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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

Primary 3/4 News

This week has been a fabulous week.

This week we have started our new topic ‘A Wee Book of Fairy Tales in Scots.’

“The first story we read was the Three Wee Pigs.” Said Aidan

“This story was not the same because the words were different.” said Ailie

“It was in Scottish slang.” said Rachel.

“The book is really fun to read.” Said Evie

In drama we were leaning the skill of hotseating. Ailie was the Big Bad Wolf and the rest of the class were the news reporters. We had some interesting questions to ask the wolf about his terrible crime.

Then for art we went a hunt around our garden to find different things objects, shapes and textures to inspire our Big Bad Wolf picture. Take a look at some of our pictures.

Have a lovely weekend!

Primary 3/4 and Mrs Kerr

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

Primary 4 Technology Homework

Primary 4,

This week you will be able to do your homework using technology! Once you have finished your homework please comment on this post about what you have learned, something you have enjoyed doing and why?

Task 1 – Maths (Division)

http://www.oswego.org/ocsd-web/games/Mathmagician/mathsdiv.html

Task 2 – Literacy (Verbs)

http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/grammar/verbs.htm

Task 3 – IDL

The Big Bad Wolf is back!! Not only has he eaten the three wee pigs but he is on his way through the woods to get Wee Reid Riding Hood!!!! We need your help. Can you design something that can trap and capture the Big Bad Wolf?

You can show your design on a poster/diagram or you can use technology (powerpoint) to explain your design.

I hope you have a fun week of technology homework!

Mrs W

Pure brilliant week in Primary 4!

This week has been an exciting week full of hard work and determination.

We began the week with our reflective reading. We used our taskmaps and explored questions which allowed us to really look at the book in depth. We were thinking about some of the words the author used to describe characters and compared the themes and characters in our book to other books we have previously read. To help build our confidence with reading we paired up with the P3/4 and P5/6 class to read to different children. We thought it was great and were able to give formative feedback to each other about our reading.

In Maths this week we continued with our division with remainders. It is quite tricky so we are working very hard with this. We watched videos on class dojo to help with our growth mindset as we want to make sure we keep trying and working at tricky problems and never give up. The videos were great and we look forward to Emoji and Katies adventures in Chapter 4.

We began our new topic this week ‘A Wee Book O Fairytales’! We loved hearing aw aboot wee Slaverie Sam, Johnny the Dowper and Wee Alan! And of course the BIG BAD WOLF!! We even got to take on the roles of some of the characters during our ‘hotseating’ in Drama. We were great at using Scots language to really bring the characters alive!!

We are looking and different functional writing. This week we created instruction for playing SNAP! We had great fun playing Snap and thinking about the steps to play it. At first we said “Snap is easy!!” but when we started writing the steps it was quite challenging but we did a great job with it.

We are continuing to prepare for the Holy Spirit during our Sacramental preperation. This week we learned all about the Fruits of the Holy Spirit. Ask your child to tell you the 9 fruits and what this means for them?

As this was Catholic Education week we had a focus on ‘The Year of Mercy’. We talked all about what mercy means and how we can show someone mercy. This is something we will reflect on throughout the year.

Thank you for reading our weekly blog. Please share a comment or ask us some questions about our learning!

Have a great weekend

Mrs W and Primary 4

Skills Academy for Parents

Thursday 25th February

6.30-8.00pm

Education is forever changing and it is important that you know the approaches we are currently using in school. Come along and see ‘first hand’ how lessons are delivered. Please remember to return your slip by Friday 5th February to choose the workshops you would like to attend.

This space can also be used for questions, suggestions or your thoughts on our curriculum at St Ninian’s.

P3 show stoppers!

Along with P3/4 and P4, P3 were real show stoppers this week with their Great Scots performances. The great Scots were actually all the children! After a lot of hard work performing and rehearsing together, the show proved to be a great success. Thanks to everyone who helped with all the preparations.

A few other highlights of the week:

PE : practising turns and balances on the apparatus and using a camera with a delayed timer so that we could all see our own moves!

Spelling: learning magic e rule, ai and oa sounding words, using letter cubes to wordbuild, playing dice games to help spelling

Reading: reflective reading about the life of Robert Burns and enjoying extracting facts about his life from a passage

Writing: we wrote about our school show, what we liked, how we felt and what other people said about it,

Art: designing our own tartans, drawing Robert Burns step by step and using an online tutorial on how to draw a rose

Outdoor Learning: Mr Hunter took us outside again and we were intrigued to learn what a fank is! If you don’t know, ask the children!

National Youth Choir of Scotland: this session was fun and we even used a huge parachute while singing at the same time!

Maths: sequencing to 1000 and partitioning 3 and 4 digit numbers

Hope you enjoy the photos,

Adios for this week,

Mrs Howley and P3

Basketball Success

Both St Ninian’s teams put in great performances today in the monthly West Lothian Basketball Tournament. The basketball on display here is excellent quality with a lot of great basketball teams around the area. What makes this league the success it is though is the atmosphere that the games are played in. It’s hugely competitive but equally respectful with sportsmanship coming as an unprompted feature of each of these tournaments. I’m pleased to say that our children from St Ninian’s have a massive contribution to this!

St Ninian’s A	16	14	Wolves
St Ninian’s A	12	6	Livi Village A
St Ninian’s A	9	10	Williamston
St Ninian’s A	14	0	Livi Village B
St Ninian’s A	24	2	Parkhead

St Ninian’s B	14	6	Deans
St Ninian’s B	2	10	Linlithgow
St Ninian’s B	7	4	Livi Village B
St Ninian’s B	6	7	Dedridge
St Ninian’s B	4	7	Parkhead

Sailing our way through the week in P2B!

Relating back to our previous learning we used our notes from our topic lesson to make leaflets in writing this week.
We had taken notes about the transport and weather of The Island. To begin our writing lesson, we watched Katie Morag give us a tour of The Isle of Struay. We had to listen really carefully so that we could think about what information we would like to include in our leaflets. Our leaflets were encouraging people to visit the Island. Miss Boyes had lots of different examples of leaflets and we had looked at them before we began our lesson.

After reading our leaflets we are sure people will change their minds and book a holiday to one of Scotland’s fabulous Islands rather than a break in the glorious sunshine across the pond!

Our new topic in maths is multiplication.
To begin this topic we have been learning about groups of objects.
We have been thinking about how many objects are in each group and how many groups there are.

There are 3 flowers in each vase and there are two vases. How many threes are 6?
“Two threes are 6.”

There are 2 coins in each treasure chest and there are 5 chests. How many twos make 10?
“That means that 5 twos are 10”. – Maya.

There are beautiful illustrations in the Katie Morag books. We had looked through some of the illustrations this week. Miss Boyes showed us a clip of an artist sketching. We noticed that the artist was sketching some parts darker and some bits lighter. The artist was sketching different tones. We took time during the lesson to walk around the room and view the progress of our peers artwork. We gave feedback:
“Emma has used a lot of detail in her sketch.”- Aaron
“Lennon has detail because he has drawn smoke coming from the chimneys and he has given the windows curtains.”- Kate

Working in groups we referred back to our individual boat designs to gather all of our ideas to make a mind map of all of the resources we would need to make our boats. We all took on different roles in our groups to work effectively as a team. A key role in the group was to create a sail for the boat so that It represented our group. We thought of some fantastic ideas: faces of each person in the group; our names; Scottish flag and the St. Ninians logo. Our boats are still are work in progress!