St John Ogilvie Primary School

Dear Readers,

We hope you are all very well.

We would like to start by thanking you all for your efforts to come to school walking/riding scooters or cycling. We have all been trying to help our class and school to win the competition and still have a week to go so are very thankful for all your efforts so far and during the coming week as well.🚶‍♀️🚶‍♂️🚴‍♀️

This week our highlights were:

• Homophones – these words are really interesting because they sound the exact same but are spelt differently and have different meanings! We had to make sentences with them to show that we know to use each of them correctly!
• Our spelling assessment – Mrs Valente tricked us by dictating the words within sentences in a different order! Fortunately, we did very well with our scores even with all those tricks from Mrs Valente!😄👍👍👍
• The 2, 3 and 6 timestables and the strategies we have learned to always work them out, including   doubling  them or counting in 2s, 3s and 6s.
• Data handling – we have learned to read information from Pictograms always paying special attention to the key. We have also learned to present information in a pictogram, even when the key represents 2 and we have to use half of the pictures. We have also reviewed tally marks and have used them to collect information that was then presented both in pictograms and bar charts, which was the other kind of graph we have learned about.📊😀
• Science/Topic – we have learned many interesting things about endangered animals, including red squirrels, sea turtles, rhinos and our very favourite one, the giraffe!🦒🦒🦒🦒We have learned so much about the giraffe! And we are going to put all of that information that we have collected into an Information Report that we will write next week!
• We have learned to take notes of the main facts we need to remember when we are writing and have them ready to write our giraffes Information Report.
• RE – we have continued the Easter story and stopped on Palm Sunday so will finish it off by next week, just before we break for the holidays!😎🐣

Here are the last three Hot Chocolate winners, up to last week, since the winner of this week is still to be decided on Monday:

Many congratulations to Olivier, Aiden S and Izaan! Super well done! They were the Hot Chocolate winners of the last three weeks!😃😃😃👏👏👏🏆🏆🏆🥇🥇🥇

We say goodbye for now wishing you all a great weekend with your loved ones!

P3A and Mrs Valente🥰😍

Hello P6B families,

We have been busy this week with our learning, world water day (and taking the lead in our school’s Rights display) and of course our class trip to Dynamic Earth.

Our trip on Thursday to Dynamic Earth was fantastic and everybody had so much fun (including myself!). We explored everything from the creation of the world and all life and materials on earth. I will attach some photos at the end of this blog, but I will put them all on our Teams page over the next few days.
We also enjoyed a walk down to the Scottish Parliament and a run about in Holyrood Park. Understandably, Dynamic Earth was a big highlight for most of us, but we do have some other highlights of the week from other parts of learning this week:

– Niamh and Amelia found it very interesting exploring the importance of water and understanding the accessibility to clean and safe water across the world. This was related to our UN Rights articles 24 and 27 and linked to global goal 6. On Friday morning, we also demonstrated this accessibility through a little experiment including plastic cups, water and converting fractions into percentages to show and compare the availability of water in different continents (photos below).

– Vivien enjoyed learning about the Blooms Taxonomy Pyramid which helps us to ask and create higher order thinking questions to deepen our understanding of texts and supports reading comprehension.

– Siddharth enjoyed creating the personality artwork with Mrs Lea. This was about creating different patterns and incorporating them into some parts of our own personality.

Hot chocolate winner this week was Aditya. Aditya has been continually demonstrating active listening in class and is always ready to learn. Well done!

Have a lovely weekend everyone and see you again on Monday!

Miss MacGregor

This week we have been learning all about where our food comes from. We learned about how eggs are sorted and sent to the supermarkets. It was funny to see all the different shapes of eggs. We also learned about the lifecycle of a hen and wrote some sentences about chicks. We have been trying to use the word ‘and’ in our sentences.

In maths, we have been revising our strategies for subtraction by playing lots of games. Our favourite was Ghost Blasters. We also played Eggs to Order to help us put the numbers in order and we had to check carefully as there were some numbers missing.

We now have a Garden Centre Role Play area in the classroom and we have been working together to grow different flowers. Some people also chose to make signs and prices for the different items.

For phonics we looked at words with the ‘ou’ and ‘igh’ sounds. We can use vowel house to help us if we are not sure what sound we need. We played a spinner game and had to write the words for the pictures it landed on.

We are counting down the days until our trip to Mill Farm and we are very excited!

Some of our personal highlights this week are:

Vasilisa – I enjoyed playing in the Garden Centre.

Darragh – I enjoyed playing with the blocks.

Joshua – I enjoyed playing with the letter beads.

Connor – I enjoyed doing the take away sums.

Filip – I enjoyed drawing on the whiteboards.

Miss Stebbing – I was very impressed with everyone writing the words with ‘igh’. They tried very hard to make sure they were using the correct sounds.

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

We’ve had a very productive week!

We have learned more about fractions this week.  We can now identify, compare and order fractions up to tenths and we have started learning about equivalent fractions, which are equal, but have different numbers of parts. We can also find fraction on a number line.

We have written an information report about recycling to share with you at home.  We have used our core and genre targets to help us with our reports so we could make our information reports even better.  We were aiming to inform you what recycling is, how to do it and why it is important.

Highlights:

Paige: I liked drawing the tree in art with Mrs Lea.

Szymon: I enjoyed doing fractions with Mrs Brown.

Matteo: I was astonished that we could make our own information report about recycling because information reports are one of my favourite types of writing.

Layla: I liked doing music with Mrs de Luen but I didn’t like that it was her last day.

Ashley: I enjoyed writing because I could write about recycling.

Well done to Feranmi, our hot chocolate winner.

Thanks,

Mrs Brown

P2 had a super (if windswept) day at the farm!  We saw lots of different farm animals and crops. I think everyone will sleep well tonight as we did a lot of walking!  We also sang one of our assembly songs, ‘The Seed Song’ to the sheep who joined in!  I hope you enjoy the photos below:

Hello P6B families,

Our highlights:

– In Maths we started investigating volume and understanding how to accurately use the formula to calculate the volume of 3D shapes.

– We have been learning about the place that an organism has in each ecosystem through exploring food chains and consumers and producers.

– We enjoyed our class visit to the library on Wednesday afternoon. Gracie, Amelia and Urwa loved finding topic related books and were very happy when we got to bring back some books to school.

– Everyone loved going to the nursery on Thursday afternoon to see and play with the younger children.

Well done to Akash who was this weeks hot chocolate winner – Akash has been incredibly helpful in his ‘reader leader’ role and ensured that all tasks for Book Week went smoothly across the school. Excellent leadership!

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss MacGregor

Dear families,

Another action-packed week has passed us by!

Our writing focus for this month is narrative. We explored some examples of narratives and thought about various techniques we would like to take into our own writing. We also highlighted some parts that we would improve and uplevel in our writing going forward. We particularly enjoyed creating our own character and detailing their appearance and personality. We are also very close to finishing our class novel, Wonder, and this week we enjoyed participating in some reciprocal reading stations to consolidate our understanding and analysis.

We have also been super busy throughout maths this week! We started our week with a scavenger hunt around the classroom and area to practice and consolidate our understanding of fractions of quantities. We are getting really confident with this concept which is fantastic. We also made some wonderful working posters to showcase our knowledge – some of us even managed to complete over 50 questions in less than 10 minutes! On Thursday we recapped and revised our understanding of equivalent fractions, it was lovely to see so many light-bulb moments and lots of learning being taken even further! We made some beautiful equivalent fraction flowers to display on our working wall, well done P5A! Alongside all of our learning around fractions, we also entered into the West Lothian Schools Sumdog competition! All pupils worked really hard both in and out of school time to improve our score and we did really well as a class.

Our Health and Wellbeing focus this week was developing our confidence. We thought about times when we might have lost our confidence and what we did to overcome this. We also reflected on someone that we admire and realised that no matter how successful they are, there have always been times when they have made mistakes and continued to carry on. As a class we have also enjoyed developing our skills in skipping throughout P.E. lessons. It has been lovely to do P.E. outside in the fresh air too!

Throughout IDL this week we have had lots of fun! On Monday we were learning all about food chains and made our very own whole-class food chain with string. We all took turns to grab a piece of string and then pass the ball to the next ‘animal’ in the food chain. As we finished, we noticed that all of us were connected in some way. This showed us that all animals and plants in the food chain are also connected. We particularly enjoyed each picking a different animal to be either a producer, predator or prey. On Thursday it was sadly too wet to go outside for outdoor learning but that didn’t stop us! Instead, we went on our very own bug hunt in the classroom, using keys to classify and find out interesting information about some bugs and insects. This was a particular class highlight.

Since it is Lent, we have been looking at different charities in R.E. Many of us have very kindly contributed towards our ‘Wee Box’ which is an appeal run by a charity called SCIAF. This week we did some research about this special charity and considered different ways of being charitable during Lent.

Our Hot Chocolate winner this week was Madeleine. She always tries her very best and shows kindness to everyone in the class. Congratulations!

Have a lovely week everyone and see you all on Monday!