St John Ogilvie Primary School

Dear Readers,

We hope you have all been well during this cold Winter week.🌨🌧☃❄

In Primary 3A we have been continuing to work hard to improve both our learning and our behaviour!

The highlights of our week were:

• Spelling work with our new spelling words.
• Religious Education by starting God’s Loving plan and understanding better the two most important commandments of loving God and loving our neighbours. After discussing this last one and learning the story of ‘The Good Samaritan’ we understood that by neighbours God meant all of us, all our ‘neighbours’ from planet Earth, His creation. We all loved this!
• Learning Where is West Lothian? – we were very interested to find out that West Lothian is one of the many councils in Scotland, which is one of the four nations of the United Kingdom, which is one of the countries in the European continent, which is one of the seven continents on Earth, which is a lovely planet, especially when seen from space, as we did. We have seen maps of all these places and were truly amazed at the end when we had the opportunity to see from space, through Google Earth, the way to our lovely school in just some seconds!🌍😃
• Our own Narrative : we have started by planning it and then moved on to writing it according to our plan and to what we had learned about the different parts of the Narrative. Some of us wrote absolutely amazing pieces!🏆🎉👍😀
• In Maths we have been continuing our work on Subtraction and found it really enjoyable to learn and exercise how to use the split strategy to subtract, by splitting tens from units/ones and making it much easier mentally. We also very much enjoyed using ‘show me boards’ to demonstrate our knowledge on subtraction families!👏👏👏
• The week has ended with our spelling assessment and Spanish.😊

We would like to congratulate our Hot Chocolate of the week, Lucas!🥇🏆😃Super well done for being so polite and working so hard! Super proud!🥰

We would also like to congratulate our Kindness Champions, Ollie – 1st place🥇👏, Aiden G and Kayla – 2nd place🥈👏  and John, 3rd place🥉👏 for their continued kindness towards all and challenge everyone else to follow their example!

Our winning table of the week was Ollie, Julia and Isabel’s and they got the usual treats for having been the tidiest throughout the week! Very proud indeed!

As we all know, our classroom is a bit our second home🏠 so we need to keep it nice and tidy!😀❤

That is all for now so we say goodbye wishing you all a lovely weekend with your loved ones!

Mrs Valente and P3A😘😘😘😘

Dear Families,

The children have had a very busy week learning lots of new things!

Our new topic this term is ‘Jobs in the Local Community’.  On Wednesday, we went on a walk around our local area to see if we could find any local places of work and discussed who might work there.  Below are a few pictures of the places we found, maybe you could ask your child what these places are and who might work there, to see if they can remember!

In Maths we have been concentrating on subtraction from 20 and finding the difference between 2 numbers.  The children enjoyed playing a game of connect four using their subtraction skills.

In Literacy, the children were learning new sounds ‘ai’ and ‘ay’ and practising spelling words with these sounds in them.  We have also been learning about narrative writing and the different parts of a narrative text.  Next week the children will be writing their very own piece of narrative text.

On Sunday, it is the start of Chinese New Year.  The children should have arrived home with a red envelope with chocolate coins inside, this is because in China children receive a red envelope with money and sweets inside as part of the Chinese New Year celebrations.  They also made Chinese lanterns and practised using chopsticks.

Our hot chocolate winner this week was Caleb!  Caleb has been working very hard in class and her been trying really hard to be kind and helpful to others.  Big congratulations Caleb!

Here are our learning highlights this week:

Chahiti – I loved learning Spanish with Miss Roscilli. I learned how to ask others how they are.

Caleb – I liked drawing during activity time.

Tediwa – I liked meeting new friends in my new school.

Vivien – I liked going out for reading groups.

Linda – I enjoyed learning about the emergency services.

Riley – I loved going on the walk to learn about local places of work.

Rory – I loved learning about Chinese New year.

Angel – I liked building a jigsaw with Jiade.  We were a great team.

Have a great weekend!

Well done P4 for all of your hard work this week.  We’ve enjoyed the frosty weather and lots of us have liked making ice mountains and snowmen during our breaks.

This week, we’ve been working really hard to plan our narratives.  We analysed examples of narratives and worked hard to identify the structure and features of a successful narrative.  We worked in small groups to think of possible story plots, based on some creative picture prompts, creating an orientation, a complication and a resolution.  We completed a plan and a storyboard for our own narratives and some of us have started writing our orientation.  We have to include lots of descriptive vocabulary and sequence our ideas.  Next week, we will be writing up our full narratives.

In maths, we learnt our 9 times tables and we also learnt how to multiply numbers by 10.  We have to move our digits one place to the left and add a ‘superhero zero’ place holder into the ones column.

Our highlights:

Daniel M, Szymon and Jonah: We enjoyed playing basketball in PE and improving our hand to eye coordination.

Ishani M: I enjoyed writing the blog because it is fun.

Ashley: I enjoyed building a snowman at break and lunch times.

Mariam: I loved doing the narrative because I wrote about a crayon going into a clock and then going back in time.

Well done to Ashley who is our hot chocolate winner this week.

Here is our termly plan, showing what we are learning about this term: Forward Plan overview T3 23

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Brown

Hello everyone, we hope you have all had a lovely week!

We have had yet another wonderful week back at school-with lots to report!

Throughout the week we have been planning and drafting our exciting narratives. We have been working really hard on ensuring we paint a detailed image in our reader’s mind and using figurative language to uplevel our writing. Super work as always P5A! We have also loved using technology to help us classify and define our spelling words this week; this has been fantastic for our independence and individual spelling development.

This week we have continued to explore decimals with a big focus on using mental strategies for addition and subtraction calculations. We particularly enjoyed using an iPad app to measure and add together each of our heights and building, adding and subtracting decimals using giant floor dominoes!  This was Inaayah’s highlight of the week! We also had great fun learning lots more about measurement with Mrs Callaghan on Tuesday.

On Monday we spent some time co-planning the upcoming term and week, based on our own individual interests and goals. Vijval mentioned that he would love to do some biology so we made this our mission and started a Biodiversity topic through our science and IDL time (this fits in really well with our John Muir learning!). We investigated and researched living things, the need for classifications and all of the different types of animals and plants on Earth. To present our learning to others, we all collaborated on a huge floormat poster which will cover our classroom wall once complete! We absolutely loved getting creative and taking ownership of our own learning. Leo said this was his favourite part of the week.

Emili and Emily’s say that their highlight of the week was definitely creating their own John Muir journals! We will use these to document all that we learn and enjoy over the next few months. As these journals are personal to us and our interests, they can be taken home and added to whenever we feel we would like to document something. We can include research, pictures, drawings, poems, stories or anything else that is relevant to our John Muir learning.

Our Hot Chocolate winner this week was Francesca. She was incredibly helpful and respectful in class and continues to show immense maturity and responsibility for her own learning. Congratulations Francesca!

Similar to last week, we had lots of names on the recognition board by Friday! We were focusing on our school value of Respect and we did a fabulous job! Well done everyone!

Thank you for reading and have a lovely weekend!P5A and Miss Ventisei 

Here is an overview of our upcoming learning for this term:

Hi P6B families,

Another great week full of fantastic learning.

Teacher highlights:

• Up-levelling our descriptive writing by exploring ‘Show Don’t Tell’ sentences. Instead of just telling the reader what the character is doing/how they are feeling, we looked at how we can show them by using description and setting the scene up.
• Exploring Fairy tales/traditional stories and discussing how we can have alternative perspectives.
• In RE, we discussed our skills and talents and linked them to future aspirations. We looked at a story which reminded us that God always has a plan for us.

Pupil highlights:

• Jayden – enjoyed writing his Narrative story and including an alternative perspective to make the story more interesting to the reader.
• Praise – enjoyed creating geodesic domes with cocktail sticks and jelly sweets. We have been discussing how triangles are used in different structures due to their strength.
• Gracie and Vivien – enjoyed reading the ‘Tale of Three Tress’ for RE and creating a beautiful art piece.

This weeks photos:

Here is our termly overview:

Have a great weekend and see you on Monday!

Miss MacGregor

Dear Parents and Carers

It has been a fun week in Primary 3b.

This week we have enjoyed…….

• Health and Wellbeing – learning about the people who help to look after us and how they do their jobs..
• Music – looking at the different notes/sound waves
• P. E – passing skills (bounce and chest passes)
• Free reading and drawing
• Spanish – learning the four seasons of the year (Otono, Verano, Primavera and Invierno)
• Our Class Novel – The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe ‘My favourite character is Lucy’ (Daniel), ‘I liked it when Lucy went through the wardrobe’ (Scott), ‘I like the Faun’ (Ella)
• Reading work in class
• Topic Work (West Lothian) – we located Scotland on a map and next week we will locate West Lothian on a map of Scotland

A big well done to our Hot Chocolate Award Winner – Rowan! Rowan has been ready to learn all week and has shown fantastic listening skills!

See you next week!

Mrs Broadley

This week, as part of our learning about Children’s Rights, we examined articles 7 and 8 which highlight our right to have a name, be registered and nationality so that our Government can plan ahead for our education. We recognised that we all have a unique identity which is shaped by our family, friends and where we live. Our names are special and are chosen by the people who love us most and we should use peoples names kindly. In our narrative writing we have been writing using Scots words. Most of us found this to be fun and unusual but some of us found it tricky.

Our Topic this year is focussed on exploring nature and learning more about the Internationally famous environmentalist John Muir. This week pupils were given a journal for them to draw, write, stick things into. They are already taking control of the design of their journal, inside and out. They will follow their own adventure through nature writing, sketching and taking part in practical tasks outdoors that will help them understand their own local environment.

In Science we were investigating the lifecycle of a flower and next week we will be dissecting flowers to see how the stem transports water around the plant and how the leafs soak up sunlight to create its own food source – photosynthesis.

This week in math we have been adding and subtracting using decimals to 2 digits we will be using digits to multiply and divide over the next few weeks. We have also been doing measuring activities. Using a metre tape and rulers to measure                                               our height, length of legs, arms etc. We had a lot of fun.

We have had a great week in P1B. Both Mrs Meikle and Mrs Russell have been happy with how well we have followed our school rules. We have all worked really hard.

This week we have enjoyed learning about Chinese New Year. We made red envelopes and dragon masks.

Enso – I liked making Chinese dragon masks.

We have been learning about odd and even numbers. We liked making odd and even monsters.

Khaleesi – I liked learning odd and even.

We have been learning the common words He/She and how to use them in a sentence. We also learned all about the sound and letter j. We tried to write a narrative story.

Faye – I liked writing a story.

We learned about the parts of our bodies.

On Wednesday we went a walk around our school to find out more about our local area.

Katie – I liked choosing learning in the area.

Forward Plan Overview Term 3 P7

Pupil Highlights:

Alex:  This week, we started to look at and explore discussion types of writing. The purpose of a discussion text is to present two different sides of an argument, for and against.

Liam: This week we finished our Learning for Sustainability power point,  ‘ Russia and Ukraine, what do all the words mean?’

Zak: This week we have finally finished making our fraction walls and we look forward to going to primary one or primary three to show them how to make this. Why are we going to ‘teach’ another class how to do something?  Rupert: ‘because the most effective way of learning a skill or an idea is to teach others how to do so.

Hannah: We learnt about the life of Anne Frank and we are going to make an academic poster.

Kieran: We created a power point to explain the meaning of the words related to the war in Ukraine.

Lucia: We created power points to show our understanding of a discussion text. We had to create a key to show the structure, then, we had to describe the purpose of the introduction specific to the text we chose. We had to explain the arguments for and against, in our own words. We then had to identify the author’s opinion in the conclusion, and , describe it in our own words.

Olly: Monique worked very hard over the holidays to produce the first part of the drama that P7B will perform. This is going to be the story ‘ The Wizard of Oz.’

Hot Chocolate Winner: I am delighted to announce a pupil has been smashing it all in areas of the

curriculum. Liam! we are so proud of you.

​

This week we have been learning about the ‘y’ sound. We have also been continuing our work on Narrative writing. We wrote a story all about a little boy looking at a scooter. We had to use our sounds and our word bank to help us write the words.

In maths, we have been learning about odd and even numbers. We read a story all about Osman Odd and Eshal Even who muddled up their shopping. We had to help them sort out the even and odd items.

In science, we left cups of water and balloons filled with water outside overnight. It was so cold that the water turned to ice. We then put them in the water tray to investigate.

Throughout the week, we have been learning about the celebrations for Chinese New Year. We learned about the dragons and lion dancer. We heard the story about Nian the monster and all the things they had to do to scare away the monster. We made a lucky envelope, couplets, a lantern and a dragon.

Some of our personal highlights this week are:

Summer Rose – I enjoyed doing the dragons.

Lillian – I enjoyed doing the lanterns.

Oliver – I enjoyed drawing.

Connor – I enjoyed playing.

Vedansh – I enjoyed playing outside.

Alexander – I enjoyed playing with my friends.

Miss Stebbing – I was very impressed with everyone trying to read words by segmenting and blending the sounds.

Congratulations to Oliver who is our hot chocolate winner this week.