St John Ogilvie Primary School

Hi there Primary 3 families. We have had lots of fun this week in and out of the classroom and have had a chance to engage with lots of fun learning experiences.

We have had lots of fun adding this week, as well as look at descriptive writing, using the description bubble and trying our hardest to work out whether something is a noun, adjective or a verb. We even did a scavenger hunt to find and sort words into the correct columns.

We had fun building nests outdoors this week which related to our last WordBoost book ‘The Wild Girl’. We have been working really hard to prepare for our reconciliation this week. We learned all about forgiveness and that Jesus and God will always forgive us for our sins.

We started a new project for our ‘How things work’ topic, we have started designing a toy and working with our group to agree on ideas and draw what it will look like.

We have been counting coins and started using coins to count out different amounts and using different combinations of coins to make certain amounts.

I hope you all had a great week at school and enjoy your weekend!

Another very busy week in P1! First thing Monday morning all the p1s went out to the Outdoor Classroom which had turned into Santa’s Grotto.  Santa wasn’t there but we read a Christmas story and sang a Christmas song.  We have been practising very hard for our Nativity and on Friday we got to wear our costumes on the stage. It was very exciting!  Our teachers said we looked amazing.

We had our Christmas Dinner on Wednesday.  It was delicious.  In the afternoon we went to the blessing of the crib and we got to sing one of our songs from the Nativity.

On Monday we took part in our first Area Advent Service with all the p1s, P2s and P3s.  We listened to some readings and sang some hymns. Mrs Russell lit the first purple candle on the Advent Wreath. We also made our own Advent Wreath for the classroom and set up our Advent Calendar. We also have a book Advent Calendar to open.

We got to decorate our class Christmas tree.  We all worked together to decorate the tree and we think it looks lovely.

In Literacy, we have been learning the sounds ‘b’ and ‘h’. We have been reading words with these sounds and finding the pictures that matched. We made a butterfly craft for the sound ‘b’. In writing, we wrote a sentence about a winter hat and had to describe what it looked like. For our ERIC Time (Everyone Reading In Class) we sat beside the cosy warm fire it was very relaxing.

In Maths, we have been continuing our work on addition and looked at part part whole models and we are continuing to develop quick mental recall.  In Topic, we have been looking at toys from the past and present and we spoke about our favourite toy.   For Art, we read the story  Rudey’s Windy Christmas. We then followed the instructions to draw our own reindeers.

Learning Highlights:

Cerys ‘I liked listening to the story in Santa’s Grotto’

Tiara ‘I liked reading Rudey’s Windy Christmas’

Guhan Kumar ‘I liked drawing the reindeer’

Felix ‘I liked playing with the Lego’

Alfie ‘I liked making Rudey’

Lena ‘I liked making the butterfly’.

Well done to Ava our Hot Chocolate winner this week.

Today we got to wear red or green to school and bring a donation for the Food Bank.  Thank you very much for all your kind donations to the Foodbank! They will be very much appreciated and will help to make Christmas better to lots of people!

Have a wonderful weekend everyone and stay safe in the storm.

Dear Readers,

We hope you’re all very well.

At school things are getting more and more Christmassy and this week we have already had our yummy Christmas Lunch, which is always a joyful occasion! We got to dress our favourite Christmas clothes and had a very good day since Mrs Valente surprised us by showing us The Lorax – the film. Although we had to be on task to spot all the differences and similarities between the film and the book we still had time to enjoy ourselves a lot with all the jokes and sarcasm of the film! 🌳🌳🌳😂

Other highlights of the week were:

• Continuing ou Elsewhere Emporium, which is crazily interesting, and working on our spelling words from it.
• Continuing working on Word problems with addition, subtraction and multiplication.
• Working very hard on the timestables, from the 2s to the 10s and trying to know all of them.
• Continue our learning about Tsunamis and the impact they can have on the affected places.
• Researching and reporting back to class about Earthquakes, the different parts of the Earth, why do earthquakes happen, the Richter scale, how it works and the impact earthquakes can have on people and places affected. As there was an earthquake of 7.0 with a tsunami alert following it in California just yesterday, we have read the news about it and understood even better how serious the situation can be. Fortunately the tsunami alert was cancelled an hour later and nobody got hurt in the earthquake but we could see how things are in real life situations and found it very interesting.
• As we have been learning about the Discussion as a different type of text we had to plan our own discussion. It was not easy because Mrs Valente has chosen a really controversial topic : Should Zoos exist? We had the opportunity to watch 2 different clips where various experts in animals and animal welfare talked about the pros and cons and after that had to plan according to everything that we had found out about it. It was very interesting but a bit difficult for some.
• From Monday, we have been celebrating daily the season of Advent. We started by having a beautiful Advent Service in the upper area prepared by P7A and continued with our daily digital Advent calendar from where we get lovely readings, hymns and prayers to help us celebrate this important season. Our Altar is now dressed in purple to show that we are preparing and reflecting on how to be the best versions of ourselves.♥ We have also discussed the importance of the Advent wreath and what it symbolises, as well as the meaning of each of the candles in it.
• The week has ended with our usual spelling assessment and we hope to get great scores!
• The Crusty Crabs deserve congratulations for being the winning table of the week! Well done!🏆👏 Although we had 3 tables with the same score, the Cheese and the Coconuts have been left behind for being huge chatterboxes!! Always remember to be Ready, Respectful and Safe!
• Many congratulations to Alexa, our Hot Chocolate of the week for  being kind, helpful, caring and for her good work this week! Well done, Alexa!🥇🎉✨

That’s all for now, we say goodbye wishing everyone a happy and safe weekend!

P6B and Mrs Valente😘😘

P.S. Thank you very much for all your kind donations to the Foodbank! They will be very much appreciated and will help to make Christmas better to lots of people!😃🎄

We have had a super busy week.  We have started rehearsing for the Nativity on the stage.  We know where we sit and we have been practising our lines and singing all the songs.  Our teachers are very proud of us.

In literacy we have been learning the sounds ‘e’ and ‘f’ we are practising writing these letters and sounding them out to make words.  We are continuing to work on our blending skills.  We made elephants to help teach our families about ‘e’ and we looked for the sounds in our library books.  We played Kim’s Game with ‘f’ objects.  We read a story and completed some prediction discussions.

In writing this week we wrote a sentence using some cvc words that included the ‘e’ sound.  We are remembering to try and use finger spaces and a full stop.

On Wednesday we had our Bookbug bag event.  We made a paper plate octopus, designed pyjamas and read our bookbug books with a family member or school helper.

In Maths we worked on making amounts to 10p and we played bowling to make the facts for 10. It was lots of fun.

On Thursday it was a cold and frosty day so we had discussions about Jack Frost.

This week was Road Safety Week.  We recalled the green cross code and discussed how to cross the road safely.  We went outside to the crossing and learned to cross the road properly, thinking about Stop, Look, Listen and think.

We started our new topic ‘Toys’ we read the story ‘The Old Toy Room’ and discussed the different toys in the story and discussed old and new toys.

Today we got to wear something Scottish or Tartan to school to help celebrate St Andrew’s Day which is on Saturday.  We learned all about St Andrew and made a Scottish Flag and designed a tartan for a teddy.  We also got a special treat from Mrs McKissack.  Thank you the Irn Bru and shortbread biscuit was delicious.

Congratulations to Daniel our Hot Chocolate winner this week and well done to Felix our Reading Champion.

Weekly Highlights:

Alfie ‘I liked playing with the Dinosaur eggs’.

Daniel ‘I liked learning about St Andrew’.

Lena ‘I liked Gym, we played Tig’.

Tiara ‘I liked learning about St Andrew’.

Ava ‘I liked learning about money’.

Cerys ‘I liked learning about the Scottish Flag’.

Emilio ‘I liked learning about road safety and how to cross the road’.

Guhan Kumar ‘I liked playing with my friends’.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone and don’t forget our School Christmas Fair is on Sunday.

Dear Readers,

We hope you are all well and cosy.❄🥰

This week’s highlights were:

• Continuing our work on the spelling of really interesting words from our new and amazing book, The Elsewhere Emporium.
• Working a lot on Maths word problems and on developing the skills to identify which operations to use in order to solve them as well as to understand exactly what they are asking us for. We will still need to continue working on this because most of us can still get very confused at times.😊
• Revising 3 to 6 digits addition and subtraction sums and multiplication by 10, 100 and 1000.
• Art work related to Book week’s The Lorax – Finishing our design of an alternative cover for the book, creating our frames for our own Truffula Trees. Drawing and painting the enormous Truffula Trees for the Area display which looks absolutely fantastic!🌳🌳🌳🌳
• For topic, we have learned many things about tsunamis, why they are formed, the size of the waves they can make, the consequences of the most terrible tsunamis in the world and the warning signs that show a tsunami is about to come. We have had a very special focus on the Tsunami of 2004 and have watched the incredible story of the ‘Angel of the beach’, about a British girl who, at the age of 10, had identified that a tsunami was going to happen and warned her parents who then warned everyone at the beach to run to security. All that happened because she had been paying attention to a Science lesson about tsunamis in school where her teacher had also taught her all the warning signs that people should be aware of. She saved many lives that day and we were all very emotional when we watched her talking about it. ♥
• Learning about St. Andrew, who he was, why he became the patron saint of Scotland and why the saltire cross is at the centre of the Scottish flag. We also spoke about how people celebrate this day and about the old Scottish clans and their different tartans.
• We have revised, once again, the main different types of words we know: nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and connectives and agreed that we will need to continue working on it, since many of us can still find it hard to recognise them in sentences.
• We have learned about a new type of text, the Discussion and its different parts and have identified those by ourselves. Next week will be time for us to start writing our own discussions.😃
• Finally, it was Sumdog West Lothian challenge week and we are very proud to announce that we ended up in 9th place overall!👏👏👏Out of 233 classes!
• We are also very proud about the fact that we won a daily prize for the 27th of November!!!!You can see the certificate attached🏆🥇SUMDOG CERTIFICATE
• And of course we felt super happy as well because our Jude ended the challenge in 26th position, out of more than 2000 pupils participating! Super well done, Jude!!!!😃👏👏👏👏🏆✨🎉
• Because of all his hard work and his usual amazing participation in class Jude was also the Hot Chocolate of the Week!!!!!😁🥇🏆👏🎉✨

We hope you have enjoyed reading about our week and say goodbye for now wishing you all a great weekend!

P6B and Mrs Valente😘😘

We have had another great week in Primary 2!

It was Road Safety week this week.  The children learned about how to keep safe when crossing a road and made brilliant posters to show our Primary 1 pupils. They were super impressed!

It was a beautiful, crisp, cold day when we went out for outdoor learning on Thursday.  The children had a lot of fun playing with the ice and we had a lot of discussion around how ice is formed.  We then took some ice into the classroom and predicted how long we thought it would take for the ice to melt.  Some people said 20 minutes and others thought up to 2 weeks.  In the end, it took around 3 and a half hours.  Well done to Daniel, Umaez and Garvit, who predicted the closest with 3 hours.

Tomorrow is St. Andrew’s Day, so we had a little early celebration.  We learned about the life of St Andrew and the children made their own Scotland flags.  As a special treat, the children even got to taste a little Irn Bru and shortbread.  Most of them liked it, but a few weren’t so sure.

Huge congratulations to our hot chocolate winner Laaibah!  Laaibah always works very hard in class and is kind and helpful towards others.  Keep up the great work Laaibah!

Our new reading champion is Joseph.  Joseph is a great example towards others during ERIC time and has been doing fantastic with his reading!

Have a great weekend everyone!