St John Ogilvie Primary School

Hello P3A families,

Here are this week’s highlights from the Red table:

Jack liked Number Talks.  As reported a previous week, the children estimate how many items they can see and use clues to work out the correct answer.  They then check to see if their estimate was correct.  This particular Number Talk is a class favourite!

Tvisha loved listening to the bagpipes on Burns Day.  Mrs Brown played her favourite song, ‘Highland Cathedral’.

Grace enjoyed learning about the Trinity; that God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit are one.  We used the analogy of an egg to help us understand this.  The shell, yoke and white are all part of the egg.  Of course, we also learned about St Patrick and the shamrock too!  The children sang a song called, ‘The Trinity is a Mystery’.  It can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USRbkAx-AEE

Zion said his highlight was the football after school club.

Caiden’s was iron bru and shortbread.  A special Scottish treat!  Thank you to Mrs McKissack for providing the tasty shortbread.

Twida liked tracing the map of West Lothian for our wall display.  He and Zion worked as part of a team to prepare this.  Good job boys!

Deveena liked Scottish country dancing with Mrs Ross during PE.  Mrs Ross explained that the dance, called ‘The Flying Scotsman’ was named after famous train in Scotland.  She was very impressed with how fast the children picked this dance up!

My highlight was the performances of the Burns poems the children orally composed (some went on to write them for our Star Writer wall).  First, we listened to his poem, To a Mouse (found here: https://primary.scotshoose.com/toamouse.html) and used nature to inspire our own poems.  We went to the local river and wooded area.  We used our senses to record ideas for our poems.  Once back in class, we worked in  pairs to compose our own poem like Burns did.  We selected 2 words from our note taking outside and using the internet, researched the word in Scots.  The children had the choice if they wanted to perform their poem in front of the rest of the class and most did!  What confidence!

Congratulations to Zion, our hot chocolate award winner and Grace, our reading champion this week!

Lead Learners were Alicaj and Rory.  They had the important role of looking out for people who were demonstrating our school rules of being Ready, Respectful and Safe.  They also get to say something extra for the blog:

Alicaj – “I liked going to the river.”

Rory – “I liked weaving to make our own tartan.”

Regards

Mrs Brown

Good Afternoon,

We’ve had another very busy week in Primary 2!

On Thursday, we had great fun celebrating Burns Day.  In the morning, we wrote amazing stories about finding the Loch Ness Monster.  We worked hard to use interesting sentence openers in our work.  Then, in the afternoon, we had a Burns Supper in the area.  We tried haggis, neeps and tatties, sang Scottish songs, and some of children stood up and recited their Scots poems, out loud, in front of everyone! Superstars that they are!

In Maths and Numeracy, we continued to learn about money.  This week we were finding the total value of different groups of coins and looking at different ways to make the same total.  We also continued working on our subtraction skills.

We are still having fantastic fun playing in our café and the children are always coming up with new creative ideas for it.

Highlights of the Week:

Enso: I liked writing a story about the Loch Ness monster. 

Summer:  I loved the Burns afternoon and I said my poem with my friends in front of a big audience!

Cameron:  I liked making the tartan kilts with the paper.

Dineli:  I enjoyed learning about money and coins.

Luca: I liked free writing Friday.

Huge congratulations to our hot chocolate Friday winner this week, Vedansh!  Vedansh has been working extremely hard to meet his learning targets and has been very helpful around the classroom!  We are very proud of you Vedansh!

Our Reading champion this week is Cameron, who has been trying really hard to improve his reading skills.  Well done Cameron!

Have a great weekend everyone!

This week we have been learning the sounds j and y. We have been writing words with these sounds and we are feeling confident about this. In writing, we wrote two sentences to tell people the food we liked and did not like to eat. In wordboost, we read ‘The Gruffalo’s Wean’ and we learned some scots words.

In Numeracy, we have been practising counting in 2s. We had to count the pairs of shoes and we know that if we count in 2s it is a quicker way. We also did some subtraction games and we are remembering all our strategies.

In RE, we have been completing our work for God’s Loving Plan. We spoke about how we are all unique and then drew a picture of ourselves. We also discussed different types of families and we said a special prayer to thank God for our families.

In topic, we learned all about different Scottish foods. We also learned about Steven Brown who is a Scottish artist and made our own version of a McCoo. On Thursday we celebrated Burns Night with P2/1 and P2 in the area and we ate some haggis, neeps and tatties, shortbread and some Irn Bru. We listened to some of the P2s reciting their Scots poems and we sand Heids, Shooders, Knaps and Taes. We had a great time!

On Friday, we celebrated 100 days of school with lots of different activities about the number 100. We managed to make a tower of 100 paper cups and we had fun knocking them all down. We spent time with our Buddies and made a picture with 100 sticky dots.

Here are some of our personal highlights:

Lewis – I enjoyed playing with my buddy.

Tyler T – I enjoyed playing with the marble run.

Alfie – I enjoyed playing with the 100 cups.

Joseph – I enjoyed making the McCoos.

Ollie – I enjoyed playing with the mini cubes.

Vikashini – I enjoyed playing with the 100 cups.

Davith – I enjoyed playing with the marbles.

Congratulations to Zuraib who is our Hot Chocolate winner this week and to Ollie who is our Reading Champion.

Dear Parents,

Here’s an update about our learning from this week…

On Monday we did our weekly Religious Education in the morning where we continued to work on accurately using the bible to find passages and we followed St. Paul’s first missionary journey on a map. Then we did some Wordboost from our novel; The Last Wolf. After snack we did Algebra textbooks for Mathematics. Then after lunch we did some reading and then our focus for January; famous Scottish authors. To finish off we did some gymnastics for PE.

On Tuesday we did work on indirect speech for grammar. Then we all planed a Scots poem for our writing task. After snack did more algebra textbooks for Mathematics. Then after lunch we did some reading for 15 minutes then we did music with the music teacher, Mrs Morrison. To finish off the day we did French, singing Head, Shoulders, Knees and toes in French.

On Wednesday we wrote our Scots poem for writing, most people chose to write about ‘Snawmen’. After snack we did RLPS for Mathematics, trying to find a holiday for Mr McGurn. After lunch we did some more reading then we did some practice for our Burns recital. To finish off we did gymnastics for PE.

On Thursday we all did The Last Wolf reciprocal reading for literacy. Then we did HWB With Mrs Morrison on drugs and substance misuse. After snack we all did work on the area of triangles for Mathematics. After lunch we did some reading then Spanish. Then we did our Burns Poetry Recital where we should off our Burns presenting skills to one another.

On Friday we did a big discussion on the school camp. Then we did a science transition with St Margaret’s high school for science on Teams. Two S6 pupils dissected a heart, some people thought it was horrible but a few were really interested by it. Then we met our Buddies to celebrate their 100 day of school after snack. Then we had finished with Fun Friday.

Signing off,

Myles, Lead Learner.

P.S. Aoife was this week’s Over and Above winner and got to take home the hot chocolate prize for great effort and always being on task.

Have a great weekend,

Mr McGurn and Primary 7A.

P.P.S.

Here is the Termly Overview for Term 3:

Hello families!

I don’t know about home, but this week for us has passed so fast!

We have had a packed week full of fun learning! We started looking at multiplication strategies which the children loved! Reesa and Georgia-Rose went on a school tour to showcase their fantastic new learning! We have been developing our strategies (repeated addition and skip counting) using the four times table.

For STEM the children have loved our ‘Tuff Challenge’ using screws and bolts and putting their innovation and critical thinking in action! Ishaan liked creating a helicopter and Lilly created a cutting device!

The children have been working together during our collaborative working time! They choose their learning and have been creating their own Kahoots – all independently! I was very impressed! TJ loved helping his classmates with Minecraft education! Fantastic!

Mahathi, Elvin and Aaron enjoyed making habitats for small animals using Lego! They are doing so well on our global goals journey!

The class loved discussing their rights, they even love shouting “we have rights” out loud! They want the world to hear! They sorted the A-Z of rights and created a poster with the rights associated with their name! “We have the right to a name” – Ciara!

They have been creating their pupil heroes, using cut outs and different materials for literacy and technology! They made an huge mess! But we’re VERY quick to clean it up! So much so the cleaning staff commented on how sparkling the classroom was!

In literacy, we are looking at developing sentences! This week we focused on joining sentences together with “and, but, so or because”. We linked this to our first level targets!

well done P3! Keep up the great work!

Hello P3A families,

Here are this week’s highlights from the Blue Table:

Ollie said the learning highlight of his week was tracing around the outline of a map of West Lothian.  Ollie did a super job and concentrated very hard to record the town names and the 2 motorways and train line that runs across West Lothian.

Ethan loved music with Mrs Morrison when the class learned some songs and stories about heroes of Troy.

Rory LOVED a game we played to learn how many days were in each month of the year.  The children got in to a circle and each child had to say one word that collectively made up the memorable rhyme, “30 days has September, April, June and November”….etc.  If the child got their word wrong, they were out.  Rory was part of the group of winners!  Well remembered Rory!  Next week’s maths homework will involve going over this memorable rhyme.

Alicaj enjoyed gymnastics and reported that her favourite movement was the ‘bridge’.

Chahiti has been enjoying our new starter activities in the morning that keep the children productively busy while dinners and daily emotion check-ins take place.  The starter activities this week included a choice of 3.  1. An activity about our new daily common word, 2. An activity that reinforced learning from our Number Talks, or 3. The daily number challenge.

Caleb liked this week’s Word Boost story, Black Dog and his favourite word was ‘demand’.

My highlight was the discussion P3A had about what our new role-play area could be.  We had some super ideas but decided to go with Angel’s idea of creating a West Lothian visitors centre!  The children traced maps and are currently working on gathering research that will then feed into leaflets that we will make next week about: transport, hotels, restaurants, famous people, landmarks and the history of West Lothian.  The children are very enthusiastic about the visitor’s centre!  Their enthusiastic is infectious!  Thank you Angel for this great idea!

Congratulations to Angel, our hot chocolate award winner this week!

Lead Learners were Diana and Chahiti.  They had the important role of looking out for people who were demonstrating our school rules of being Ready, Respectful and Safe.  They also get to say something extra for the blog:

Diana – “I enjoyed checking everyone was behaving in the cloakroom.”

Chahiti – “I liked the story, ‘Going on a Train’ and answering the questions.”

Regards

Mrs Brown

Good afternoon dear Readers,

Welcome to P5A’s first blog of 2024.

We hope you are all well and wish you all a very good year.

This week, the highlights were:

• Our Big Spelling Assessment.
• Going to Deans Community High School for our swimming lesson.
• Continue practising our Human Football game.
• Beginning to work on God’s loving plan with the story of Creation, that we have read, discussed and illustrated in groups.
• The visit of the RRS team from Unicef to see how well we know the Rights of the Child in our school.
• Starting to learn about decimal numbers, their value in a number and how to order them in a number line. We have also started to learn how to turn decimal numbers into fractions.
• Also regarding the Rights of the child, we have listened to the beautiful and moving speech ‘I have a dream’ from Martin Luther King. All the children were very interested to learn more so we have studied his biography and became big admirers of his achievements. The children were so moved by what they have learned that they have written their own ‘I have a dream’ speeches, which some of them have asked to say to the class. They were beautiful!🥰
• We have also learned many things about the Scots language, its origins, where it is spoken and why is it not spoken everywhere in Scotland. At the end we have finished by writing our own sentences including the Scots words that we have learned and it was very funny reading them!

Finally, we would like to congratulate our 1st Hot Chocolate of 2024, Miss Baibua and our Hot Chocolate of this week, Miss Hannah! Super well done for both! Keep working hard!🥇🥇🏆🏆👏👏

That is all for now, we say goodbye wishing all of you a lovely weekend and a good week ahead.

P5A and Mrs Valente😊😘