Woodmuir Primary School Blog

This term, the children have been working on solving addition and subtraction tasks using concrete materials like counters, blocks, Numicon and more. These hands-on tools help the children visualise and understand the concepts in a more concrete way before moving onto pictorial and abstract problems.

By physically moving objects, the children can “see” the math which makes it easier to grasp how numbers can be combined or separated. Concrete materials build confidence, deepen understanding and make learning more engaging. The children were working on using Numicon to make number pairs and visually represent how numbers can be made up of different pairs – in this example, the children were making all the different number pairs to make 6.

Here, the children were using base 10 blocks to represent the jumping strategy in addition; they would use the blocks to represent jumps of 10 or 1 to solve 2 digit + 2 digit sums and missing number problems. The children have managed to transfer this understanding into subtraction tasks too!

The children have enjoyed the hands-on approach in numeracy and feel more confident in their numeracy skills! We will continue using concrete materials in all our learning to help boost our skills and confidence!

We want to say a huge thank you to everyone who was able to attend our Christmas Fayre last Friday. It was a fabulous morning celebrating all things Christmas and the children had a ball.

Today in maths we were learning to divide decimal numbers as well as counting on and back. In doing this task we had the opportunity to practice these calculations with a partner or in a trio outside, on the tables, on white paper, white boards and sit in any area of the class we wished. We are all very busy and this helped with our written textbook task later on.

To finish off our work on DNA, we had to present our final poster to Edinburgh University. Well done to Ethan and Joe who presented this clearly and confidently. A big congratulations to Harrison, who won our DNA competition by collecting the most DNA and can be seen below, receiving his prize. This was a fantastic partnership to be involved in and has given our learners lots of new knowledge and scientific skills.

Yesterday in P5-P7, we were bringing some Christmas cheer to the classroom through creating our own Christmas stars. We first of all collected the sticks outside and then Regina taught us how to manipulate the sticks to create a star shape and tie them together. Then we had the fun of adding on a few glistening decorations! We had so much fun and we can’t wait to show our grown ups.

Today at the Scottish You Film Foundation workshops at West Lothian College, P5-7 enjoyed three workshops. In the first workshop we learned basic animation, pixel animation and freeze framing. In the second workshop we learned about characters and storytelling. In the third workshop we learned about silent film. It was a lot of fun.

Over the past 4 weeks we have been learning more about Clarifying which involves the children identifying problem areas and then using repair strategies such as reading on (to give more information), re-reading more slowly, looking at pictures, consulting a dictionary, using prior knowledge, reflecting on the text read so far or rephrasing a sentence or section of text. Today we decided to use this strategy to learn more about St Andrew’s Day before our assembly. We had the chance to write postcards to our friends describing the best parts about St Andrew’s Day and some of us started to create our own VLOG using clarifying and other reciprocal reading strategies to research content online and explain ideas to make it very clear.

The world of work is a fun way to help children learn about themselves, their skills and the jobs they could do in the future. We talk about career options in P5-P7 every day during our lessons and last Friday we were very lucky to have a special visit from John Blacklock to talk about his Engineering job with Amentum and how it takes him all over the world.