St John Ogilvie Primary School

Hello P3 families!

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and new year!  I missed the children very much!  We have had a few changes in class for the start of the new year.  The children have now moved seats and have new table names.  We now have table names after towns in West Lothian.  We have: Bathgate, Broxburn and Livingston (the children picked them).

This week we will hear about the learning highlights in P3 from ‘Livingston’:

Joseph enjoyed the maths work we completed on the calendar.  The children worked in pairs to create a month for our new class calendar.  They researched important dates in their month, picked 3 and inserted them in, as well as class birthdays of course!  The calendar looks very special.  Good work everyone!

Izaan and Eliza both liked our lessons on alphabetical order and early dictionary skills.  We played different games to ensure we were confident with alphabetical order and this helped prepare us for when we looked at the dictionaries.  We raced to find different sections of the dictionary and have begun to look at definitions.  We will continue with this next week and look up vocabulary from one of our previous Word Boost books.

Oscar enjoyed bench ball during PE.  This half term the children will be developing their gymnastic skills begun in P2.

Ellie liked our phonics lesson on the ou/ow sounds.  We had a practise of some of the active spelling homework tasks using these sounds.  The children had to speak riddles to their friend who had to guess the correct word.

Rahim chose Spanish as his favourite lesson.  This was with Mrs Ogruno, who taught the children the months of the year in Spanish.   Here is a link to a song that will help the children to remember:

🎶 Learn the Months of the Year in Spanish Song – Kid’s Spanish songs

Ollie’s highlight was tracing an outline of a map of West Lothian.  I was so proud of everyone for their concentrated efforts completing this task.  They then completed a key to represent the different towns.  See the photo below of those who won a prize for the neatest map.

My highlight was our lessons on our new topic.  The children are excited to learn about life on the Isle of Coll (the island that the author of the Katie Morag stories grew up) compared with West Lothian.  They came up with very interesting questions such as: How many schools are there?  What are the names of the rivers?  What types of transport are there?  What is the population?  What places of worship are there? etc.  There were 16 questions in total and over the course of this half term, they will research these questions.  After we looked at the images of the Isle of Coll, I told the children that I wanted to move there when I retire as it is so beautiful but my husband thought it would be too cold!  Ellie’s advice was, “Tell him to just wear a coat!”  Thanks Ellie, I will pass that useful advice on! 😆

Congratulations to our hot chocolate award winner, Dawid and a big, warm welcome to our new pupil, Rahim!

Those parents who opted in for homework, will have found it in their school bag on Tuesday.  Everyone will continue to have daily reading homework.  Thank you for your continued support.

I hope you enjoy your weekend!

Mrs Brown

Happy New Year! And just like that, the first week of 2026 is complete! Here’s what we got up to in P4B: 

Literacy: 

We began the term by revisiting some of our key spelling patterns from before the Christmas holidays, including plurals, y‑ending words, and y + er / y + est. To put our learning into action, pupils designed their own board games to practise these skills and challenge their classmates. We also explored a comprehension text about New Year celebrations and finished the week by writing our own New Year’s resolutions. 

Maths: 

In maths, we continued developing our confidence with three‑digit subtraction using our Building Thinking Classrooms approach. We focused particularly on exchanging and explaining our strategies clearly. 

Pupil Highlights 

• Many pupils were delighted to play dodgeball in P.E. this week before we move on to our gymnastics block next week. 

• Azmeer, Cemre, Filip and Harald especially enjoyed creating their spelling board games. Vasilisa loved trying out the board games made by her peers. 

• Lillian had a great time during outdoor learning, where we filled water balloons, placed them in different areas, and observed how the cold weather affected them. 

Miss Mushet’s Highlight 

• I loved being part of outdoor learning this week too. Observing how the balloons froze on the grass but stayed liquid in the woodland sparked some brilliant discussions about temperature, shade and micro‑climates. 

Dear Parents and Carers,

Happy New Year from Primary 7A

We have had a busy first week back , mainly focussing on numeracy, literacy and topic. We joined together with P7B to start rehearsing for our show ” Edith’s War Time Scrap Book..” In Literacy, we have learnt about hyperbole and have been making up our own examples. During numeracy, we developed our knowledge of how to complete long multiplication calculations. Some of us found this particularly tricky! We also worked in pairs to research information about famous Scottish authors.  We started a new class novel entitled ” Millions” by Frank Cottrell Boyce.

Here are some of our learning highlights:

Hamnah. Reya – ” We enjoyed the rehearsals for the show! ”

Ben- ” I enjoyed learning how to complete long multiplication calculations.”

Ameya and Alfred- ”  Researching Famous Scottish Authors was interesting! ”

Baibua- ” I enjoyed gymnastics and learning to perform forward rolls correctly.”

Sam- ” I liked learning about how to use hyperbole in writing.”

CoNgratulations to Nell on being our hot chocolate winner this week!

Congratulations to Reya who was nominated our class reading champion for the next two weeks.

Have a super weekend!

Mrs Lea and Primary7A

Happy New Year from P1B!

We have had a great first week back! We have been practising reading and writing words this week. We got to use little snowmen to help us sound out the word and then magnetic wands and chips to blend the words to read them. It was great fun! We read the book ‘Sneezy the Snowman’ and did some writing about why the snowman melted.

In maths, we have been learning all about subtraction. We used the little snowmen and ten frames to help us.

As the weather has been very cold, we put some water outside overnight. We then got to play with the ice. We learned all about the words solid, liquid and gas.

In PE, we have started our work on gymnastics. We learned about balances this week. Ask us all about 1,2,3 and 4 point balances.

This week we got to make our own robots using junk modelling materials. We had great fun and showed some excellent creativity.

Here are some of our personal highlights from this week:

Aayat – I enjoyed making the robots.

Victoria – I enjoyed doing the gymnastics.

Aria – I enjoyed making my robot.

Eloran – I enjoyed writing about the snowman.

Mikayla – I enjoyed making our robots.

Hanna – I enjoyed drawing.

Congratulations to Amelia who is our Hot Chocolate Winner this week. She is always kind to others and helps people when they need it.

Well done to Niall who is our Reading Champion this fortnight. He has shown confidence in reading CVC words and always find lots of common words in books during ERIC time.

We wish all our families and friends a very Happy Christmas and we look foward to seeing you all again in the new year.  Thank you boys and girls for all your hard work everyday in class learning new things.  Look how far you have all come since starting school in August, our Awesome Ogilvies.  Thank you to our parents for all your support this year.  It is greatly appreciated.

Merry Christmas and have a restful holiday, Mrs Russell and Mrs Meikle

Wishing all of our special children and families a peaceful Christmas.  See you all in 2026!

Hello P3 families!  Here are this week’s highlights from The Polar Bears:

Maks has continued to enjoy Maths with addition within 100.  The children are growing in confidence understanding the concept of exchanging and carrying over.  Maks’ favourite subject is maths!

Danvith liked the religion lessons were we listened to passages in the Bible about an angel appearing to Joseph in his dreams.  We compared his character to that of King Herod’s.

Sophia enjoyed music with Mrs Morrison.

Vakashini has said that Scottish Country Dancing was the best part of her week!  We all look forward to our Christmas party this coming Monday where we will put our dancing skills to the test!

Oscar liked making cards for the non-teaching staff in the school.  This was Friday’s Mini Vinnie Advent suggestion on preparing for Christmas.

Daisy enjoyed designing a Christmas decoration for our whole school competition.  Congratulations to the winning entry from our class, Navami, who made a lovely wreathe with hanging star.  The children were tasked with the challenge of only using given materials supplied by Mrs McKisssack.  It was so lovely to see the creativity P3 had; all using the same materials but in different, creative ways.  We look forward to hearing who the winner was soon!

Umaez continued to enjoy our description writing this week.  We have finished the first draft and will now complete our final draft next week.  We hope to present them to the people we wrote about and I know they will love them!

My highlight was when Mrs McKissack came in and said how lovely our class singing was during the Advent service.  I felt very proud of the class.

There will be no new reading books handed out for the last week of term but those who have opted-in for homework, will continue with their spelling and maths.

Best wishes,

Mrs Brown