Category: Primary 6

It has been a week packed with learning for primary 6.  We all enjoyed our first teacher carousel afternoon.  All the primary 6 pupils came together and worked with Mrs Currie on a science topic.  We continued working on place value in numeracy and began to work on different addition and subtraction methods.
We also continued reading our class novel, it is getting very exciting! We worked as a class to discuss the positive and negative factors of being educated and home, or being educated at school.  After a lengthy class discussion we came to a conclusion as a class that we all favour being educated at school! The only negative we gave was the early mornings!
Our writing lessons this week have focused on descriptive writing.  All pupils worked very hard on descriptions of Skellig and some settings from the novel.  Some pieces of writing were particularly impressive, when reading them I felt like I was really there! I could imagine exactly what Skellig is like.

Here is what some pupils have to say about their learning this week:

Aliza: “I enjoyed the science lesson during the teacher carousel because we got to go outside and experiment with forces and air resistance. We used pieces of card to test this.”

Krzysztof: “I also enjoyed the science lessons, especially learning about ‘Bloodhound’ the fastest vehicle.  We then made our own paper models to test air resistance”

Declan: “It has been fun and exciting learning all about place value this week, we have gone beyond millions!”

Mia St.: “I enjoyed listening to more of our class novel, I particularly enjoyed when we found out that Skellig has wings”

Erwin: “We used our reading books and class novels to go on a vocabulary hunt to add to our VCOP wall. We found interesting words that we can add to our own descriptive writing”

Neave: “In our descriptive writing this week we used similes, metaphors and personification to describe Skellig and other characters from the novel.”

Nicholas: “Today is St. Ninain’s feast day.  We celebrated by having a special Mass and in class we have been learning about his life and how he was the first known Christian in Scotland.  We looked at Mrs Howley’s pictures from her trip to Whithorn to visit St Ninian’s Cave.”

Thank you to all the parents and pupils who came along to Ninian’s Natter last night.  Pupils who did not attend last night have taken their learning profiles home.  Their learning profiles should contain an ‘all about me’ page, ‘school community’ page and their 3 current personal learning goals.  Please discuss your learning profile at home and remember to add in any personal achievements or proud moments.

Enjoy your long weekend, I’ll see you all on Wednesday!

Miss McCormack

Just a wee note to say how touched I was with the events surrounding my final day in the school.  Thanks for the Gift Card, and in particular thanks for the Book of Memories. It brought a tear to my eye when sifting through it.

I wish you, the staff and the kids at the school every grace and blessing for the future.

In Christ,

Fr Paul.

It has been a busy week.  P7/6 welcome Miss Ross to our class.  She is a final year student teacher and will be in our class for the next few weeks delivering many aspects of the curriculum.

We continued with our focus of rugby and hockey during our PE lessons on Tuesday, the children are all really enjoying these sessions as well as getting the chance to work with children from the P7 class.  Our PE lessons on a Thursday with Mrs Currie have changed their focus to football.  We have looked to develop skills and then try to use these in a competitive game.  Check out one of the three skills we learned this week and practise it again at home before next week’s lesson so you can dribble the ball confidently.  Click on the link below and choose the video of Ball Mastery – Inside and outside of the same foot.  Good luck, remember to let me know if you try this at home by posting a reply to tell me how you got on.

http://www.scottishfa.co.uk/scottishfootball.cfm?page=2590

We had a music session on Friday from Voice Rocks.  The children were given a short taster session of this project which runs at Howden Park Centre.  I was amazed at some of the high notes the children could reach and I loved the final song “Love Runs Out”…some of the dancing was pretty good too (Jack!).  Flyers are available in school for those interested.

We completed our piece of writing this week about an elderly man’s memories and how he looked through a squint and saw back into his past memories.  We used a video stimulus to help us, click the link below and choose The Piano to see the story of the gentleman we wrote about,

http://www.literacyshed.com/the-inspiration-shed.html

Here are some snippets from the children’s writing,

“Carefully the old man pressed his eye to the small window and suddenly his life came to a halt.  Everything he knew and loved came to a stop.  Memories from everywhere came flying towards him.” (Freya)

“When he looked through he could see his wife dying.  It was just like a nightmare, he felt a cold breath on the side of his cheek.  He loved his wife…and he missed her so much.” (Broady)

“He could see a war.  He watched his friend get shot and he could not save him.  He was terrified…he felt helpless” (Rachel)

“The old man then felt happy as he reminded himself about the time he was given a box.  Inside the box was a hobby horse, it use to be his grandad’s…he felt ecstatic and speechless and quite emotional.” (Billie)

“He woke up next to his piano, he was playing his favourite song with his grandson and he realised that all the sad moments in his life ended in a happy ending.” (Mikolt)

I am sure you will agree they have used some very mature and emotional language.  Both Mrs Docherty and myself had a lump in our throats at times reading the amazing pieces of work.  Thank you everyone for your great efforts and keep up the super work.

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Currie

We have been practising our place value this week in numeracy and we are all getting really good! During numeracy we were working at different stations to help us with our understanding of place value. We were working together to research house prices, populations and the cost of footballers to compare and order numbers.  We also made numbers using cards and whiteboards and recorded our answers with our class iPads.

We have continued with our class novel this week and it is getting very interesting.  Lots of our literacy work this week has been based on ‘Skellig’ including writing a letter as the character of Michael to show our understanding of the novel so far.  We included lots of description in our letter, with some very impressive similes, so that the reader could imagine what the house, garage and man in the garage looked like.  We used our portraits from last week to help with our descriptive writing.  Have a look at two of our class drawings.

One of the characters in our novel is home schooled.  We have discussed this as class and have started gathering lists of positive and negative factors of being educated at home.  We will continue to work on this next week and start a debate.

We were very luck to attend a Voice Rocks workshop! We played some singing games and Jennifer helped us with our signing techniques! Miss McCormack was impressed with the singing talent in our class! The pupils have been given flyers for free Voice Rocks workshops in the area.

Finally we held a vote for our class topic and the winning topic was… Australia!! We are all looking forward to learning lots of new things about Australia in the coming weeks.

Primary 6 and Miss McCormack

Here are some of the highlights from our week.

Art – we investigated water colour mixing to create effective medieval landscape pictures.  We were very pleased with our results.

Maths – P7 were working with negative numbers and were making links to real life skills by reading a thermometer scale with negative values.  The Oil Rig dice game was a big hit!  You could even make your own simple version at home and teach your parents the rules…who can reach the platform first!

 P6 continued to work with large numbers and again linked this to real life skills by learning how to fill out a bank cheque, I wish I had been receiving some of the cheques which had values into hundreds of  pounds!

The whole class have learned how to play the game Shut The Box, which focuses on recalling basic number bonds as well as playing smart (turn over the large numbers early on!).  Again this is a game you can make at home by either making your own number cards 1 – 9 or using these values from a pack of cards and two dice.  If anyone makes the game and teaches their parents let me know how you got on by posting a blog.

Literacy – we have continued using our class novel to base our literacy work on and completed our first tasks map.  We started our first piece of writing on Thursday about memories, and we are looking through an elderly mans eyes into his life and past experiences and we are going to be completing an imagined response to this man’s memories when he looks through a squint.  Make sure you log on next week to read snippets of the children’s work.

PE – This was a huge success this week with nearly all children remembering to bring appropriate equipment for their outdoor learning.  Both the rugby and hockey groups were very pleased with their chosen sport.

Just as a reminder, reading books were given out this week.  I do ask that these are brought into school every day as we complete follow up work based on the novels which can span over a few days.

To finish off we would like to mention Fr Paul.  He came into our school this week and we surprised him with an assembly and a P7 afternoon tea.  He was genuinely delighted and touched and I’m sure his eyes looked a little watery at one point!  Thank you Fr Paul.

Have a great weekend

Mrs Currie

P6 are Epic Everyday!

This week we have been learning place value up to millions!  We were writing really big numbers in words and digits.  We used our whiteboards to help us write our numbers by partitioning them into millions, hundreds of thousand, tens of thousands, thousands, hundreds, tens and units. We also listened to a song to try and help us remember.

During our smart starts we have been working on our times tables and addition.  We were completing activities against the clock and we are all getting faster! We discussed the strategies we use when completing calculations to help each other and give each other new ideas. We will continue to work on this in the coming weeks, if you would like to practise the speed challenge at home here is the link:

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

We have been reading more of our class novel Skellig which is getting very interesting.  We all wrote a diary entry as Michael, showing our understanding of his feelings and then worked on some role play activities showing off our acting skills! In art we all used chalk and charcoal to create feathers to make wings for our display!  We all drew a portrait of how we imagine Skellig to look based on evidence from the book.

This week we said good bye to Father Paul, we had a special surprise assembly and we all made poems to add to his book.  We will all miss Father Paul and wish him good luck in his future.

Miss McCormack and P6

PLACE VALUE HOMEWORK

Try out this interactive resource.

Either blog back a reply or write an evaluation statement in your jotter.

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/place-value/place-value-charts

Good luck.

Mrs Currie

Welcome back everyone.  It has been such a quick week but we have achieved a lot.  Here is our new class.

Our Primary Sixes look very smart in their green and yellow school uniform and our senior Primary Sevens look very grown up in their black and yellow uniform.

Our focus in class for the next three weeks will be based on a novel called The Squint by Lesley Howarth.  We have read the first four chapters so far and found out that this story takes place in the modern era as well as the medieval period of history.  The main character Ben looks though a squint (spyhole) whilst visiting a historical house and finds himself part of one of his ancient ancestors lives story!  As a link from this novel we have been learning about medieval coats of arms. In pairs the children were given the opportunity to use a website to create their own.  Here is the link we used,

http://www.makeyourcoatofarms.com/app.asp

Our class will have PE on a Tuesday and Thursday in school.  On Tuesday’s Mr McCurdy has requested that the children bring in outdoor PE kit suitable for all weathers (within reason!).  The children were given a choice between rugby or hockey as their chosen PE lesson on a Tuesday.  On Thursday PE will be in the school gym hall.

For maths we have focused on place value, numbers up to millions.  We have practised reading them, writing them in digits and words.  For extra practise you can try this game.

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/place-value/place-value-charts

Have a lovely weekend and I am really looking forward to next week and getting on with all the great activities and events that are planned.

Well done everyone,

Mrs Currie