This week we have been continuing on with our optical illusion art work using straight and curved lines.
We have been extending our knowledge of money by using the four processes to work out 1 and 2 step word problems. We had great fun setting up a shop and using money to buy different products and giving change from different amounts.
In Number Talks, we have moved our focus to subtraction and have been sharing our strategies and ideas on how to work out some tricky calculations.
In PE, we have been focussing on our own personal fitness during full body workouts and building up our stamina by running for a certain amount of time.
We have been using our class novel ‘Billionaire Boy’ to learn new vocabulary during our word boost sessions this week. Our favourite word was ‘deafening’.
We have been successful with our use of Glow. As well as carrying out homework tasks using our online accounts, we have also been developing our own personal profiles. We have all managed to complete our community profile page and set our new goals online. Why not have a look at home and see if you can add anything to your WOW wall that you are super proud of.
Our topic focus for the next few weeks in Enterprise and we plan on making a lovely craft which can be bought at the Christmas Fayre. We have been carrying out the research to find the best place to buy the resources we need to ensure we can sell our products at a reasonable price and still make a small profit. Keep your eyes peeled.
Congratulations to Maliha this week for being awarded our praise post card for trying very hard in all areas and being helpful to others during group tasks.
In our outdoor learning we were nature detectives and used magnifying glasses to look at a variety of things in the school garden. We had to work in teams and draw the object as it looked with our eyes and then draw it after using the magnifying glasses. It was amazing what we found and as it was frosty it was even more exciting.
In Literacy this week we read Hiccup The Viking which was our Word Boost book. We had to listen out for the following words ocean, spine, shriek, ancient, immediately and peculiar and remember if they were nouns, verbs or adjectives. In our reading we worked on our higher order thinking skills of Remembering where we had to write down the setting of our story, the main characters and what happened at the beginning of the story. We also worked on Understanding using our word boost knowledge of adjectives we had to write three adjectives to describe the main character, think of the main idea of our story and describe why the title was appropriate to our reading book.
We continued to work on our addition and counting in Numeracy and are becoming super at our number talks.
Here is a link to a game we used to help us with our addition.
In our number talks we sometimes use ten frames and we can come up with lots of strategies of what do we see and how do we see it. Here is one you can try at home and you can post your strategies too!
In P.E. we are working on a fitness block and this week we became teachers and worked alongside P1D in a fitness circuit. We followed our school rules of READY, RESPECTFUL AND SAFE. We really enjoyed working with them and want to say a big thank you to Mrs Davenport for inviting us to join in.
In Digital learning this week some of us have logged onto Glow and we will continue with this next week. This will also be part of our Homework for next week and we are excited to be digital learners.
We have also been working very hard during our Smart start in the mornings with lots of focus and great collaborative learning.
Connor- “I know how to form this sound because you draw around the flamingos neck then draw a line down to the flamingos feet and lastly a line across his body.”
Emilie- “F is pink because it is a quiet lip sound.”
Adam- “The b sound is a lip sound but it is not pick it is red.”
Lucy- “It is red because it is a loud sound.”
Liam- “The p hangs under the line and the b sound sits on the line.”
Khlya- “f is curved at the top but t has a curve at the bottom.”
We have been learning how to write words with our sounds and have been identifying the which sound is at the beginning, middle and end.
Here are the songs which we have been listening to this week to help us learn our sounds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxa_zfeB0w4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNT6gFNnmcI
We were excited to start word boost this week. We were introduced to 4 new boost words and their meaning. We have been completing activities which help us remember the meaning of the words. Can you listen for the words in the story?
We enjoyed learning our words at home too with our parent postcards.
We have been learning how to count on when adding. During number talks we have been sharing strategies for adding numbers together and have been finding out the quickest and easiest ways to add. We are trying to hold the number in our heads and count on.
We have enjoyed playing different types of games in our plenaries to show what we know.
In Art this week we learned about different types of lines- long, thick, thin, wavy and broken.
We used lines to draw pictures of the train station near our school. We wanted to include other features of our local environment so we decided to draw the river Almond and hills.
Isla- “You pass some hills when on the train.”
Miss Boyes was impressed by how good our drawings were and all of the different types of lines which we used.
We have used google maps this week to show Trex different places he could visit in Livingston. We said that he could visit the train station to see what the train looks like, this discussion led us to the idea of Trex getting the train to Edinburgh. We used google maps to show Trex Edinburgh Castle, The Zoo and The Royal Botanic garden. We think Trex would learn lots if he visited these places and we thought about what he would learn when there.
We ended this lesson by asking Miss Boyes how Trex would find out the price of the train so we visited the Scotrail website.
We have had such a busy week that we ran out of time to type up our blog so Mrs Roy stepped in to help us out.
Monday
We started the week with spelling and wordboost before having our morning PE lesson. Fitness is the theme and we all worked in teams to play fitness bingo. The P7 girls were the winners! In numbertalks we were working on the doubling and near doubles strategy for addition. During shared reading Mrs Roy introduced us to ‘Inspector Heurisko’s lights’, the story told us about skills we need when reading. Mrs Purdie came into our class this afternoon and was helping us to order decimals using post it notes.
Tuesday
We were learning about abstract nouns in grammar today, we all did well with the task. In the afternoon we went to the lanthorn library to choose new reading for enjoyment books.
Wednesday
Mr McCurdy continued working with us on fitness using a Halloween theme. We nailed the monster mash as our warm up!! In enterprise we worked in pairs using our devices and netbooks to research 5 local businesses. We then created factfiles for out display, we could use Microsoft word or a poster. Mrs Scott is joining us now in class on Wednesday afternoons to help us with our reading.
Thursday
We learned about the feast of All Saints and led the liturgy at our whole school mass in the Lanthorn. Mrs Roy was very proud of us all as we led by example. In writing we used a picture as a stimulus. We then had to think of descriptive words or phrases to describe what we saw. Everyone wrote an extended piece of writing and some peoplr shared their story with us.
Friday
Everyone went to their committee, have a look on Twitter to see what we got up to. We also updated our GLOW Profiles using OneNote. Please ask us about these at home and we can show you what we have done so far.
Pupil voice:
Beth- I really enjoyed writing this week.
Bea- we did a scary piece of writing about a spooky picture.
We completed some spooky Hallowe’en art this week.
Firstly we made hallowe’en lanterns. This focused on our cutting skills.
Then we used the outdoors to inspire some skeleton making. We went into the school garden and foraged for useful material which we could turn into skeletons in class. This was so much fun and it helped us to develop our creativity skills. We hope you don’t get too frightened checking out these pictures!
In our Numeracy we had a chance to be the teacher. We did a Find It and Fix It lesson. Winnie the Witch was at witch school and she was given a worksheet of addition calculations to solve. We had to check Winnie’s work for her and fix anything that she got wrong. We put a big version on our Maths Working Wall and used tickled pink and green for growth to help her. We hope Winnie will grow from her mistakes just like we do in class.
For our Literacy we did a character a study from our reading books. We all had to choose one character from our book and draw a picture of them, then list some adjectives to describe our chosen character and say what they did in the story. This really helped us use our higher order thinking skills as we had to Understand our reading books and then Apply what we had found out to complete a character study.
Our Alien story this week was so much fun, we had to describe what an alien would see if he landed on our planet on 5th November. We used our Mighty Writer to develop our story. Here are the star writers from this week; Kayla, Jiya and Leon.
Next week we will be writing a story about a police officer and the jobs they have to do in our community to keep us safe. This will be part of our Community topic and will help us answer Ibad’s pupil voice suggestion for this topic (“What are the jobs of a Police Officer?). Have a chat at home about the types of jobs a police officer in Livingston would need to do.
As an extra try this Number Talks at home with your child. How many beads are there on the left hand side, how did you count them? Did your doubles knowledge help you at all? As always if you get answer and a strategy feel free to share it with me by replying to this blog.
The children have had a wonderful Halloween week in nursery. Dressing up and dookin on Tuesday then a Halloween hunt on our fundraiser sponsored walk on Wednesday. New pipes and hoses in the water tray caused great interest on Thursday and we ended the week with a fantastic assembly all about kindness and how our kindness can colour the world. I’m sure your children colour your world, but they most certainly colour ours. Thank you all so much for your support during our Care Inspectorate inspection this week. We are delighted with the feedback given and will share the news when we get our final report.
Have a great weekend everybody!! from the Nursery Team xx
NEXT WEEK
Monday – GIRFEC – ‘ACHIEVING’
School photos, siblings can be included from nursery in these.
Can we please ask for any Sponsor forms to be back in today x.
Tuesday – Library Visit at 9.30 am and 1.30 pm.
Wednesday – Breakfast Blether at 8.30 with Mrs Mushet and Noon Natter at 12.00, any parent is invited to come along and have a chat about the nursery and our vision for the future.
We have been working hard in P5D this week and would like to share some of the things we have been getting up to with you!
Most importantly, we celebrated Miss Diamond’s Birthday! She is not 30, she is 18 with 12 years experience :)!
With it being the week of Halloween, in writing, we described a spooky, haunted house setting and focussed on using our senses to help with the description.
In maths, we had to complete a Halloween Party challenge using lots of different maths concepts. We had to use multiplying, roman numerals, adding, subtracting, odd/even, rounding and read graphs to work out who the blindfold thief was! We had fun completing this task and developed our team work skills in the process. We had to be determined, focussed and display a growth mind-set to make this challenge a success. Well done to ‘The Mathematicals’ for working extremely well as a team and completing the challenge first!
In PE, we are developing our own personal fitness by joining in with various activities. We have been doing body weight exercises to strengthen different muscles and continued to work on our skipping skills. We also had a Halloween themed session with Mr McCurdy.
In art, we created optical illusions using line and colour. They were very effective and easy to recreate at home if you fancied giving it a go!
We had our class mass this week which we celebrated with Primary 5R, some of our families and other parishioners from our community. We also participated in a whole school celebration for All Saint’s Day.
Finally, congratulations to Robbie and Ethan for being rewarded our praise postcards this week. Both boys have been giving 100% in all areas of their learning and multiple members of staff commented on this throughout the week. Well done boys!
In primary 6 we have been making our pupil profiles for glow. This will let us share our successes in and out of school. We have also been doing Mexican art called Dia Los Muerdos or Day of the Dead where we drew a picture of someone who has died in our family or our pets We have been doing Halloween Report writing about what we do for Halloween. This involved sharing some of our Halloween traditions such as Dressing up and Jack O Lanterns, Did you know that Jack O lanterns were originally used to scare of bad spirits from peoples homes?
In Maths we are continuing to develop our Number Talks strategies and we are all keen to share our strategies with each other. We have been working on Subtraction of 3 Digit Numbers.
A big group of us went to the school Halloween party on Tuesday night – it was great fun. Vanessa was even dressed up as an inflatable dinosaur!
Oskar: In P.E we did just dance and fitness bingo.
Lucas: On Thursday we had an All Saints Day mass.
Lukasz: This week in writing we wrote spooky stories.
Oskar: We wrote letters to businesses to ask for raffle prizes for the Christmas Fair.
Lucas: On Monday we wrote Halloween poems in groups.
Lewis: on Monday we did our Halloween poems and we had to record it and we added sound effects using Audacity.
Chloe: in P.E we did just dance and it was fun and we did the Halloween workout.
Charlie: We did Halloween P.E and it was very fun.
Lukasz: On Thursday we had an All Saints Day mass.
Joseph: I won a prize at the Halloween disco J
Kalin: I won a prize at the Halloween disco
Grace: I enjoyed just dance in PE with Mr McCurdy
Isla: I enjoyed going to the Lanthorn to celebrate mass with the whole school.
All pupils now have access to our Class Notebook through Glow. If they sign in to glow, click on their emails, click on the waffle and click on OneNote they will find the Class Notebook. We will use the notebook as our profiles and pupils are encouraged to add posts from home. This space can also be used for home learning.
We started word boost this week. Most weeks we will be learning 4 new boost words. Some weeks we will have revision weeks where we don’t learn new boost words. On a Tuesday, children will bring a ‘parent postcard’ home with details of the words we are learning that week in class.
Scott: we read a book.
Jane: it was called ‘the lamb who came to dinner’.
Lucas: the wolf wanted to eat the lamb.
We learned 4 boost words. Here are our boost words:
Scott: gobble is one of our boost words it means you eat quickly.
Anna: trudge means that you walk all sad.
Rojin: delicious means something that is tasty.
Luke: howl is a noise that would be sad.
Here is our word boost story. Can you listen carefully for the boost words:
Phonics
Roma: we learned the ‘b’ sound. It is a red sound that comes from lips.
Amelia: ‘b’ is a loud sound.
Shea: we learned the ‘f’ sound. It is a pink sound that means it is a quiet sound.
We are continuing to learn about addition and numbers within 10. All of our numeracy activities this week were Halloween based activities.
Olivier: I played bowling on the ipads and had to count the skittles.
Carter: we played a game with a partner and we had to count spiders.
Carter: we made potions at the tuff table.
Roma: we had to tick how many colours we used but you couldn’t have the same twice.
Paul: we had to roll a dice and if it was 6 then you had to put 6 arms on the legs. If you rolled again and got 5 you would have to put another 5 on. It looked funny.
Number Talks
Freya: we tried to copy Mrs Davenport’s rekenrek. For 5 you could do 2 at the bottom and 3 at the top.
Celine: for 6 you could make 3 and 3.
Amelia: for 4 you could make 3 and 1.
Rojin: you could also do 2 at the top and 2 at the bottom for 4.
Writing
We used a picture of a haunted house as our writing stimulus this week. We were thinking about who lives in the haunted house. We were learning that ‘imaginative’ means stories don’t need to be real. It can be pretend and silly!
Shea: I wrote about a zombie.
Roma: I wrote about a horrible witch.
Luke: I wrote about a vampire.
Paul: I wrote about a mummy.
We used story stones to develop our ability to tell stories orally. We also use apps on the ipads to help with this too. You could download some of these at home too to make stories. We really like the apps puppet pals, morfo and sock puppets.
Shea: Me and Lucas made a big story using the story stones. It was about a frog that turned into a wizard.
Roma: Me and Pati done a big story using the story stones too.
Topic
We are really enjoying learning about airports and we have turned parts of our classroom into an airport. We have a check-in desk, baggage weighing, first aid, café and even a runway and an aeroplane!
Carter: we could pack our suitcases and go on the aeroplane. I was going to legoland.
Luke: you needed a ticket and a passport to get on the aeroplane
Carter: we had a café in the airport.
Roma: we needed to measure our suitcases to check they were light enough to get on the aeroplane. It couldn’t be heavier than 10. I wonder what would happen if it was 10?
Layla: there are big suitcases and small suitcases.
Freya: at the airport we were pretending to be at doctors in case you hurt yourself.
Spanish
Pati: we learned about flamenco dancing. I was twirling.
Shea: There was a boy dancing too.
Carter: escucha means to listen.
Anna: si means yes.
Mara: no means no, that is an easy one to remember!
Our Favourite Parts of the Week
Igor: I was bowling on the ipads.
Michelle: I liked learning new sounds. I learned the ‘f’ sound. It is a pink sound.
