Mrs Dick

P5 working hard

The IDL homework menu is finally here! It will be issued on Monday. Thank you to everyone for your patience whilst we waited for the photocopier to come back from the Christmas holiday. Well done to all the children who logged on and looked at the list of activities which I had blogged to allow you to get started. Please remember the expectation is that four pieces of work (one from each section on the menu) has to be completed by Friday 5th February. It is easier if it is all handed in together on this date at which point the children will share their work with each other.

This week in Maths we have looked at sequencing numbers. Through this topic we have explored our times tables patterns and used Maths terms like steps, rules and patterns to describe the sequence. We have had a lot of practice on finding the next set of numbers in a sequence as it grows either up or down. We have learned that not all patterns in a sequence follow the rule of equal jumps. Look at this sequence,

20 , 25 , 35 , 50 , 70, _ , _ , _

Can you find the pattern? What are the next three numbers? If you get a chance respond to this blog with your answer. This area of Maths will continue next week and extend into looking at Function Machines.

Two new people have joined us in our classroom this week their names are WALLACE AND BRUCE. So far the children have really enjoyed learning about these famous Scottish figures and are beginning to create a timeline of significant events in Scottish history. Some super fact files were created and these have formed part of the display we have started in class.

Another two wall displays we have renewed is our “Together We Learn” display which highlights the planned learning for the coming weeks and our “Goals” display where the children have carried forward goals from last term and/or written new goals for this term. We are using a rainbow theme this term for recording a goal, which will hopefully look really colourful as we achieve our goals.

In our PE gymnastic lessons we have been improving our core strength and agility whilst also learning tolerance and cooperation in team work. There are some really well thought out routines being put together and i can’t wait to see the final outcome.

A really fabulous week P5! Well done and have a lovely weekend.

Mrs Currie

Primary 5/6

This week, in maths we learned how to add fractions together using cups, there was half cups, quarter cups and whole cups, this really helped us understand how to add fractions because we had a picture in our head. On Tuesday we revised lines of symmetry and we will continue this next Tuesday. During our short read this week, we worked in groups to find alternative words with the same meaning, practising our thesaurus skills. We also had to check definitions using a dictionary. During topic, we learned what primary and secondary sources are. By using secondary sources we learned new information about Mary Queen of Scots and created posters to display our learning in our class talking book. We used our knowledge of Mary Queen of Scots to write a diary entry about a key event in her life. We now know the various features of a dairy entry and we were able to use time connectives to write our own diary entries.

By Joshua and Isabella

P7 Weekly News

This week in P7 we created our new class charter. We considered the main themes in our school values and the UN rights of the child and decided that we would make our overall theme about respect as this makes it easy to understand rather than having lots of statements to learn and abide by. We have changed our wall display to ’emojis’ so that each child in the class is represented by one of their favourite emojis which they use on their phones/tablets etc. Our charter is also linked to Class Dojo so that we are very clear on when we are abiding by our class charter and when we are not (which is very rare in P7!)

We also started our new topic this week which is Democracy. We are very excited about this as for the first time in topic work we are working as a whole P7 group with the P7 children from P6/7 joining us. So far we have talked about the features of a democratic government and written a manifesto as if we were a leader running for a political party. We really enjoyed writing these as we were able to debate things like education, health and the environment which was really interesting.

Have a great weekend!

P5 Take Away Homework

DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY – TAKEAWAY HOMEWORK MENU

Write a newspaper article relevant to the project we are studying.

Include specific, accurate information, with good English. You could include images and/or quotes. Have a look at a newspaper for some inspiration!

Create a power point presentation about our project.Be creative, use any computer programme, and include factual information. You could include links to other websites too.

Imagine you are going to teach part of the project we are studying. Come up with a suitable starter activity for a lesson on this project.Create a recap task, game or warm up for the class that could start a lesson off.

Create a leaflet which summarises the project we are studying.Use key terms and images to make it informative and eye catching.

Create a factsheet summarising the project so far, but also add additional research and facts.Use correct terminology and use the internet/books to include extra facts (no copy and paste!)

Create a comic strip to retell an event from our project.Use lots of pictures and speech bubbles as well as other text.

Create a poster about one of the historical people we have been learning about.Use any key pieces of information learnt, make it informative and eye catching!

Write your top ten facts that youhave learned.

You can use pictures as part of your work.

Write a quiz about our project.Write the questions and answers (on a separate sheet) to test a peer…

Create a mind map about our topic, including any information we have learned so far and any information you would like to learn.

Identify key terms we have learnt in this project and write a dictionary definition for them Find out the definitions of the key words and write a glossary to help you learn spellings and keywords.

Write three tweets to summarise the project.Tweets must be no more than 140 characters and they must be informative. Use # for keywords.

feliz año nuevo de P7

This week in P7 we have had a great start to the New Year. We made New Year’s resolutions and learned how to say happy New Year in Spanish – Feliz año nuevo!

We started back on 6^th of January which was Epiphany so the children had a go at ‘hot seating a King’ where they used drama skills along with their knowledge of the feast of Epiphany to ask and answer questions about the kings’ experience.

As it was also Vision and Values week we enjoyed creating pictures which showed what the school values looked like for us. We also linked our school values to the rights of the child and found that even in the first 5 rights we could make 3 direct links to our values.

This week we also started our new PE block – gymnastics. The children enjoyed working in groups to create sequences to music which showed creativity and confidence in performance.

Welcome Back P5!

Happy New Year to you all! It was great to see everyone back this week all relaxed and ready for another busy term.

And we wasted no time…

This week in Maths we have started a new focus on sequences which is part of developing our algebraic thinking skills. Our homework in Maths for the next few weeks will be focusing on written calculations using the four maths processes.

Our new topic for the next five weeks will be learning about Wallace and Bruce and The Wars Of Independence. This week we learned who William Wallace was and created fact files for our class wall display. Thank you to Ciara for providing some very colourful printed photographs which we will use in our display.

At the beginning of the term we always revise our Class Charter and we discuss our school values and visions. The children are all becoming very knowledgeable on these and can see them in action in our class and school. We have began work on our new class display for this and our theme is jigsaw pieces.

Talking of themes, we have also changed the theme of our goals wall display. This term we are using a rainbow to help us record our aims, these will look really colourful as the term progresses and we begin to achieve our goals.

Your child will have a letter home describing how to access the Letterjoin Handwriting programme that we use in school. This is a new feature so would appreciate any feedback if you log in from home to use it. This will hopefully help anyone who needs extra practise to improve in this area of their work but at the moment there is no set work required.

Have a lovely weekend.

Primary 5/6 News

This week in Primary 5/6 it has been a short week.We started our history topic, which is focused on ‘Mary Queen of Scots’. We have already learned that when Mary was 6 days old when her father died and she became queen. Miss Bell has been reading ‘Mary Queen of Scots and all that’ to us.

In math we have been learning about fractions, numerator and the denominator. We have been practicing our skills by playing a game called “Complete me”.

In P.E we are working on flight in gymnastic we had to plan and preform a show which had to have at least 3 flights in it.

It has been Vision and Values week in St Ninians. The value our class choose to focus on was ‘Being the Best We Can be”. We discussed that we all need to recognise our own achievements and be proud of ourselves. By reflecting on last year and thinking about how we can be the best we can be, our class wrote New Year’s resolutions.

By: Sophia and Jessica

Merry Christmas P5

It has been a lovely last week of term, so many festive things going on. Many of our class members are in the school choir and they have performed in a variety of settings this week. Great feedback, so well done to all invovled. Our brass players have also performed this week at our cake and carols, it was magical as always!

Christmas jumper day and Christmas dinner was excellent! Everyone was full to the brim!

Our Christmas party was a huge success…the Scottish Dancing was super!

The Christmas sing-a-long was also a hit. The video made of us practising our song in class is too large to attach at the moment, I am hoping that Santa’s elves will help me over the holidays to work out how to make my file smaller.

Have a lovely relaxing and peaceful holiday.

Primary 5/6 News

This week in primary 5/6 it has been a lovely Christmas week.

Today everyone in the school sang a Christmas song at the school sing along and our class sang half the world away, from the John Lewis Christmas advert.

We had the pantomime, on Thursday, it was ‘Jack and the bean stock’ it was really good and funny. In Science we watched a live video of Tim Peake and other astronauts launching into Space we also created fact files with all the information we have learned about the Solar System.

Here are some facts we found interesting:

Sun- The Sun is a star

Mercury- It’s the closest to the sun but not the hottest planet.

Venus- Venus is the brightest planet in the Solar System and can be seen even in daylight if you know where to look.

Earth- the Earth is unlike every other planet in the Solar System in a number of different ways.

Mars- Mars and Earth are similar in so many ways that it’s almost hard to believe we haven’t found anything alive there.

Jupiter- Jupiter is the giant of the Solar System, with a mass more than 300 times the mass of the Earth and is called after the ancient Roman sky-god, Jupiter, known to the Greeks as Zeus.

Saturn- Saturn is the sixth planet in the Solar system and, when seen through a telescope, by far the most beautiful.

Uranus- The seventh planet from the Sun, it was not known in ancient times, unlike the planets from Mercury to Saturn.

Neptune- The discovery of the planet Neptune was one of the most exciting discoveries in astronomy.

Yesterday the Primary 5 and 6 had their Christmas party, we did some Scottish dances and some disco dancing too. We all had a lot of fun!

Some people in ‘Mini Vinnie’s’ went to a local care home, sang some Christmas and gave away homemade Christmas decorations.

In French we have been working on writing Christmas postcards to another school and we all enjoyed receiving replies from our French pen pals.

We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

By Jessica and Sophia

Mini Vinnies Christmas Visit

On Thursday some of our St. Ninian’s Mini Vinnies group visited the Livingston Care Home to give the residents some handmade decorations and just to spend some time simply talking to them. It was lovely to see the children interacting with the residents and it was very evident that they really appreciated our time and small gifts. I am so proud of our Mini Vinnies for their confidence, frendliness and positive attitudes and both myself and the children would be very grateful if you could please spare a few thoughts and prayers for the ladies and gentlemen which we met, especially over the Christmas period.

Have a very merry Christmas and a happy new year from Miss Ford and all of the Mini Vinnies.