Outdoor Learning

During Outdoor Learning last week, we finally managed to go pond dipping!  Conrad took groups of five or six children to the pond, and each group filled several buckets of water, which they took back to the playground to examine more closely.  We found lots of interesting and different types of minibeasts in the pond water.

Thank you, Conrad, for helping us out!

Tag Rugby Festival

Our whole school Tag Rugby festival took place on Friday last week.  Primaries 1 to 3 played their games before break, and the older classes played after break.  Everyone played in their house teams, (Seals, Otters, Beavers and Dolphins) with a Primary 7 pupil acting as captain of each team.

P7 captains gathering their teams at the start of the festival.

Bruce reminded everyone of the rules before the games.

Everyone was very impressed by the standard of play, and by the good sportsmanship shown by the teams. 

Thank you to Bruce and Mark for their help in organising the festival, and thank you to Tesco for very kindly donating lots of fruit for half time!

Well done everybody!

Outdoor Learning

During last Thursday's Outdoor Learning, we visited the maze to investigate the types of minibeasts living there.

We used magnifying glasses and 'bug pots' to examine the minibeasts in more detail.

Once a cabbage butterfly landed on one of our hands and gave us a really good view!

 We even saw a dragonfly resting on the leaf of a plant near our pond.

Visit from PC Kanesh Pankhania

On Tuesday P.C. Kanesh Pankhania, the school's police link officer, visited St Andrews to talk to classes about keeping safe during the holidays.  He spoke to us about road safety, about keeping safe on beaches and near water, about not speaking to strangers and about keeping safe when using the internet.

He thought that we already knew a lot about keeping safe, but felt it was important to remind us of possible dangers before the long summer holidays!

Chess Club tournament

On Friday Sue and Ray, two of our parents who help run Chess Club, presented certificates and prizes to everyone who took part in the chess tournament last term. 

Competitors from Primary 3 and 4

Competitors from Primary 5, 6 and 7

Well done to everyone who won prizes and who took part in the tournament.  And a big thank you to Sue, Pat, Ray and Dan, who gave up so much of their time to organise Chess Club.

Minibeast display

Our completed 'Minibeast Garden' display!  You are welcome to pop into the classroom to see it properly.

K'nex Spider Trap Challenge

A rare spider has escaped from the zoo.  Our challenge was to use K'nex to build a trap, which could catch the spider and return it to the zoo, without hurting it.  We had to work in groups of three or four, and we had one hour to complete the challenge.
These are our completed traps.  Aren't they amazing?

Tag Rugby

Last week we had our last Tag Rugby session with Mark.

After our warm up activities, .... 

.... we were split into three teams and played several games.

Each time a try was scored, ....

.... we changed teams around.

Finally Mark talked to us about next week's whole school Tag Rugby festival and gave us some hints and advice.  

Thank you to Mark and Bruce for all their hard work during our Tag Rugby sessions this year.

Maths

This week we have been learning about division.  We found out that division means sharing things out equally and we have been using counters to help us do this. 

Next week we will learn how to use our times tables to help us do division sums.

Outdoor Learning

Last Thursday we carried out another minibeast hunt around the school grounds.  Last time we did this, it was a very wet day.  This time the sun was shining and it was very warm.  We wanted to compare how many minibeasts, and what types of minibeasts, we could find, compared to last time. 
We looked for minibeasts ...

... in the boat ...

... under the dolphin bin ...

... in the grass ...

... and even under the mushrooms!

We took magnifying glasses and bug collecting pots with us to examine what we found more closely, but we remembered that we had to handle any minibeasts very gently and return them to where we found them.

We found a spider's eggs below a stone.

Look at this!

Wow! That's amazing!