St John Ogilvie Primary School

Hello families of P5A!

We have had a lovely last week of term and looking forward to a well-deserved rest over Easter!

Numeracy: This week, we have been focused on multiplication of 2 and 3 digit numbers. Through this, we have been learning to use 2 different strategies- the grid method and the friendly-numbers method. We loved playing some really fun games, such as multiplication splat and multiplication mania to help us practice! We have also been focusing on our 8 and 9 times table and we are now all experts with the counting stick, some of us have even been leading our own counting stick sessions! We were also lucky to enough to learn lots about Fibonacci swirls with Mrs Callaghan and create some fantastic Fibonacci swirl artwork- well done P5A!

Literacy: Our class highlight of this week for literacy was writing our final narrative piece. We all started with the exact same opener and we loved that each of us interpreted this sentence differently. We worked really hard to include lots of figurative language and setting and atmosphere description in our writing- Miss Ventisei thinks we did a fantastic job!

IDL: Recently we have been learning about animal adaptations. We decided to design and create our very own adapted animal model and this week we have completed these. Many of us used various materials such as clay, recycled plastics, recycled cardboard boxes, paper straws, lollipop sticks and many more; we also painted and added extra details to our models.

Art: This week we really enjoyed using chalk and oil pastels, alongside stencils, to create our very own crucifix artwork. We decorated our classroom wall with our creations and have received lots of lovely compliments.

R.E: Since Holy Week and Easter is approaching, we have been learning about the Easter story. Alongside this, we have also been learning about all of the different Masses and traditions that occur over the Easter Triduum. We are very excited because Mrs Valente collected our ‘Wee Box’ this week and we are very proud of our extremely generous donations to the SCIAF appeal, thank you and very well done P5A!

Outdoor Learning: This week we planted potatoes, carrots, basil, parsley and chives in our school grounds! We loved working together to fill the planting bags with soil and seeds and we are looking forward to watching these grow- and hopefully have a little taste- throughout the summer term.

Our Hot Chocolate winner this week was Carina. Congratulations Carina!

Have a lovely holiday everyone!

Miss Ventisei and P5A

Hi Families of Primary 2A,

We have had another exciting week of learning, this week we have been preparing for Easter and doing lots of fun activities.

In RE we have been learning about the Easter Story, Palm Sunday and the Last Supper. The children enjoyed roleplaying colouring activities.

In literacy we have been reading the story book ‘Who’s Our New Teacher’ by Jeanne Willis. Primary 2A were predicting who they thought the new teacher in the story book would be, they had lots of imaginative ideas. We found out that the new teacher is a dragon! Children took turns of being the dragon, and the class asked them questions about the story.

In numeracy we have been learning about ordering, sequencing and missing numbers up to 20, 100 and 1000.  Primary 2A participated a variety of activities including, bingo and interactive board games.

The children especially enjoyed the Easter Egg Hunt in the woodlands. They worked together as a class to find all the hidden chocolate goodies and a special golden egg!

Here are some highlights from pupils in P2A:

“I loved singing at our assembly to our families” – Laura ,Vivien and Abeeha.

“The Easter egg hunt was amazing!” – Zion and Jiade.

“I loved doing the Easter scratch colouring” – Grace.

It has been a pleasure teaching such a wonderful class. I hope you have a lovely Easter break!

Miss Roscilli

This week we have been learning the Easter story and we acted out the events from the week. We enjoyed waving our palm branches.

During literacy, we played some Easter games to practise our reading and spelling. Our favourite activity was a bunny footprint hunt.

In maths, we have been practising our addition skills and we used the top spot game to help us.

This week we also went on a trip to Mill Farm. We had lots of fun meeting the different animals and playing in the park.

Some of our personal highlights this week are:

Darragh – I liked playing at Mill Farm.

Connor – I liked doing the bunny footprint hunt.

Eve – I liked seeing the ducks at Mill Farm.

Harald – I liked playing in the sand at Mill Farm.

Tiya – I liked making things with the buddies.

Congratulations to Tiya who is this week’s hot chocolate winner.

What a great last week of term we have had!

Teacher highlights:

• Finishing our information reports about an ecosystem. Very proud of the work that was produced by everyone!
• Baking! Related to our learning in maths about weight and measurement, we made banana and cinnamon muffins.

Pupil highlights:

• Gracie – completing my information report about rainforests and marking it against the targets.
• Jude – creating the ‘maths review’ posters. We discussed what we have learned in maths and numeracy this term and displayed the learning in a poster.
• Aeryn and Sophia – creating information powerpoints and posters about a chosen topic. Ours was about a favourite animal and TV show.

Well done to Summer who was the hot chocolate winner. This was for being very helpful around the class and to others and continually being ready, safe and respectful.

Have a lovely Easter holiday everyone, I can’t wait for our term 4 learning!

Miss MacGregor 🙂

What an amazing last week of term we have had.

This week we have been revising our sounds and our common words.

For writing we designed our own Easter egg and wrote sentences to describe it.  We remembered to use capital letters, finger spaces and full stops.  We worked very hard at trying to use a joining word and using describing words.

In maths we worked on addition and subtraction and quick recall within 10.

This week we learned about Holy Week and the Easter Story.  We remember Jesus died on the cross and rose again on Easter Sunday.  We made colourful crosses to remind us of Jesus on the cross.

Thank you to everyone who brought in money of our ‘Wee Box’ for SCIAF.

This week we were very excited to go on our first school trip at St John Ogilvie to Mill Farm.  We had a great day and enjoyed seeing all the animals and exploring the Farm.  Our teachers were very proud of how well we behaved.

We have been very busy making Easter crafts and cards for our P7 Buddies and Families.  We made Easter selfies on Seesaw and went on an Easter Scavenger Hunt in our classroom.  We also made Easter buns.

Our learning highlights:

Mrs Russell ‘I loved all the Easter crafts you made, they were amazing’

Connor ‘I liked gym’

Martyna ‘I like doing our work’

Bradley ‘I liked the soft play at Mill Farm’

Aaron and Luca  ‘I liked ‘Jelly Belly’ at Mill Farm’

Faye ‘I liked going on our School Trip’

Cameron ‘I liked going on the trampoline at Mill Farm’

JJ ‘I liked Mill Farm’

Victoria ‘I loved Mill Farm’

Owen ‘I liked going to Mill Farm’

Khaleesi ‘I liked playing in the park at Mill Farm.

Well done to Victoria our Hot Chocolate winner this week.

We would like to thank the boys and girls of all their hard work this term and we wish you all a wonderful holiday with your family.

Happy Easter Mrs Russell and Mrs Meikle

Pupil Highlights:

Tanya: We resumed our Drama rehearsals for our show this week, practising scene 1, 2, and 3.

Yesterday, we went outside and played with our buddies.

Connor: We resumed our writing unit discussion and explored possible issues we are going to research.  We are going to research the evidence for every points we make in an argument.

Sam: On Monday and Tuesday, we started some narrative writing. In our stories, we had to describe a door in detail,open the door, create a problem and then a resolution.

Hot Chocolate Winner: Long over due and well deserved. Congratulations to Lucia who continuously tries her best in all areas of the curriculum. She offers insightful and high quality contributions but her teacher would like her to be more confident in her ability because, she is a delight to teach.

Teacher Highlights:

I have been blown away by the excellent report Mrs Lea passed onto me when I returned to class on Wednesday. We have been working extremely hard at understanding why we create our own questions, understanding the benefits of creating HOT questions and what HOT questions actually are.

We have been creating HOT questions for our Anthony Browne stories, and, we have vocalised our criticism of the Blooms Pyramid and what it implies about the different types of questions that exist.

We had a light bulb moment when we had to create as many HOT questions when reading one of our class novel chapters from Adam 2.

Dear Parents,

Here is a quick update about this week!

First thing on Monday we did word boost spelling from into the forest book, after that we got our new reading books. In Maths we were continuing BODMAS number talks, after lunch lunch we were doing RE.

On Tuesday we started a new book called The Tunnel and Mrs Amatller came in and helped us, we did more BODMAS for math.

We did article 24 and 27 as article of the week and continued Falling Into Space art where we use our hands and feet to do art.

On Wednesday we did narrative writing, after break we did the sumdog competition, and we did art with Mrs. Lee. After lunch we we did science and we learned about types of rocks.  To end the day off we did drama scene one.

On Thursday Morning we did grammar about a piece of text called gallery in the cave, After brake we did PE we were playing basketball, after PE we did the sumdog competition, After lunch we did a quick Rocks wordsearch and then played outside for the rest of the day as a reward for coming 10th place in the West Lothian Sumdog competition.

On Friday Morning we did PE and then confirmation group. After brake we did Real Life Problem Solving called Cracking Codes. Then we got Reward Time!

Congratulations for John for winning Hot Chocolate. Congratulations to Raquyya for winning a school writing competition from book week.

Quotes

Tanvi – I enjoyed Mrs Amatller coming in and also like the Sumdog treat because we got to have fun.

Bettina -I loved ‘The Tunnel’ book that we read, it taught us lots of things.

Junaid – I liked the art with Mrs Lea because it was challenging.

Lily – I enjoyed reading The Tunnel.

Nellie –  I liked practising for the show.

Have a good weekend,

Pardhu and JJ Lead Learners and P7A

We have looked at a video about fractions.  I learned that the top number is the numerator and the bottom is called a denominator. (AS) We have also been doing lots of division. (MM) We learned that division is the opposite to multiplication. (SF)

We have done some nice art with Mrs Lea. It was a tree that had a sun behind it. The sun was coloured with red, orange, yellow and pink which are called fire colours or warm colours. (DM)

The class looked at the parts of a report. I learned the start is called the introduction and tells you what its about. (JR) It also tries to get the reader interested. (JJ)

In PE, we are practising throwing, catching and dribbling for basketball. (JJ)

Mrs de Luen is our NYCOS teacher and it was her last week with us. We made a card to say thank you. (SF/HM)

There has been 2 birthdays this week. Our hot chocolate at home winner is Khadija.(SR)

Have a lovely weekend everyone from Mrs Ross

Hello P2B Families!  Here are the learning highlights from the Blue Table:

Blair has really enjoyed our lessons about money this week.  We have been learning about the value of coins and combining different combinations of coins to make the same amount.  The children enjoyed setting up their own shops, deciding on the prices of the items, making price tags and taking turns being the shopkeeper and the customer.  We have just recently moved on to learning how to find change from 20p.

Theo’s highlight was our visit to Craigies Farm.  He loved looking at the bunnies the best!

Safaa said the best part of her week was writing a Spring poem with her friend and is looking forward to reading one of these fantastic poems out at our assembly on Friday.

Evana has loved our assembly practises.  The children are becoming more confident with their roles and the singing is so beautiful!  We hope you are able to attend and will be invited to join in with that actions of the final song, ‘Celebrate’, where we celebrate Jesus rising from the dead on Easter Sunday.  Afterwards we will invite you to decorate and roll a boiled egg with your child and enjoy some Easter craft together.

Amariah-Grace recounted that the best part of her week was learning how to do Story Massage.  Mrs Devlin recently received training on how to teach Story Massage.  The children started by asking permission if they could give a Story Massage.  Those who did not want to give/receive a massage had the option of either doing it on a teddy, in the air or on their arm.  Mrs Devlin introduced the various different movements on the back.  We had a movement called, ‘Fan, Walk, Smile, Sprinkle, Wave and Calm’.  Afterwards, as a class, we applied these different massage movements to a Spring Poem.  The children really enjoyed their first Story Massage.  Ask your child if they can show you the different movements.  It was all so very relaxing.

Mrs Devlin’s favourite part of the week was our school trip.  I was so proud of how well behaved the children were and despite the wind, everyone had a fantastic time and enjoyed learning about the different crops and animals.  The new baby lambs were a favourite!

Congratulations to Ciara, our Hot Chocolate Award winner this week.

Dear all,

We have had yet another exciting and fun-filled week!

Literacy: Over the course of the week we have worked really hard on writing a high-quality narrative piece and ensuring we achieve all of our writing targets. We also peer and self-assessed our work and set personal goals for our final narrative piece which we will complete next week. On Tuesday we completed some exciting reciprocal reading stations where we focused on our questioning, summarising, predicting and clarifying skills.

Numeracy and Maths: This week we primarily focused on converting between decimals, fractions and percentages and some problem solving surrounding this. Alongside our knowledge of this topic, we were also using our multiplication, division, addition and subtraction skills to solve these problems! A class highlight this week was definitely getting the water out to represent different decimals, percentages and fractions of a cup’s volume and convert between. We particularly enjoyed trying to fill 99.9% and 0.01% of our cups with water! We also continued our work on area and perimeter by drawing and measuring our own shapes.

IDL: Since our science topic is biodiversity, we have been learning about animal adaptations. We found that lots of different animals have both behavioural and physical adaptations to respond to their habitats. We decided to research an adapted animal of our choice and we are now working collaboratively to create some models of these. We were challenged to use a variety of materials that we could find around the classroom, with many of us selecting recycled fabrics, clay, paper straws, tin-foil, bordering, lollipop sticks and much more!

Outdoor learning: This week we were very excited to get outside because the weather was absolutely beautiful and we have noticed lots of signs of Spring finally arriving! We decided to head out to the woodland, with our partners and clipboards, and sketch out our very own nature scene. We discussed different types of sketching techniques and how we might use these to capture the beauty of our surroundings. Our sketches are beautiful and many children said that they loved how calm and peaceful the environment felt.

Art: On Tuesday, we were lucky enough to have Mrs Lea who did some fantastic artwork with us! We worked hard all week to finish our designs and we will enjoy decorating our classroom with these next week.

Health and Wellbeing: This week we have been exploring World Water Day; this links with UN Rights articles 24 and 27 and global goal 6 which aim to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. For P.E. we have been working on skipping and we have enjoyed doing this outside in the fresh air! On Friday we were thinking about the beat and rhythm that is involved in skipping and challenging ourselves to skip in time to Miss Ventisei’s clapping! This was a little tricky to begin with but soon we managed it no problem! Another highlight was skipping with the big and little ropes, together as a team and also on our own.

R.E.: Thursday was the beginning of Ramadan so we decided to learn a little about this special holy month. It was lovely to hear some of our classmates speak about the importance of Ramadan and the different things that they do to observe this. We explored the 5 Pillars Of Islam and learned that fasting is the 4th Pillar. We also looked at an example of a Kindness Calendar that some Muslims use throughout Ramadan.

On Friday we were introduced to the Stations of The Cross. We used a video to help guide us along and practice the responses but we will do this ourselves next week as it is the final week before Easter. We also explored lots of the station’s artwork and images in various beautiful churches and used these as inspiration to create our very own stations to display around the classroom- we’ll use these next week!

Sadly Miss Ventisei was unable to upload the pictures for this week but these will be posted in next week’s blog!

Our Hot Chocolate Winner was Emily! Well done and congratulations Emily!

Have a lovely week everyone,

P5A and Miss Ventisei