Primary 1/2 2016

Maths

We will now have differentiated maths learn-its.  Please look in the front of your child’s reading record to establish whether they are in the blue or the yellow group.  Look for the coloured dots on the top of the first page.  (Some children did not have their reading records/folders at school today so will not have coloured dots in the front of their reading records).

Yellow Group

Continue to revise 1+1, 2+2, 3+3, 4+4, 5+5.  Try asking your child nonsense sums with these learn-its e.g. 3 monkeys + 3 monkeys, 4 bananas + 4 bananas etc

Blue Group

Please continue to revise the learn-its above.  You can also try learning our new learn-its 6+6, 7+7, 8+8, 9+9, 10 + 10.  Once your child becomes confident with these you could try using the words ‘double’ and ‘half to provide an additional challenge e.g. what is double 7?  What is half of 16?

Literacy

• Reading will be on Tuesday and Thursday this week.
• P1s – new sounds in sound book (on Tuesday).  P1s with z, x and qu: we now know all of our initial sounds.  Please spend this week revising all of these sounds.
• Please spend 20 minutes on ‘teach your monster to read’ this week.  I noticed a lot of children still need to start this – please let me know if you are having problems logging on.
• All P2s will be learning ‘ay’ (or ew)  this week.  Please cut up the sounds that were given home and try making different ay words.  These will be given out on Tuesday.

Our ‘World Explorers’ wall is starting to take shape and it is looking great.  If you have not done so already, please bring your photographs of you travelling, to school as soon as possible.  We are all really enjoying looking at them and talking about them.

Our independent task today was to use different collage materials to make a Chinese flag.  Our targets were to use the correct colours and to work well as team.  We were very kind to our group members and tried hard to share our ideas with our group.

We have been travelling to China this week.  We looked at a map to decide how we could get there quickly.  We decided that a boat or an aeroplane would be the best way to travel.  In groups we made our own models of the boats or planes that would take us to China.  We worked well as a team, sharing our ideas and listening to our friends.  We drew the route our plane or boat was going to take on the map and are becoming increasingly familiar with where Scotland and China are on a map!

We have also been learning how to make Chinese fans, exploring the Chinese alphabet and writing stories about our ‘trip’ to China.  More photographs to follow.

Literacy

Please use the ‘Teach your monster to read’ letter that was sent home to access our new online reading software.  This will be your homework this term.  Please spend twenty minutes on this each week.  You can access the website by clicking here.  You can either play it for free on a laptop or desktop computer or you can download the app for it, unfortunately they have recently introduced a charge for this download.

News sounds – P1s please see your sound books for your new sounds.

Numeracy

Please continue to practise your learn-its this week.  We want to try and beat our scores when we do our beat-that assessments on Friday.   See the previous post on ‘CLIC maths’ to get ideas on how to offer an extension to these learn-its.

Our learn-its are:

1+1, 2+2, 3+3, 4+4, 5+5

Topic

We are going to be travelling to China on our trip this week.   We all need to have a ‘passport’ to make this long journey.  Please complete the passport form that was sent home.  Parents: please encourage your child to do the writing.  All passports should be returned to school on Friday.

This term we will be participating in ‘CLIC’ maths sessions 2- 3 times a week.

These interactive mental math sessions are broken down into four sections.  You might find the information below useful to help you understand what the children will be doing.

C – Counting:  counting forwards and backwards to 100 (and beyond for some), counting in 10s and 5s, reading 2 and 3 digit numbers.

L – Learn-its.  These will be sent home weekly for homework.  ‘Learn-its’ are simple, mental sums that the children will learn by heart.  They have been taught that learn-its should be answered immediately without using their fingers.   The children will be given learn-its for homework and should be orally practised most days  Please see the homework uploads on the blog weekly to see which learn-its we are focusing on.  You may wish to try:

• Asking them their learn-its and getting them to respond quickly
• Asking them nonsense sums using their learn-its e.g. 1 monkey + 1 monkey, 3 bananas + 3 bananas.  This allows the children to recognise that numbers have meaning.
• Putting on a timer for 20 seconds and getting them to orally answer as many ‘learn-its’ as they can in this time.  Try beating this time over the next few weeks.
• Asking them their sums orally whilst missing parts of their learn-its out e.g 3 add ‘what’ makes 6?
• Give them extension sums (orally) e.g. since  we know that 1+1 =2 what would 1 hundred and 1 hundred be, 1million and 1 million etc?  Please note this should only be done orally.

I – It’s nothing knew.  This section involves us applying what we can already do with small numbers to much bigger numbers or to different contexts.  

C – Calculations.  Every day we will spend five minutes developing our mental skills in solving addition and subtraction calculations.

Topic

Our topic this term is ‘World Explorers’.  We will be exploring China, France and other countries of our choice over the next few weeks.  This week we are learning about the world map and are thinking about how we can travel from place to place.  As part of this we will be creating a ‘Look how we travel’ display in the classroom.  Please could all children bring a photograph of them either travelling  or in a holiday destination. It could be on their bike to school, in the car to Grandma’s, their first ever experience on a plane or a photograph of them at a travel destination.  We would welcome any train, bus or plane tickets for our travel display too.  Please bring all photographs to school by Monday 16th at the latest.  Thank you.

Maths

Please help your child learn the sums below:

1+1, 2+2, 3+3, 4+4, 5+5.

These are our special maths ‘learn-its’. Please see the information entitled ‘CLIC’ maths on the blog to find out how to do this.  These will be our learn-its for the next few weeks.

Reading

We will be reading twice this week.  Reading will continue to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Later on this week your child will receive a ‘Teach your Monster to Read’ letter.  This is an online reading programme that we will be using for homework this term.  Please look out for it in your child’s reading folder.

We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and a very happy new year. We would like to thank you all for the very generous gifts, cards and well wishes! We look forward to seeing you in 2017!

With warm wishes,

Miss Moyes, Mrs Duncan and Mrs Bennion

P1/2M have been creating their own stories over the last few weeks.  The stories focused on one character, a polar bear, who was suffering because of global warming.

Today P1/2M took their beautifully illustrated stories to nursery and the library to share their books with the younger children.  P1/2M were fantastic with the nursery boys and girls.  They gave them time to look at the pictures and some of them even tried to teach the 3 and 4-years olds about global warming!  🙂  They had an opportunity to play in nursery or share a different story with their new friends too.  It was a wonderful opportunity for the children to develop their skills in being kind and to help them become more confident in initiating conversations with new faces.  Next week we will revisit the nursery to give the afternoon nursery children the same experience.

Due to show rehearsals we will not be doing formal reading sessions this week.  Please encourage your child to read for enjoyment at home instead by reading a range of books that they own.

The most important piece of homework is to learn the song words for our show.  Please click here to be taken to the P2C blog to access the words.   Your children know the tunes for all of the songs.

Optional Websites for this week

P1 – Starfall, Caterpillar ordering

P2 – Dino Eggs – choose one of the sounds we have been focusing on recently,   Alien pair number bonds

Costumes – very important

All P1 children will be dressed as snowmen for the school show unless they have been told otherwise.  Please could all P1 boys and girls bring a scarf to complete their costume.  They should bring this to school on Friday 9th December.  Please ensure it is clearly named.

All P2 children will be dressed as Christmas trees for the school show unless they have been told otherwise.  Please could all P2 girls and boys bring a piece of tinsel to school on Friday 9th December.

Thank you.