This morning we had a special visitor in from West Calder High School. We had an Italian lesson full of fun games and lots of learning.
Italian lesson
Category: Whole School
Celebrating Burns Day
On Friday, our classes came together to celebrate Burns Day with a fantastic assembly filled with Scottish culture, music and tradition. It was a wonderful tribute to Robert Burns and showcased the talents of our pupils. Both classes performed Scottish songs such as ‘The Jeely Piece Song’ and ‘Coulter’s Candy’, we heard various Burns poems read aloud which brought his famous words to life and we discussed the life of Robert Burns and the traditions of Burns Night, including the famous Burns Supper, complete with haggis, neeps and tatties!
To end the assembly, we all joined in a Scottish dance which was a fun and fantastic way to honour Burns’ influence and enjoy a bit of Scottish tradition together. A huge well done to everyone – ye did yersels proud!
Scottish Country Dancing
Today we had the chance to practise our Scottish social dancing, the Gay Gordons’s! It was so much fun and we can’t wait to show our parents/carers this dance later on this morning in our Burns Supper Assembly.
Burns Supper
Today we had a wonderful practise of our Burns supper, ready to perform tomorrow. The children sang beautifully and presented their speaking parts with confidence. We are excited to do it all again tomorrow for our grown ups.
Physical Education
After a wonderful morning with our author and an excellent Burns assembly practice, we had some fun playing football outside. We also played a few fun, fitness games in the hall before home time. One game we all loved is called ‘Steal the bacon’, and we finished off with a running game involving lots of skills such as communication and collaboration.
Music workshop
Voice Rocks
Today the P5-P7 class took part in a singing workshop with Jill, called ‘Voice Rocks’ The children got the chance to develop their skills and techniques relevant to singing and performing.
Christmas Dinner
Last week, the children enjoyed a fantastic Christmas dinner at school. The lunch hall was set up for the occasion with a beautifully decorated Christmas tree and some festive touches on the tables – sparkly table cloths, Christmas themed placemats and some Christmas crackers. The children had a great time enjoying a delicious festive meal with yummy turkey, steak pie and some pasta. But of course, no Christmas dinner would be complete without some ice cream for dessert! After the meal, the children settled in to watch a Christmas movie, Santa Clause 3, and then enjoyed some games in the gym hall.
It was lovely to see the children enjoying an amazing day, full of good food, lots of fun and plenty of Christmas spirit. Everyone left feeling happy and excited for Christmas!
Hands-On Learning: Numeracy
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!
Christmas Fayre
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.
Building, Thinking Classrooms
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.
