This week in P2M we have been working on our teamwork skills. In our ‘reading routes’ lessons we have to work in teams of 4 and everyone has a different role – reader, recorder, checker and noise monitor. All children worked great in their roles and even earned a ‘teamwork’ dojo point for their efforts.

We have also been working on the concept of measure in class. This week we were measuring a range of things using non-standard units of measure (our hands and our feet). The children had to measure the classroom door, table and cabinet using their hands and their feet. We are already looking forward to learning more about measure next week.

We were also introduced to our new topic this session – ‘The North Pole’. We created a poster showing what we already know about this and what we would like to learn about the north pole. Did you see the poster when you visited our classroom this week?

On Thursday we were writing imaginative stories. Our stories were inspired by this video called ‘dream giver’. Miss Meechan is very impressed with our writing and hasn’t managed to pick a star writer yet!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXVY0cCnF_c

In our number work we have been working on counting up to 200… this is quite tricky! We have also been working on counting in 5’s. We know that when we are counting in 5’s the number always ends with a 5 or a 0. We have been singing along to this song to help us:

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan

We have had lots of fun in P1D this week! As most of you will already know, we had a disaster when we came in to school on Thursday! EVERYTHING in our classroom had been turned upside down! We decided to use our imaginations and wrote a story about who/ what caused all the commotion! What/ who do you think was to blame?

We are really enjoying our new topic and a couple of our favourite activities this week have been using chalk to write our names and playing old fashioned playground games! Do you recognise any of the games?

We have been busy in maths learning about subtraction but loved using the head bands to help learn our ‘learn it’s’! We had to find our trios!

Have a good weekend, Miss Diamond and Miss Corbett.

This week we have been learning about the famous Scientist Archimedes.  We learned the story of his “Eureka” moment and used this as our focus for our writing.  We all became reporters for the morning and wrote our own article about Archimedes discovery.  We had a “Mission Impossible” to include quotes in our articles, we all achieved this and learned about using speech marks effectively.  Great work P5!

Carrying on our theme of water in Science we have started to look at floating and sinking.  Why do huge (and very heavy!) metal ships float?  This was the question we asked ourselves as it challenged our idea that heavy things sink.  Using blu-tak we made a ball shape and dropped it into water, and of course it sank.  Using the exact same blu-tak we had to investigate how we could change the shape to make it float.

Reece said “I think it has something to do with the amount of surface on the water that it takes up that makes it float”.

Most groups had some success!  Try it out at home but don’t use play-doh as this goes yucky in water, Mrs Currie knows after a very slimy incident with orange play-doh!  We hope it will be plain sailing (this was meant) next week when we continue the investigation into why ships float.

In Maths we have continued learning about fractions.  Our focus was finding a fraction of an amount.  Using our times table knowledge and our division skills we worked hard on this.  Please use the help sheet given out at Parents Meetings to help you quicken your recall of your tables.

Have a great weekend.

This week in Primary 6/7 as part of our Science topic we have been looking at the results of our mouldy bread investigation and we also took part in another investigation looking at the effect of salt  when we try to freeze water.

In Writing, we finished our Middle Ages stories and we learnt some facts about the Black Death. We tried a new system in Maths, which allows us to choose our activity and decide if we want to try an extra challenge task.

On Thursday those of us in Whithorn were able to go to Pizza Express as our prize for winning the house points and the rest of us all enjoyed attending our class mass at St Philips along with other members of the community. Afterwards we were delighted to have a chance for a short play at the park!!

Finally we finished off the week with a Dress Down Day in support of Children in Need.

By Nikki and Freya L

Primary 4 have been learning all about the phases of the moon this week. We listened to a great song to help us remember what they were. We loved dancing and singing to the song. We learned that the moon shines brightly because of the reflection of the sun and depending on the position of the moon at certain times of the month we see different shapes reflecting. We now know that waning means the moon is getting smaller and waxing means it is getting bigger.

This week in Maths we have been revising rounding numbers to the nearest 10. We are getting very confident with this concept of maths through playing games in the active maths area. We had great fun. We have started multiplication this week. We are finding it a little tricky so we are going to really try hard to revise our times tables in the classroom, playground, at home and even in the car. Mrs Wassell thinks we will be “Whizz Kids” at this in no time.

We wrote fantastic imaginative stories this week called “The Day I Visited The Moon!”. Mrs Wassell thought they were all AMAZING! She is having a tricky job this week choosing our star writers. We can’t wait to share them with you Mrs Purdie. You will be blown away! We have great imaginations in P4!!

This week has been awesome!

We have been learning all about the Phases of the Moon. “There are 8 phases of the Moon” said Evie. Here are some of the names that we have learned this week. “The Crescent” said Mark, “The Full Moon” said Brooke, “The New Moon” said Hannah and “The Gibbous”” said Shannon.

We now know that we see bright parts of the Moon’s surface at different angles and these are the different Phases of the Moon.

We have also been exploring our class novel ‘The Twits’ using our task map. In chapter 5 ‘The Glass Eye’ Mrs Twit puts her glass eye in Mr Twit’s beer glass. “It was kind of weird but very funny.” said Hannah. Isabella said “It was funny but yuck”

So in our ‘Create Something Great’ task we had to think of a nasty trick that we would play on Mr Twit. Here are some of our nasty ideas:

Gabriella said “I would strap bombs at the bottom of his chair and then BOOM!”

Rachel said “I would give him a jacket to wear with slime from a slug on the inside. Then when Mr Twit would sit down he would have slime on his clothes.”

Ailie said “I would put a blind fold on Mr Twit and then push him out of the window.”

Aidan said “I would dig a hole in the front garden and put pretend grass over the hole. Then Mr Twit would walk over the grass and fall down the hole.”

Jacob said “I would put down a trick tile so that when Mr Twit stands on it 1000 robots would come and attack him.”

Jay said “I would put Mrs Twit’s eye on his toothbrush and then he would have invisible slime in his mouth.”

Watch out Mrs Purdie primary 3/4 have a trick up their sleeve.

Have a lovely weekend!

Primary 3/4 and Mrs Kerr

This week in maths we have been learning about the different formulae used for calculating speed, distance and time. We learned about the magic triangle which we can use to work out what formula should be used each time by covering up the aspect which you are trying to work out to reveal the process of this: speed = distance/time, time = distance/speed or distance = speed x time.

Within our topic (Sport Science) we have been learning about the parts and functions of the lungs and how we can keep our lungs pink and healthy throughout our lives. To help us really understand how our lungs work we did an investigation where we used a plastic bottle, a plastic bag, a balloon and an elastic band to create a model of the lungs and this allowed us to see that when we breathe oxygen in, the diaphragm flattens/moves down and when we breathe carbon dioxide out, the diaphragm moves up.

Next Tuesday we will be visiting St. Margaret’s Academy for the first of our 3 weeks of transition mornings. The theme of this is ‘Children in Conflict’ which should link really well with some work we have already done on refugees.

Have a great weekend!

What a wonderful week we have had in P2M. We rounded off our ‘Fairyland’ topic in spectacular style on Thursday at our ‘Fairyland Ball’, thank you to all the parents who came along to support the children at this event.

Sophie R said: “I loved going to the ball as a princess.”

Before the ball we all made crowns and tiaras just like Princes and Princesses would wear to a ball.

Emily said: “I liked making crowns especially putting decorations on them.”

We also used recycled materials to create images of castles. We had to use a range of skills and resources to make these: cardboard tubes, paint, PVA glue, sellotape and paper.

Teegan said: “I loved making the castles because I like painting.”

On Thursday we used our imagination to write an imaginative story about a haunted house. We used a picture of a haunted house as our stimulus.

Alexis said: “I liked writing about the spooky house. A blood witch lived in the house I was writing about.”

Mr McCurdy was challenging us with some fitness challenges in PE.

Maliha said: “I liked climbing on the bars in PE.”

Jack: “we were squatting.”

Alexis: “I liked stretching my legs.”

Sophie YM: “I liked dancing.”

Emily: “we had a dance off with P2B.”

Please check out the blog next week for photos and videos from the ‘Fairyland Ball’.