St John Ogilvie Primary School

Dear Parents and Carers,

Primary 7 started their week performing “A Midsummer Nights Dream” by William Shakespeare to the other classes in the upper area. We all enjoyed performing and practising our lines. It was great to see everyone organising costumes and performing with confidence and enthusiasm! It will be good practice for our Primary 7 show, which takes place in February!!

Our class have been revising for SNSA assessments during literacy and numeracy and hopefully it will help us next week when we sit them for real!

We all enjoyed our online transition lesson this week, hosted by the English department at St Margarets Academy. The teacher described how it was important to read a wide variety of material, to help us develop our vocabulary. She had also prepared a book quiz which was great fun!

We joined up with Primary 7B to practise our dancing for our Christmas party. It was very enjoyable! Primary 7 has been creating and designing PowerPoints based on rainforest animals. We will present them to our class when they are completed.

We took part in the West Lothian Sumdog competition this week and managed to climb to a respectable 9th place! Some of us worked really hard at home, answering lots of questions to earn as many points as we could.

Have a super weekend!

Mrs Lea and Primary7A

This week has been very exciting as we found out what parts we are playing in the Nativity. We have been practising in the hall and we have been trying really hard with our singing.

For Literacy, we have been learning about the sounds ‘f’ and ‘b’. We wrote a sentence about a bat in a bin which was very funny!

In Maths, we have been looking at different coins. We used 1p coins to pay for items and then tried to use different coins to make the amount which was a challenge.

In Topic, we learned about coding. We had a go at coding our friends by giving them lots of instructions to follow. The best part was when we got the Beebots in and we were able to code them to move around the classroom.

In RE, we have been learning all about St Andrew and we enjoyed making flags and having some shortbread and Irn Bru on Friday. We also drew around our hands and then coloured them in green to make our Advent Wreath. We also joined up with P1A, P2/3 and P3 for our first Advent Service. The P3 pupils did an amazing job reading and singing.

On Tuesday, we had a very exciting morning out in the Woodland with Caitlin from Kids Gone Wild. We got to try out the hammocks, the zip line and the slack line.

We all agreed the highlight of our week was playing with the Beebots.

Congratulations to Hanna who is our Hot Chocolate winner this week. She always tries hard with her tasks and is helpful.

Well done to Amelia, who is our Reading Champion for this fortnight. She has been trying hard to read cvc words and common words.

Hello P3 families!  Here are this week’s learning highlights from The Ferrets (you will find our Book Week photos below).

Vihaan has loved our Scottish Country dancing lessons for PE this week.  The P5s have been dancing with us and the children have picked up the dances very well.  They have been learning:  The Flying Scotsman, Military Two Step and Canadian Barn Dance.  We will dance these at our Christmas party.

Joseph said he liked maths the best.  We have been learning addition within 100, using an upstairs, downstairs chimney method to help us find answer.

Izhaan liked the lesson with Miss Hunter about the Scottish Outdoor Access Code as part of our learning about wild animals in Scotland.

Matteo loved completing an instructional drawing of a red squirrel.  The children had a choice of drawing a red squirrel, red deer or beaver (Scottish wild animals).  They then researched it and will use their note taking to create an information poster next week.

Eliza said her learning highlight was listening to the story of The Paralysed Man in RE this week as part of our learning about God’s healing and forgiveness.  We saw in this story how Jesus healed the man by forgiving his sin, “Your sins are forgiven, my friend.”  Eliza played the role of the paralysed man when we then acted the story out.

Tyler enjoyed our revision of the oi/oy sound.  He won the oi bingo game!

Navami loved singing the hymns, ‘Little Donkey’ and ‘Away in a Manager’ as part of this week’s Advent Service.  What beautiful singing Navami!

My highlight was the Advent Service today.  The children worked hard to learn their readings and songs that helped the Infant Area prepare for the important season of Advent.

Look out for December’s homework in your child’s homework pack on Tuesday (those who have opted in).

Congratulations to this week’s hot chocolate award winner, Amelia and Reading Champion, Dawid!

I hope you have a great weekend.

Mrs Brown

Dear Readers,

This has been a very busy week for us, since we have started the week by performing  our Twelfth Night show to the Upper Area classes and finished performing the 1st part of the Christmas Story during our Advent Service!

The highlights for us were the following:

• Preparing, practising and performing the Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare, to our friends from P6 and P7.
• Preparing, practising our parts and hymns and presenting the 1st Advent Service to the other Upper Area classes and teachers.
• Working hard to answer correctly to all of Sumdog’s questions in order to be the 1st ones from our school in the West Lothian Challenge. Unfortunately, although lots of us have done an amazing job, we ended up in 2nd place in our school and would therefore like to congratulate Mr. McGurn’s P7B for finishing in 5th position overall. We have finished in 7th position overall which was quite good, but hope to put even more effort into the next Sumdog Challenge, if at all possible.
• Basketball with David was super fun and on Thursday we have tried girls v girls and boys v boys, since we have always played with mixed teams and lots of us had been complaining a lot about not touching the ball, especially the girls…
• Our spelling words this week were really challenging and, exceptionally, we didn’t have time for our Weekly Spelling Assessment, which was unfortunate.

Mrs Valente’s highlights were:

• Watching us perform the Twelfth Night in the Hall.
• Watching us presenting the 1st Advent Service.
• Our Enrolment on Pope Francis Faith Award – Father Kevin kindly came to our Area where he has explained many things about this journey and at the end he gave us the opportunity to ask him all kinds of questions, some related to his vocation and others completely personal. We got to know him much better, he was nice and calm and seemed to be having a good time being with us!

We congratulate Cohen for being the Reading Champion of the Fortnight!📚🏆🥇

We also congratulate Cohen, Georgia, Aaeryn-Leigh and Amelia for having the best table!🏆

The Hot Chocolate of the Week will be awarded on Monday because some of us were not in class at the end of the day, since Mrs Brown had asked for our help with her class!

That’s all for today, we wish everyone a super duper weekend with lots of fun and cuddles!

P6B and Mrs Valente😘😘

We have had a busy few weeks preparing for our Enterprise Event.

We were at Hopetoun House 2 weeks ago and got to see what it was like to be a servant in Victorian Times. We got to dress up and even our grownups had costumes. We also played some Victorian games in the old stables.

Last week was Book Week and we had some plays to work on. We put on a show for the area and shared all our acting skills.

We have begun practising our Scottish dancing in preparation for our Christmas parties. We are working with P3 and doing the flying Scotsman, Canadian barn dance and the Military two-step.

Today we led the area in the first Advent Service.

We are really looking forward to sharing our crafts and decorations with our families next week.

Dear Parents and Carers,

Here’s an update on some of the things P7 have been doing this week:

“We played a lot of Sumdog because it was the West Lothian Sumdog Contest. Mr McGurn said we’d get a special prize if we made it into the Top Ten Pupils list or if we do all 1000 questions! I was so pumped that I did all the questions in 2 days. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the top ten at the end of the week. I was 1st for a day though and got a prize for finishing all 1000 questions,” reports Benita.

Paige said, “Some of us performed The Tempest for the Upper Area and we watched their performances of other Shakespeare plays too. We all loved it because it was so much fun.”

“I enjoyed doing the practice SNSA on Maths and English. I think it will help me a lot with the real SNSAs which we will do next week,” said Daniel.

Mariam said, ” PE was Scottish Country Dancing- it was OK, the other P7 class joined us on the Thursday (not my fav) but it was fun and we did progressive dancing. Only 3 pairs of boys and girls were brave enough to dance together but they received a prize for giving it a go so maybe more will join in next time.”

The Over and Above winner this week was Daniel but we ran out of time at the end of the day so he will receive his Hot Chocolate on Monday.

Have a great weekend,

Mr McGurn and P7B.

Hello P2 families,

We have had a lovely week starting ceilidh dancing.

Practising the Canadian barn dance.

We continued practicing time and counting in tens.

We practised our phonics outside!

We have loved celebrating St Andrews day!

Our reading champion is Emilio this week

Our hot choc winner is Arush

Great job this week P2!

Weekly highlights

I enjoyed free writing – Martha

Doing greater than and less than – Alfie

Doing ceilidh dancing – Zenith

Learning about Advent at assembly- Hallie and Joseph
Continue Reading →

We have had a very exciting week in P1A finding out our roles for the Nativity. We have started putting our performance together and can’t wait for our families to come and see it.

In literacy this week we learned two new sounds, f and b. We worked really hard to form the letters and to use them to build words. We tried really hard to write a simple sentence using a capital and a full stop.

In maths we have been doing lots of addition work, using concrete materials and part-part-whole strategy. We have also been learning some more about coins and worked hard to count how many 1p coins were in the jar.

This week we learned all about trains, comparing trains today to those in the past. We also started to learn about boats and worked hard to design our own boat.

With St Andrews Day coming up on Sunday, we learned who St Andrew is and enjoyed making our own saltire flags. We were all very excited to celebrate St Andrews together trying some Irn Bru and shortbread.