Catholic Education Week

Please find below some information regarding Catholic Education Week from the “Scottish Catholic Education Service Website”.

This year’s Theme

Catholic Education Week 31st January to 6th February 2016 *

THEME: “Learning to be Merciful”

When faced with the gravity of sin, God responds with the fullness of mercy. Mercy will always be greater than any sin, and no one can place limits on the love of God who is ever ready to forgive.

Catholic Education Week

CEW logo4.jpg

The Catholic Church in Scotland encourages schools, parishes and other agencies to work closely together in order to celebrate the successes of Catholic education particularly during one week each year. The purpose of Catholic Education Week is to highlight the significance of education, not only for young people but for society as a whole. Students, parents, teachers and others are asked to reflect on their own roles in the education process – at home, in school, in the local parish and in other educational settings.

P5

This week we have used the focus of Mercy through our Catholic Education Week work. Through this we learned about the parable of “The Prodigal Son” which Pope Francis also call the parable of “The Merciful Father”. We used our literacy skills to create a comic strip of the story which highlights the main points. To do this we engaged with the story of the parable in a variety of ways one of which was a short animated version of the story. Please use the link below to see the story.

We then designed our own snap shots from the story which told the main points. From this our comic strips were created. Some of these will form part of a Catholic Education Week wall display.

Talking of wall displays I commented last week that I would post a picture of our completed art display of our Scottish Waterfall Landscapes, my apologies as I have forgotten to take the picture. I will post first thing on Monday the photograph. I would be grateful if any of our class reminds me on Monday morning (perhaps a dojo if you do!).

In writing this week we looked at the story of Robert The Bruce and The Spider. We were writing the story from the Spiders point of view. We used a story starter which demonstrated good use of openers and connectives and the challenge was to continue the story trying to maintain good openers and connectives. We have not fully finished these yet but they are reading really well so far. We will continue this in next weeks lesson. Well done to our Golden Ticket winners from last week for their “Guide To Be An Awesome King”, James for up levelling his work, Reece for good use of WOW vocabulary and Emily for amazing explanations. You have not managed to get along to Ms Purdie or Miss Smyth yet but we will make sure that this happens at the beginning of next week.

In PE we are making full use of the apparatus this week. Some of the gymnastic skills are coming along really well and you can see how the children are individually progressing, well done and thank you Mr McCurdy you are doing a great job keeping the children and Mrs Currie right.

Next week is our Technologies week. I am really looking forward to it especially our trip on Monday to “The Bridges”. Please remember to bring a packed lunch as we will need to have an early lunch before we head off. Please remember our trip does not have us return until 4.15pm. Over the course of the week we will be focusing on Bridges, and designing and building bridges…not hard hats will be required as they will all be SCALE models.

In preparation for our trip on Monday if you can find out some information about the bridges (new and old) post one fact on this blog and earn a dojo!

Have a lovely weekend.

Mrs Currie

P7 Weekly News

This week in Primary 7 we have been really busy celebrating Catholic Education Week. We began by learning about what it means to be merciful which was the overall theme of Catholic Education Week. We then spent some time on Wednesday as a whole P7 group learning about Mother Teresa and the amazing work which she did to show mercy to others throughout her life. We used this information to plan a biography which we will be writing next week. On Thursday we started work on our Catholic Education Week wall display and for this we worked in groups to research ‘The Holy Door’ in St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome. Dylan Polland wanted to tell you what we created: “We used technology to research the holy door and made a big poster. We all learned at least one fact during the research and when we had written a fact on a post-it note for the display we spent some time making and finishing off a stained glass window for art.”

Have a lovely weekend and remember to have a look at your child’s work in their jotters!

Primary 5/6 News

This week started with some disappointing news as our Primary 6 skiing and snowboarding trip was cancelled. After that we found out this week was going to be different as we were going to be doing a Growth Mindset topic! On Monday we discussed what we already knew about growth mindset and then in groups we discussed what we wanted to learn about growth mindset. Some of the suggestions were how does our brain work, how do we make decisions and how do we stay positive? These questions became our plan for the week .Before we learned anything more about Growth mindset we all did a quiz that told us if we had a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. It was very interesting to find that we only had two people in our whole class that had a growth mindset. We then learned who discovered the growth mind set theory and what growth mindset and fixed mindset really means. We then researched how our brain works and the different parts of our brain, which was very interesting! We worked in teams to create posters to show what we were learning over the week and these will be displayed in our upper area. On Thursday we thought about a time we had struggled and how we overcame our struggle by not giving up. We used these events to write a letter to future students telling them how important it is to have a growth mindset and overcome struggles. At the end of our letters we gave future students advice on how to develop a growth mindset. At the end of our topic we did an experiment to see if anyone in the class had developed a growth mindset over the week. We repeated the quiz we did at the start of the week and were amazed that everyone in the class had developed a growth mindset. We all found the topic helpful and it taught us to persevere even if we struggle as that’s when we learn the most. Have a lovely weekend.

Primary 5/6 & Miss Bell

P5’s FAB learning!

Our learning in Maths this week has seen us continuing to use function machines. We are now using larger numbers to input and then applying our mental maths skills to help work out the output number from the function machine. Sometimes we are given just the output number and have to work backwards to find the answer. This has led us to discuss inverse operations. Using this web link below you can click on the number to make it go into the machine, but if you click on it again it will go backwards through the machine, therefore showing the inverse operation.

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Flash.aspx?f=FSInverseMachine

We were then challenged to work out the function the machine was performing when given the input and output numbers. This was quite tricky and we will continue this next week.

In our fruity maths group carousel stations over the last two weeks one station has been focusing on learning how to use the maths strategy of partitioning. This has helped us learn how to multiply a 2 digit number by a one digit number. We have used the Captain FAB method to record this, can you remember what FAB stands for? If you do, reply to this blog (it will earn you a dojo point!). We recorded our learning this week in our class Talking Book, we each created a post it and put it in the book.

This week we linked our writing again to our Social Studies topic of Wallace and Bruce and this time we produced a guide on how to become a good King, or as Kalvin called his “How to be an Awesome King!”, (Mrs Purdie will be pleased as this is one of her favourite words!). I wonder if anyone will receive a Golden Ticket for this piece of writing, you will find out on Thursday (well done to Aliza for earning a ticket for her application form from last week). If parents who are reading this want to know more about Golden Tickets just ask your child, as it is something everyone wants to get!

We also used our topic of Wallace and Bruce to influence our art work. Mrs Thomson has worked with the children on producing some Scottish landscapes, they are amazing! They showcase well the art skills of sketching and shading. These pieces will form part of a display in our area, it is currently under construction so I will blog a photograph of the final result next week.

Please remember that your Social Studies take away menu homework is due on Friday 5th February. I can’t wait to see what you have produced!

Have a lovely weekend. 🙂

Mrs Currie

Primary 5/6 News

In writing this week we had all week to think about a significant event in our life that we wanted to write about. We learned how to write a personal recount, the four key things we needed to include in our writing were Chronological order, Past tense, 1^st/3^rd person and descriptive language. We peer assessed our work and today some of the class were able to share their work with the class and also the pictures they brought in linked with their writing work.

In our short read we learned how to recognise the purpose of a text, the four purposes we focused on were, to entertain, to describe a personal experience, to inform and to persuade. We enjoyed working with our table groups to decide what the purposes of 3 different texts were.

We are learning about symmetry on our maths morning on a Tuesday. This week we were practicing how to rotate symmetrical patterns, you can see some of our symmetry work in our talking book.

In our class we have a talking book, Joshua and Mark designed the front and back cover of it. We add our learning in social studies, science and maths in to it. Here are some pictures of our work in our talking book so far.

Today during Ninians Natter we were able to evaluate our ‘Agar.io’ goals, we wrote our next steps in our profiles and added new goals to our class goals display.

By: Sophia and Mark

P7 Weekly News

This week in P7 we have been celebrating Robert Burns Day. The children used their ICT skills and worked in groups to research and create a PowerPoint on Robert Burns and then presented this to the class. We also analysed the Burns’ poem ‘A Red, Red Rose’ and even managed to draw our own roses which look really impressive!

On Wednesdays we work as a whole P7 group for writing with Miss Ford and Mrs Docherty. This week it was really funny because we got to write Scottish poems using Scots vocabulary such as: rammy, totie, nicht, minging, hame, bonnie and sleekit. Do you know what all of these words mean?

We also held a debate this week about the current government proposal of the sugar tax. This was something we heard about on CBBC Newsround and with our topic being democracy we decided to share our thoughts and ideas by having a debate. Just over half of the class liked the idea of the sugar tax because of the benefits this would have on the health of our nation although some people thought that increasing the price wasn’t the best way to create a healthier population. We would be interested to hear some of your thoughts too and we will be looking out for more information on the sugar tax in the near future.

Have a great weekend!

Primary 5/6 News

This week in P5/6 during topic we worked on our drawing skills by using photographs of Mary Queen of Scots to create our own self -portraits of her.

In maths this week we have been learning more about fractions, how to recognise equivalent fractions and how to subtract fractions. We made fractions posters to put up in our classroom to remind us of our learning about equivalent fractions e.g. 2\6 =1\3. We used our cups again to play fraction subtraction and become confident with addition and subtraction with fractions. In writing we wrote a personal account about what qualities we have that make us good friends. This linked to what we have been learning about Mary Queen of Scots and the friends she had. To help us think of qualities a good friend has, we listened to you’ve got a friend in me and footprints in the sand, we took key words from the lyrics to help us. Today we got a special treat, we got to watch the primary 3 and 4 Burns show. It was fantastic!

By Kaden & Billie

P5…Kings of Scotland

This week we all applied for the job “King Of Scotland”! We used our learning from our Social Studies topic Wallace and Bruce and linked it with our Literacy work in which we developed the Life Skill of filling out an application form. On the application we had to state our reasons why we wanted to be King…

“…it would be an Honour” (by Aiden)

“…I would be free to do whatever I want and care for my people” (by Reece)

“…a brilliant opportunity for me to listen to other people’s ideas.” (by Emily)

We also had to say what qualities we have for this role…

“…I have courage” (by Mia St)

“…I am loyal” (by Alistair)

“…I have strong opinions about my country” (by Neave)

As you can see the children had some amazing ideas and Mrs Docherty and Mr McCann, who worked with the children on this lesson, both commented on how focused and hard working they all were. Mr McCann gave everyone a Dojo point!

In Maths we have continued to work on our CLIC sessions. Through these sessions we have been working on counting up in 25s, which we were all very good at, so we uplevelled this to counting in 2.5s. We all agreed it was “nothing new” and we really enjoyed the satisfaction of being able to do this. We are continuing to work on our links between division and multiplication. Keep practising those times tables to improve speed of recall. Here is the link to the TopMarks interactive games which can help with revision.

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/7-11-years/multiplication-and-division

On Thursday the children were introduced to function machines, if you would like to learn more and practise it try this link,

http://www.iboard.co.uk/iwb/Function-Machine-603

If you try either of these web links you can always post a blog reply to say how you got on.

Have a lovely weekend.

Mrs Currie

P7 Weekly News

This week in P7 we have been learning about Suffragettes as part of our Democracy topic. In writing we created a speech which we would have presented to the government at the time when the suffragettes were trying to get the vote for women and we also enjoyed learning about some of the tactics which they used by listening to a Horrible Histories song. The link is below for you to enjoy, it’s really funny!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/music/p00hps6c

In maths we have been working on scale drawings which many people use in their everyday lives and jobs. We have been measuring scales used on maps and scale drawings which architects use when designing buildings.

Finally, we are using Muckle Reading again this term and this week we started our first task map. It is really important that we learn to answer all different types of questions and that we always do our reading homework so that we can keep up with the storyline. Some of the questions which we use are taken from Blooms. There is a link to some example questions below.

http://iss.schoolwires.com/cms/lib4/NC01000579/Centricity/Domain/1366/BloomQuestions_000.pdf

Have a great weekend!