Art Showcase Joy!

What an absolute joy it was to watch the children share their learning with their families this morning. Their faces said it all! Thank you to everyone who came and joined in. The children did a fabulous job performing, teaching, presenting and discussing all their Elements of Art learning.

What a special and memorable morning!

Bye bye Mrs Thomas

This week the parents and children of P3A treated me to some wonderful gifts, crafts and even a song to say good bye before I start maternity leave. I have been so touched by the kindness, generosity and well wishes and just had to share the beautiful song they sang. A thank you too to Ms Mac for her hand in the surprises! Thank you P3A, it’s been a super year 😍. Love Mrs Thomas xx

P3C Roundup (9th – 12th May)

Gosh it’s been a busy week in P3, so busy we forgot to take photos and write a proper blog post! So we sat down quickly on Friday and discuss what we’ve been up to.

We are getting ready to show our families our art work and dancing at our Elements of Art Showcase next week and so we’ve worked together as a stage to decide what we need to do and to practise our dance steps. On Tuesday we all practised the jive together with Mx Cranston and on Thursday Bobby helped us remember our waltz steps. We’ll perfect our steps next week ready for Friday.

In literacy we used our biography skills to write our own artist biographies for the showcase. We created a first draft this week and will edit them next week.

We also had lots of fun learning about and writing our own haikus. We learned that haikus have 3 lines, with a 5 – 7 – 5 syllable pattern. We chose cherry blossoms as our theme and wrote some amazing haikus.

Here are some examples –

Pink puffy flowers
Weaving in the bright blue sky
In little bunches
By Boris

Beautiful flowers
Falling from the blossom trees
And landing of the grass
By Emma

Pink and orange leaves
Drifting on to the grass
From high in the trees
By James

Some of us also chose other natural themes to challenge our haiku writing skills –

Squawking and squeaking
Parrots are big copycats
Parrots are noisy
By Oomo

Nice green Christmas tree
By the window sparkling
Time to decorate
By Ellis

We’re really looking forward to our showcase, another busy week ahead! By P3C and Mrs McC


P3C Roundup 3rd – 5th May

This week our Element of Art is Space. We learned about how artists create space in their art and then used our knowledge to go to the Meadows to draw a path with cherry blossom trees on the sides. We all loved being outside, getting fresh air and having a fun run about. Thanks to the mums who came with us.

We’ve been continuing to celebrate our stars of the day – this week our stars were Annabel and Nyigyal.

On Thursday we had a visit from Christopher from NYCOS – the national youth choir. We played really fun singing games with him and he was very funny and wore a very funky hat!

We enjoyed Mx Cranston’s Kahoot to explore our Reading Skills this week, our winners were Molly and Firth. We also came up with predictions for what happens next in the story, we were all very creative.

Written by P3C

P3C Roundup (24th – 28th April)

This week’s Element of Art was Tone. We explored how artists create tone with pencil before trying out some flower arranging, creating beautiful arrangements using different tones of pink. Thanks to Holly’s mum for helping us, we really loved it.

We also created paintings using different shades and tones of red or blue and then we cut them up and made Picasso inspired self-portraits. Some people also used our left over paintings to create little paper pets.

We are planning an Elements of Art Showcase in May and so this week we designed invitations to tell our families all about it! You can see all our invitation designs here.

We’ve been doing our Reading Skills this week, we enjoyed the extract about a dangerous royal quest.

With our dance teacher Bobby we practised our waltz and our jive. With the waltz Bobby taught us how to move around the floor a bit, it was fun. The jive is quite tricky but we’re getting there.

Miss K took us to the Meadows for PE. We were practising our 60m run, we averaged around 13 seconds!

In Maths we are learning about Time. We made our own clocks to help us and looked at o’clock and half past.

By Firth and Ezra.

Clay Creations

This week’s Elements of Art focus has been form. The children used clay to create a variety of different things, from pots to bowls and decorative tiles and coasters.

We started by heading out to the nature strip to collect some interesting leaves to imprint into the clay. Some of us decided to use the modelling tools to add other textures.

They were finally dried out this morning and we all enjoyed a relaxing morning painting and varnishing our designs. Lots of and proud faces!

P3C weekly round up (17th – 21st April)

This week our Element of Art was Form. We looked at how artists use form in their work, creating 3D sculptures and making things look 3D in drawings and paintings. We made some sculptures using clay and were inspired by the art of Charles McGee to make some 3D black and white artworks.

We completed some Reading Skills tasks this week, doing different activities every day. You can see the paragraph and questions on our Reading Skills Sway. We have enjoyed doing our daily reading skills missions and will try them again next week.

Our new maths topic is Time. We learned about different units of time and went outside into the playground to time different activities such as running from one side of the playground to the other and skipping 25 times.

In our ballroom dancing lessons Bobby started to teach us the jive, it is quite tiring. You have to do very small steps and it’s really complicated but we think it’s fun.

For PE this week we went to the Meadows with Miss K and practised throwing javelins.

We have decided to do our Star of the Day time again and started this week. We choose one person each day to be our star and just before home time we discuss why we think they are fantastic. It’s lovely to talk about all the great things our classmates do, such as being kind friends, good learning partners and super dancers! Our stars this week have been Emma, Eliza and Alex 🙂

Written by Oomo and Molly

P3C round up (27th – 31st March)

This week our bloggers are Ellis and Kimi. Here is their round up of our week.

At the start of the week we combined some of our previous Elements of Art, using colour and shape to make some overlapping artwork.

Our new Element of Art this week was texture. We learned that texture is how something feels or looks like it feels. In little groups we went on a texture hunt, taking pictures of different textures around us before putting them together in presentations on the iPads. We enjoying looking at art work by Vincent Van Gogh and thinking about how he created texture in his paintings. Later in the week we made stamps with lots of different materials and textures and then stamped them on a piece of paper. Once we had tried our own stamps we made some collaborative art works.

For Literacy this week we were inspired by two famous paintings to do some creative writing. We could choose our own style of writing – we wrote comic strips, stories, letters and postcards.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – Georges Seurat
The Scream – Edvard Munch

In PE we were doing gymnastics with Miss K and made up routines in little groups. Some of us got gold medal stickers for our routines and some of us got silver. Our dance teacher, Bobby was off this week but we practised our waltz steps. We think we are getting better and look forward to showing Bobby our progress after the holidays.

This week we used our knowledge about Ramadan to make Keynote presentations to share our learning. We also learned about another religious festival that takes place at this time of year, Easter. People shared their Easter traditions such as seeing family, decorating and rolling eggs and of course chocolate!

It’s the holidays now for two weeks, we hope you all enjoy the rest!

P3C weekly round up (Monday 20th – Friday 24th March)

Here is our round up from last week written by our bloggers Elaina and Eliza.

Some children in the class have decided to start a Tidy Club to keep our classroom organised and looking lovely. People can volunteer to help tidy up our classroom. Mrs McCracken is very impressed and a little surprised!

We have been learning about Ramadan which started last week. We know that Muslim people celebrate it for a whole month. Some people fast but you have to be a bit older than us to do that. They fast to understand how other people who aren’t as lucky as them feel. Ramadan ends with a big celebration called Eid. You get presents and people usually have a big feast.

Our Element of Art last week was Shape. We learned that French artist Henri Matisse was a painter and then changed to collage when he had a big operation. We made collages like Matisse using geometric and biomorphic shapes. We made pictures with our plastic shapes from our maths lessons and created a wire shape curtain inspired by American artist John Garrett.


We swam lots of breadths of the pool in the Swimathon, it was very fun and exciting. Some parents volunteered to count for us, thanks for helping out.

We have been learning about biographies and last week we wrote our own autobiographies. It was fun to write about ourselves, we know everything and we don’t get anything wrong!

Elements of Art: texture

This week’s focus in our Art topic is texture. We took the learning outdoors and went on a scavenger hunt to find different textures in the nature strip. We used words like bumpy, lumpy, smooth, hard, soft and crunchy to describe what we found. We used the ipads to take photographs of our findings and shared our results back in the classroom. Tomorrow’s learning will be how to create the look of different textures when sketching.

P3C weekly round up (Monday 13th – Friday 17th March)

P3C have decided to take it in turns to post a roundup of how our week has gone. Two pupils will be in charge of recording our week in photos using the iPad and then working with Mrs McCracken to write the blog post at the end of the week.

Our first bloggers are Boris and Sophie.

On Tuesday P3C had our first ballroom dancing lesson with our teacher, Bobby. We have started learning to do the waltz. Some of us were leaders and moved forward while the rest of us were followers and moved backwards. It’s a bit tricky but we are getting there with practice.

In PE with Miss K we did gymnastics. We walked on balance beams and tried different types of rolls like teddy bear, backwards and pencil rolls.

The Element of Art we focused on was Line. We made posters to show different types of line, we drew ourselves with a bad hair day and used lines and complimentary colours to create artworks.


By our weekly bloggers Sophie and Boris.

Elements of Art in full swing!

Our Elements of Art topic is in full swing now. So far the class have explored colour, looking at the work of a range of artists including Yayoi Kusama and Steven Brown.

This week we have already made a start to our learning about line. The children worked collaboratively to mark out as many different types of lines as they could on large posters. Then then used these ideas to create their own individual ‘Bad Hair Day’ art.

We have also been lucky enough to welcome a former Scottish Champion Ballroom dancer into school to work with the children. Everyone enjoyed learning the first few steps of the waltz and can’t wait to learn more next week!

Bake Sale Success!

Rengim and her friends were delighted to share the total raised from last week’s bake sale at assembly today. An amazing £500! What a super total and for such an important cause. Fantastic effect from all those that organised, baked and bought!

Bake Sale

What an amazing turn out for the P3 Bake sale today! The stall was organised by 7 pupils from 3A and they put in so much effort in promoting their stall by speaking out in assemblies, making posters and speaking to individual classes. Thank you to all who made cakes for the stall and for the parents who helped in the preparation and on the day – safe to say it was a roaring success!! We cannot wait to find out the total raised to be donated to the aid efforts for the earthquake in Turkey. Well done everyone!

World Book Day

3A had fun yesterday for World Book Day. There were some super costumes and the children enjoyed kicking off the day with a guess the character game. They also enjoyed joining a live lesson all about books and designing a gift card for a book shop. The gift card designs will be entered into a UK wide competition with some amazing prizes available for the school and all the children in the class if one of the entries is the winner – wish us luck!

Angles, Position, Movement and Coordinates

We have spend the past few weeks looking at directional language, angles and coordinates.

Today we embraced the chilly weather and went out into the playground for maths.

We moved round 3 stations. One was using our own ‘angle eaters’ to find as many right angles as we could. Station 2 involved blindfolding a partner and using directional language to guide them through a path we made from cones. Finally, station 3 was all about coordinates. Working in small groups to design a coordinates grid and then giving each other a set of coordinates to mark the bean bags.

A busy morning where the children were able to really show off their new knowledge!

Bake sale prep!

Some of our lovely p3s have decided to organise a bake sale to raise money for the awful earthquake in Turkey. They have worked collaboratively to design posters and some spoke at assemblies today to get the word out there!

The bake sale will be held next Friday, 3rd of March, at 12:10 in the playground. Come along to buy some tasty treats and raise money for an important cause!

Amazing Scottish Islands

To showcase the knowledge and understanding gained during our Scottish Islands topic, the children have been busily creating their very own islands.

They had to use their knowledge of landscape, industry and population to design the islands. They also had the added challenge of sticking to a budget. Only able to choose certain items and having to prioritise which would be most beneficial to the islanders.

After designing their islands, the class enjoying having a look at each others designs, leaving feedback on the star post-it’s.

We hope you enjoy having a wee look at some of our designs!

Art Critics

As part of our Scotland topic we’ve been looking at the Scottish artist John Bellany.

Everyone worked really hard to create some stunning harbour pictures using paint and oil pastels.

We then took a ‘trip’ to the p3A art gallery were we enjoyed appreciating everyone’s beautiful and individual art work.

As art critics we were able to write down some comments about one another’s art. We wrote specific things we liked about the pictures as well as how they made us feel.

Ceilidh Fun!

We have been enjoying learning a variety of Scottish country dances as part of our Scotland focus this term. To celebrate the end of this block of learning, we enjoyed a wee ceilidh this morning.

The children worked brilliantly in their partnerships, danced in time to the music and we even showed off our Virginia Reel dance to p3B at the end of our ceilidh.

Then it was back to the classroom for some shortbread, yum!

Brilliant Budgeting

Today we were combining our recent work on Toys and Money. Pupils worked collaboratively in pairs to research the best gifts to buy for different characters. They had to take into consideration the age of the character and had to stick to a set budget.

They also developed their tech skills by navigating their way around, and filtering the website.

Super teamwork and excellent budgeting, well done 3A!

Toy shop

To round off our ‘Toys’ topic carried over from last term, today children in P3A worked together to create their own toy shop in the classroom. The children discussed and planned what a shop needed, the things they would need to make to sell and how it should look. Lots of thought went into how to help the role play come alive with ideas of name badges for the shop keepers, scarves and hats for the customers coming into the shop and even gift cards to purchase! There was great delight when all the elements came together and the shop was ready to open, even complete with a security team – see if you can spot them in the photos! The children loved calculating how much money to spend and how much change to give, connecting up maths and the toys topic.

Creating Yoga Sequences

We’ve been enjoying a block of yoga in p3 this term. We have been focusing on our breathing and making the yoga poses flow into one another.

This week the children worked hard in small groups to create their own short yoga sequences which they then presented to the rest of the class.

I was really impressed with the creativity and team work skills shown by everyone.

Perfect start to our Toys topic!

We had a brilliant afternoon in 3A today. We started our new Toys topic off with an afternoon of play.

Many people kindly brought in a toy from home. It was lovely to see people playing so collaboratively and enjoying sharing each others toys.

I had a brilliant time and enjoying being introduced to lots of new toys too!

Excellent Enterprising

A big well done to Ben, Ossian and Munro for working together to raise money for the recent floods in Pakistan.

The budding artists decided to make and sell their own drawings to raise money. They worked collaboratively and organised the sale independently and by the time I made it over everything had sold!

Well done for such good team work, looking forward to finding out the total you raised on Monday.

Marvellous Maths

We like to keep things active and hands on in p3 when it comes to maths. Here is a wee snap shot of what a typical numeracy looks like for us.

We split the lesson into 3 stations. Station 1 is with the teacher learning new skills and showing our understanding.

Station 2 is usually a follow-up or consolidation task. Today we completed a Number of the Day task in our jotters. This is a good way for us to apply lots of our number knowledge.

Station 3 changes daily. Sometimes there are targets activities or games and other days itsba free play Station. Today we worked collaboratively in our maths groups on targeted tasks linked to the learning done on the carpet.

We hope you enjoyed this little insight into what a maths lesson looks like for us!

Learning about Food Miles

We are nearly at the end of our Food and Farming topic and today we were learning about Food Miles.

We worked in groups to investigate Food labels to discover where they were grown. We then used the food miles calculator to see how far the food had travelled to reach us here in Scotland.

It allowed us to see how the foods we eat can have an impact on out environment. Lots of great discussions and team work, well done p3!

Fantastic Foodbank Appeal

Well done to our super p3 team. You all worked so hard communicating information to all the Sciennes families, presenting in front of classes and at assemblies and collecting, sorting and organising the items ready for pick up today.

The staff from the Foodbank project were super impressed and grateful for all your efforts!

Thank you to all the families who contributed, we really appreciate it!

Fitness Skills

In p3 we have been enjoying tracking and developing our fitness skills in P.E. We’ve been working our way round different activities and tracking how we improve on a weekly basis. Some excellent core strength, balance and coordination skills on show this week!

Brilliant Bread Bakers!

As part of our Food and Farming project we enjoyed making bread this week. We were surprised to learn we could make bread out of just 2 ingredients. Great sharing and team work from everyone!

Foodbank Appeal

Dear families,

Here is a message from our P3 pupils:

P3 is doing a Collection for Foodbank with the Edinburgh food project. We are needing you to bring in canned food and food with a long life such as dried pasta, rice, cereal. Please bring in any Donations that you can Before Friday 14th of October. Please can you bring it to your classroom and P3 will collect it from you.

Thank you for your support of our enterprise project 😀

P2B animal classification

We have been learning to classify animals into different groups. We sorted lots of different seashore animals into vertebrates and invertebrates. We can put animals in the correct group and we can explain our choice. Here are some examples of our independent work.

P2A and P2B symmetry

We have been enjoying learning about symmetry in P2. We understand what a line of symmetry is and can create our own symmetrical designs…. Some of us are already learning to make patterns with 2 lines of symmetry. We have worked hard and had lots of fun!

P2B play-based learning

P2 had an exciting morning today as the classes rotated round clockwise and visited a different p2 classroom. P2B had the chance to experience the different play opportunities in Mrs Walker’s room and really enjoyed our morning. We have been developing our story telling, writing, data-handling, construction skills and creative skills through our play.

P2B play-based learning

P2 had an exciting morning today as the classes rotated round clockwise and visited a different p2 classroom. P2B had the chance to experience the different play opportunities in Mrs Walker’s room and really enjoyed our morning. We have been developing our story telling, writing, data-handling, construction skills and creative skills through our play.

P2B numeracy

P2B have been working hard on the early skills for multiplication and division. Today we had a warm-up song counting in 3s and then a variety of small group and practical tasks to help build our understanding of grouping and sharing. We are very good at working together and supporting and challenging each other in our learning. We can create equal groups, describe these groups and say how many items in total, using skip-counting, doubles and repeated addition to help us.

P2B seashore fun!

We are very excited about our new topic ‘The Seashore’. We enjoyed reading ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch’ this week and creating art work and story maps. Today we had a morning of play focussed around our learning from this week. We had a a great time and showed some really independent learning.

P2B multiplication and division

P2B continue to work hard on the early skills for multiplication and division. This week we are building and describing arrays and using arrays as a strategy to solve word problems. We have enjoyed lots of opportunities for active learning and are great at supporting our peers in their learning.

P2C Victorian Topic

P2C are really enjoying learning about the Victorians. Before the holiday we were learning about Queen Victoria and her life. We made comparisons between objects from then and now. This week we have been investigating some important inventions from the Victorian era and thinking about how they have impacted our lives today, for example, the telephone and the postage stamp. We have been inspired by the Victorians and today we started to think about what we would invent if we were inventors. We put on our inventor hats and have come up with some great ideas. Later this week we will create models of our inventions. Thank you for all your junk donations so far.

P2b Victorian Inventions

Primary 2 are learning about important inventions from Victorian times which have had an impact on modern day life. Today we learned about Alexander Graham Bell and made our own telephones using paper cups and string. We had lots of fun testing them out! We also learned about Samuel Morse, who invented the telegraph system and Morse code. We wrote our names and a short message for a friend to decode.

Victorian school tour P2B

P2B had a very exciting afternoon today. As part of our Victorians topic, Mr Scott took us on a tour round the school to look at some features that have been here since the school was build in 1892. We got to see the old boiler room, which would have stored a large pile of coal to stock all the fireplaces around the school. We also saw the swimming pool and the attic and spotted where the original girls and boys entrance doors would have been. It was very interesting and we enjoyed seeing areas of the school that we do not normally have access to. Thank you Mr Scott!

P2A measure

We have been learning about measure over the last few weeks. We have been learning to use mathematical language to compare items, e.g. heavier, lighter, shorter, taller, greatest, least, we have been measuring items using non-standard units of measurement such as cubes as well as having an introduction to standard measuring tools. We have been so interested and have engaged really well in every lesson.

P2b Numeracy

P2b are still working hard, even in their Christmas jumpers! Today we were consolidating our understanding of place value by playing mini board games and making numbers with materials. We are showing that we can understand how numbers are built using hundreds, tens and ones and that we can identify the value of each digit.

P2C So far…


Primary 2C have had a wonderful term so far and wanted to share some of their learning with you. Some of the learning so far included creating our own imaginary street, families and houses as part of the street topic. The Mayor of Sciennes opened our wonderful Sparkle Café and then there was a mysterious break-in the following week. We looked at the evidence we had and wrote a newspaper article telling the residents of Sparkle Street. We have also been practising our counting on and back, sequencing and grouping and sharing. In literacy we have been working on our sounds, spelling, reading and writing. P2 made their own 3D moving models to show what they would like to do with the road space if it was closed. P2 have worked incredibly hard, shown resilience and a can-do attitude to each task. A big well done P2C, now it is time to enjoy the October break with your families and friends. Thank you to all the families for your continued support. Have a relaxing well-deserved break.

Greenspace p2b

P2B have been working to create a greenspace for the members of their Nature Street Community. We talked about how we needed to meet the needs of different groups of people. We worked in small groups to draw a design for our space and then made a 3D model. We used problem solving skills, team work and lots of creativity. We are really pleased with our designs.

I can design and construct models and explain my solutions.TCH 1-09a

Wonderful Work

P2A are fantastic learners. The class wanted to share some examples of their wonderful work to date. We hope you enjoy what you see! 📝

Number bonds
Our wonderful number bond clouds
Colour Monster Daily Check In
Adjectives
Mapping
Sentences
Literacy