Category Archives: Literacy

P6B Reading Challenge Week 1

Let's look at interesting words...
Let’s look at interesting words…

L.I.: to identify and select ‘interesting’ words within a variety of passages. 

P6… how are your new novels? While I hear some of you read I would like you to find *FIVE* interesting words (remember what makes them interesting? – unknown words, ambitious vocabulary, specialist or topic words, words you would like to use in YOUR WRITING etc.).

Please note your WORD CHOICE – DEFINITION – SYNONYMS in the comments box….

An example… no problem! < See Comments Box for Mrs Gray’s example>

TOOLS TO USE: Devices/dictionaries/thesauri/peers/help boxes

 

Author Visits Primary 3

Yesterday, Primary 3 had a very special visitor in school.  Christiane Dorion, who has written a series of children’s non-fiction books, came to visit us to tell us all about her book “How Animals Live”.  She told us about different animal habitats and the animals that live there.  She challenged us with animal riddles, and then we had to come up with our own!  We also had lots of fun making the noise of a rainforest (primary 3 are very noisy!).  She also brought along an elephant tusk, a leopard skin and a hippo tooth to make us aware of the dangers animals are in from hunting.

Some of us bought a copy of her book and Christiane signed it for us!

This visit was part of the Scottish Friendly Children’s Book Tour, organised by the Scottish Book Trust and Primary 3 had great fun!

World Book Day

World Book Day was celebrated in style with another successful book swap and lots of class activities.

The highlight of the day was the Potato Book Character competition. The judges were blown away with the number of entries and found it extremely difficult to choose the winners from each stage. Congratulations to all the winners and everyone who took part – all the entries were amazing!

 

We enjoyed sharing our learning at a whole school assembly. The nursery children had fun presenting their Gruffalo artwork, Primary 1 and Primary 2 told us about their favourite books and Primary 3 read “Whit the Clockleddy Heard” in their best Scottish accents! Primary 4 presented their learning about Holy Books and other religious stories and Primary 5 gave a wonderful performance of a song from “Matilda”. Primary 6 shared Dr Suess with us and Primary 7 taught us all about William Shakespeare! Thanks go to the library reps who led the assembly.

Remember to exchange your World Book Day token and “Keep on Reading”.

P3/2 celebrate World Book Day

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P3/2 had a wonderful time celebrating World Book Day on Thursday. We created some fantastic potato characters…A huge well done to all those children who took part!

We also enjoyed creating book token designs and bookmarks and had the opportunity to do some paired reading with our friends.

Today, we performed a Scots story or personal account of our favourite book in assembly in front of the whole school! It was great fun having the opportunity to share our learning.

We have also been taking part in fairtrade fortnight and created some fairtrade artwork, using fairtrade colours and images. Today, our class brought in 10 fairtrade snacks for playtime! Well done!

 

Scottish Children’s Book Awards 2016

Today we travelled to the Grand Central Hotel in Glasgow to attend the Scottish Children’s Book Awards 2016. The authors of the three short-listed books in the Bookbug category of the awards read excerpts from their books whilst the illustrators demonstrated their artistic talents.

Over 30,000 children voted for their favourite book. There was great excitement as the winner was announced ……

“Mouse’s First Night at Moonlight School” by Simon Puttock and Ali Pye.

After the ceremony we were lucky enough to meet the authors who signed copies of their books for us.

A fantastic experience!

 

Scottish Cooking and Baking in P4

In P4, we have been having great fun learning about, making and tasting Scottish foods. The first food we made together was a (child-friendly) cranachan – we used oats, yoghurt, raspberries and honey. We also baked shortbread for our Burns Party. Both were delicious! Well most of us thought so anyway! We are doing all of this through our food technology lessons with Mrs Logan. We are learning to prepare food and use equipment in a hygienic and safe way. We use our reading skills as we read the recipe and we use our maths skills as we measure the ingredients. We have to cooperate with our friends and work as a team. We can’t wait to find out what we are making next!

P6 have been GETTING CREATIVE and exploring Glow Mail…

BYOD... opening new doors of creativity at all turns for P6.
BYOD… opening new doors of creativity at all turns for P6.

 

On Friday P6 entered into the realms of sheer and absolute creativity, and, perhaps even without knowing…

In our ‘Digital Technologies Across the Curriculum’ (D-TAC? We’re trying to think of a name!) session we were looking at emailing. We all ‘assumed’ we knew how to do it. 85% of use already have personal email accounts. So we know how to email right? NOT QUITE YET…we discovered!

Key Skills we learnt about EMAIL IN GLOW:

1. Know your login/password (And if it is your device – click ‘save for future’, little box, saves time!).

2. Click on Microsoft Outlook 365 tab. Wow it looks different to my other email account!

3. Find out my own email address… ‘My Profile’

4. Add contacts through ‘People’ – this makes it easier to see my friends, add groups, email quickly.

5. Send an email to Mrs Gray. Wow we filled her inbox, didn’t we P6?

6. Found out what ‘CC’ stands for/means in emailing. Yeah, we had seen it before, did we know what it meant? Nope. It means ‘Carbon Copy’, like if you want other people to see what you’re emailing but it’s not exactly for them. Pretty good idea, right?

7. We all got excited about changing our profile picture, and then had to be even more creative. All our devices were very different. Everything appeared very different on all of our screens. Let’s start real exploration – we found out how to change/create lots of stuff through doing this!

FEEDBACK FROM MRS GRAY…

~ P6 trust yourselves and each other more, remember I am no expert either. Let’s ask each other, before we ask me, if we are unsure about something.

FEED-FORWARD FROM MRS GRAY…

~ What now? Shall we set up an email group? Shall we use email within a lesson/activity (peer assessment method?). You will have better ideas than me…

 

SO P6… let’s have some FEEDBACK/FEED-FORWARD IN THE COMMENTS…

P6 have been taking inspiration from the late, and great, Steve Jobs...
P6 have been taking inspiration from the late, and great, Steve Jobs…

P4 Scottish Poetry Finalists

Well done to all P4 pupils who learned a Scottish Poem! (And thank you to parents who helped us learn them!) We performed the poems in class and gave each other feedback on our strengths and next steps. It was really hard to choose the finalists from so many talented performances. Chloe, Hannah and Sophie from P4b and Aimee, Caitlin and Ayanna from P4a went through to the school competition and all performed very well on the stage. Congratulations to Sophie and Caitlin who came joint Third, Ayanna who came Second and Chloe who came First.

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