This has been a very exciting week in Primary 1D! We have completed our Pirate adventure. Pirate Pete was in touch to tell us he had been caught in a storm and it wrecked it ship but worse than that…someone stole his treasure. We agreed as a class that this was a challenge we wanted to help with. We were very lucky to have our school trip to ‘The Tall Ship’ in Glasgow where we found the treasure. We had lots of fun and were exhausted by the end of the day. Some of our highlights were ringing the bell, scrubbing the deck and hunting for the sleeping cat.

We had to make treasure maps to help us find the treasure. Thankfully we have been learning all about directions in maths so we had a good understanding of where the treasure may be. One of  our favourite activities was listening to instructions and drawing objects in the correct places to complete a picture.

 

We made a collage of Captain Pete Pigeons ship wreck using a variety of materials. We are very creative in Primary 1D!

We have introduced the daily mile this week at school, even for Primary 1! So far we have managed to get round the track four and a half times in 15 minutes. The full mile requires five laps so we are very close! Are you impressed?

Some of the children’s highlights of the week:

Vanessa – “I liked looking for the treasure.”

Maja – “I like ringing the bell on the Tall Ship.”

Poppy – “I liked the school trip.”

Chloe – “I liked learning about directions and making a treasure map.”

Have a great weekend,

Miss Diamond and Primary 1D

Maps, maps all around.  The children have all embraced our new topic this week with enthusiasm and interest.  They have seen how we are joining up our learning and developing skills,  in particular through our imaginative writing.  The children have been asked to write an imaginative story about finding a treasure map and then the adventure which follows.  This week the focus was the planning and introduction of the story.  We then used our learning from our Social Studies lesson about the features of a map to design and create our own treasure map to accompany our story.  Here are some of the maps which have been started,

     

 

Our Success Criteria is to ensure that we include a TITLE, COMPASS and KEY.  We will then used a tea bag to create an aged staining effect on our map, tune in next week and there will be more photographs of the finished products.

In preparation for next week the children can continue to think about their adventure story and the events which will occur.  We have discussed having a “twist in the tale”, perhaps the treasure is not money, gold and jewels…it might be something completely different!  Get thinking, I can’t wait to read some of your ideas.

Our Maths next week will involve us using measurements and scales from maps to work out distances.   The short video clip (which can be accessed by pasting the below address into your search engine) from the BBC will help the children link their learning in class to real life application of these Maths skills.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/clips/z3rd2hv

Alongside this we will begin to look at different types of graphs and charts through data handling.  To prepare for this you can look at this website, you need to make it full screen and you can differentiate what level you want to work at.  This game will form part of our carousel fruity groups smart starts. Good luck.

http://mathsframe.co.uk/en/resources/resource/51/bar_charts

The Daily Mile has also been launched this week.  At the minute some of us are finding it quite difficult (especially Mrs Currie).  In improving our general fitness and improving our growth mindset we hope to achieve” healthy bodies and healthy minds make for good learning!”  Next week we will use our Big Talking Book in class to record our own thoughts on the Daily Mile.

Have a lovely weekend, and if you manage a daily mile over the course of the weekend you can post a blog reply telling me all about the route you took (this could link with our Mapping topic if you can draw or mark on a map the route you took!)

Mrs Currie

Primary 6/7 have been feeling healthy and fit this week by jogging a daily mile around the school every day! We began on Monday and we are all feeling much fitter and look forward to our daily challenge! Today we ran with the Primary 1s and we helped them to complete their daily challenge too!

In maths we have been continuing to learn about decimals and we have been focusing on reading decimal numbers from a scale and rounding decimal numbers to tenths and whole numbers.

 

During our reading lesson, we worked in groups to make posters to help us explain the important features of a newspaper article.

 

 

We used these skills to help us complete our writing assessments, where we all adopted the role of a Victorian reporter and wrote a Victorian newspaper article about the issues concerning child labour during Queen Victoria’s reign.

Continuing with our topic, we started to learn some facts about Charles Rennie Mackintosh and in Art we started to create some Art Deco roses in the style of Rennie Mackintosh.

Finally, yesterday we completed our last session of our Circle of Friends groups. We have really enjoyed participating with the games and the discussions about friendships and how we can improve friendship problems and be better friends.

Have a great weekend!

Primary 6/7 and Mrs Reeves

We started our week off by focusing on another sound in the ‘vowel house’. This week we focused on the ‘oi’ sound. Some of our words this week with the ‘oi’ sound are coin, join and toilet. We practise our spelling words throughout the week through a range of activities. Here are some of the different activities that we’ve been doing this week: we have our spelling words printed off in our letter join handwriting – this helps us with our fancy handwriting. We also practise writing our spelling words using different writing methods – play-doh and ‘doodle app’ on the ipads. We also enjoy some active games. This week we played a game called ‘obb’ and ‘bob’. Ask your child how to play this game and have a go using the link below. You will find this ‘oi’ sound in ‘phase 3’.

Katie said “I like using the ipads to practise my spelling words because it’s fun.”

Sophie D said: “The smart pals are really fun.”

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/PicnicOnPluto.html

 

We love our reading carousels in P2M. We complete a range of different activities in our reading carousels. Each day we enjoy reading aloud in a group and we are all working really hard trying to read with some expression. Reading is fun so we still enjoy playing some different games during these lessons. We were introduced to a new tricky words reading game this week – each pair got 3 50 balls with tricky words on them. If you read a word correctly you keep it in your basket, the person with the most at the end is the winner. Bartosz is playing a reading game in this picture too; he was reading lots of different words which feature in his reading book. Once a week we complete a ‘task map’. Tasks maps are related to our reading books and help promote our higher order thinking skills. Our ipads have also been recently updated with new games on with, we played a new tricky words game on them this week. The better we got at this game the harder it got!

Emily said: “the game is fun because you learn more words.”

Richard: “you learn to red more words.”

Ola said: “I like the new ipad games.”

   

Our first CLIC session this week focused on the L part of CLIC – Learn-Its – and we looked at number bonds to 10. We completed 3 different activities to help us with this. The first activity was on the smart board and we had to choose which alien pairs made 10. Why don’t you try this game at home? Here is the link for you to play:

http://www.iboard.co.uk/activity/Alien-Pairs-to-10-733

We also worked with a partner to complete a matching task. The aliens and their spaceships had numbers on them and we had to match them up. If an alien had a number 4 on it, the matching spaceship would have number 6 on it. Finally, we completed a written task to check that we understand our number bonds to 10. You could check how quickly you know your number bonds by playing ‘hit the button’ and selecting ‘number bonds’. Here is the link for you:

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button

Sophie YM said: “maths is my favourite work.”

Huda said: “you used the aliens to make numbers up to 10. 1 and 9 make 10.”

 

We have been working really hard on our learn-its this week. As part of a CLIC carousel we completed lots of fun activities to help us learn these sums as ‘quick as a CLIC’. We played the ‘hit the button’ game on the smart board to work on our doubles. Use the ‘hit the button’ link above if you want to play this at home too. We also worked on a timed challenge focusing on adding on 2 or 3 to numbers between 2 and 9. We used a 1 minute timer to see how many learn-its we could match in that time – we want to try and beat that score next time we play. Finally, we played a game on the ipads also working on adding on 2 and 3 to numbers between 2 and 9. This game is called ‘math racer addition’. If you have an iPad at home you could download this app and practise.

Levente said: “I was beating other cars in the racing game by adding numbers together.”

  

We have all been working so hard with our multiplication topic in number work. This week we focused on repeated addition. We know that 3 groups of 2 is also the same as 2+2+2, we can count in 2’s so we quickly found that the answer was 6. Have a look for a fun multiplication game to play at home in next weeks homework.

 

 

We started our transport topic this week. Did you ask your child what they wanted to learn as part of this topic? I would love to read some comments about their suggestions to add to our class topic plan. We have began an art project as part of this topic – we have started to make paper mache hot air balloons. Have a look at what we have done so far… check back next week to see the finished results!

Teegan said: “Paper mache was all gooey and it was messy fun.”

 

We started the daily mile this week… how tiring! The first day we completed this mile we walked the route (5 times around the school) but we now have started to run round. It is lots of fun and it helps us get fit too.

Sophie R said: “I like running fast in the daily mile. I run super fast.”

Jack said: “we do the daily mile to help us get healthy.”

As we started a new topic of ‘transport’ this means new structured play stations. Ask your child if they can remember what stations you could choose from at structured play and what ones they participated in?

P5 will be completing a block of work on cross country running for the remainder of the term.  This will involve being outdoors (we hope!). They need to bring suitable PE clothing and shoes on Mondays.  Today the daily mile…tomorrow the Edinburgh marathon!

This week we have been rounding up our topic of Wallace and Bruce.  For our Literacy work the children completed an imaginary interview with William Wallace where they had to adopt the character of Wallace to answer the questions.  This really put our knowledge and understanding of the topic to the test.  We discussed what made a good question and the difference between and open and closed question.  Here are some examples of the questions we asked,

“Why did you want to fight against the English Army?

“What battle was your most successful and why?”

“Did you have any help from anyone?”

To answer our questions we used our core text “The Wars Of Independence” book and also this fun Horrible Histories song.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/music/p00hbbm9

Our next topic is based around Maps.  The children have been asked to think about what they already know about maps,

*What are maps used for?

*Why are maps important?

*How many different types of maps can you name?

We have discussed how we can link our work to this topic.  In Maths we are revising co-ordinates, scale and measure.  In our writing we will create an imaginative piece of work about finding a treasure map.  In Social Studies we will be learning how to build a mental map of Scotland and the main features of Scottish landscapes.  We are also going to learn direction words in Spanish.

Get a head start on your Spanish directions by watching this link,

Mrs Currie