away by our rehearsal on Friday, everyone has done so well to remember their lines and deliver these in such a confident manner. It’s lovely to see every child beginning to enter their character and contribute to what is going to be a fabulous peformance in their own individual way. Keep up the hard work and stay calm P6 and P7, you’re going to be fantastic! Here are some of the talented pupils we have playing main parts in P7b!

Have a great weekend!

P7b and Mr. Logan

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

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).

A dark picture of a savanna plain.

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

 

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

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

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

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