Nursery Update – March 2022

Some of the learning, activities and experiences happening in nursery.

This week the children have been learning about the Artist Wassily Kandinsky, who is well known for experimenting with shapes in his paintings. One of his most famous paintings was called ‘Squares with Concentric Circles.’ The children have each been contributing individual pictures that have been put together to make a class abstract piece of Art.

This is our last week exploring Shape. The children have been learning about the properties of shape through a range of experiences and activities.

Predicting and testing shapes outdoors to see if they slide or roll. Shape matching and sorting. Making straw and pipe cleaner shape jewellery was a great fun activity. We had diamond shaped necklaces, triangle shaped dangle earrings and square bracelets. They were all excited to take them home. “My Mummy is going to love all my jewellery; she will want earrings like these ones!!!”

Lots of the children have been pretending to be Firemen this week. They made their own Fire Engine, and the role-play area has been turned into a Fire Station. There have been fires everywhere in nursery!!!

Outdoor Garden News

The Mud Kitchen has moved location and has been popular with the children.

Connie’s Dad has also made us a fantastic ‘Petrol Pump’ for our car area. We can’t thank you enough. The children have had great fun filling up their cars. With some very high petrol prices!!!

       

Next week we will be learning about Easter. The children will be doing lots of craft activities and an Easter Egg Hunt in the Nursery Garden!

P1 – March 2022

We made a start into our mini topic Fairy tales with great enthusiasm. The children enjoyed listening and retelling Sleeping Beauty, making masks and acting it out. We compared it with Hansel and Gretel and looked for similarities and differences. We are developing our Role play corner into a Fairy castle with dressing up, so if you have any “royal” items that you can donate to enhance this, they would be most welcome.

Our science is closely linked to our topic. Miss Robbie is teaching us about use of materials. The three little pigs got a helping hand to build houses of straw!

We are continuing to learn 2 letter sounds and are practising reading and writing words with them. We are also using our sounds in phonics to sound out longer words. On Shrove Tuesday we made some pancake toppings and wrote about it, we retold a fairy tale, and we have been writing labels for our Gingerbread houses. We enjoyed a visit from Diane from Mearns Library who came to read a variety of stories to us, and we would encourage the children to visit the library to borrow books now that they have longer opening hours again.

In Numeracy we are using different ways to practise number bonds to 7, 8 and 9. We began to write, read and order numbers to 20. We have been exploring data handling and have learned about Carroll diagrams and Arrow diagrams. Next we will be learning about simple graphs.

In Art we learned how to mix secondary colours and used them to good effect when painting the Gingerbread man story.

 

 

P4-5 Blog Update – March

Maths

The class are finishing up with decimals and percentages and have moved on from money to time with Miss Davie.
We were learning to round decimals to the nearest tenth and some to the nearest hundredth. We are learning to calculate percentages of amounts of money. Underpinning all of this was place value skills so we have been working on these for our Soft Start in the morning and during maths lessons.

Literacy

The children have been learning to use figurative language in their writing with Miss Davie. They have been watching ‘Planet Unknown’ and writing a Captain’s Log using these skills such as alliteration, personification, and onomatopoeia. We are still reading our class novel, ‘Cosmic’.

With Miss Riley, the class are learning comprehension skills. We are learning how to infer or read between the lines. We watched a short silent Pixar clip called ‘The Birds’ and used this to make some educated guesses about what kind of dialogue would be used in the clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYTrIcn4rjg

 

Health & Wellbeing

We have been learning about what skills and abilities we have, are proud of and would need to do jobs when we are older. We have been talking about internal and external motivators, how to motivate ourselves to reach our goals and why taking little steps is important. In PE, we have been learning lots of different gymnastics skills. We have been working on our jumps and leaps, handstands, cartwheels, round-offs, vaulting and rolling. We are currently choreographing our own routines of at least 5 movements linked smoothly together. We listening to music while we did our routines last week and all the children said they experienced their mood lifted, increased focus and said they felt motivated by it!

 

Topic

We did a ‘planet fact’ hunt around the school in which we found out facts about the planets and compared them in properties such as atmosphere, size, number of moons etc. We are using this information to create a papier mache solar system in class. Once these are strong enough, we will paint them and hang them in the classroom!

 

French

The children are learning how to say and write what their favourite school subjects are. Next week, we will try to add opinion to these sentences and say why we like / dislike something.

 

P6/7 – March 2022

Literacy – Last week we wrote a narrative poem as a class based on The Tale of the Three Brothers. The children enjoyed working with a pair to write part of the poem, then putting the verses together to make a whole-class piece of work.

Our class novel this term is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone. Together we read chapter 7 before completing comprehension activities. The children particularly enjoyed ‘Blankety Blank’, where they were given a passage of text from the book with words blanked out. The children had to think of the most appropriate vocabulary to fill the blanks – points were awarded, with the highest number of points being awarded if the children used the word the author used originally. This got quite competitive!

Next week we will start planning a piece of persuasive writing linked to climate change and our current topic.

Maths – We completed our wall display showing the data we collected about children who attend clubs in and out of school.

We started learning about Time in maths. We re-capped 12- and 24-hour time, before moving on to short and long time intervals. The children planned a journey from Brechin to Edinburgh Zoo on public transport, where they were required to research and correctly read bus and train timetables. Some children have started learning the formulae for calculating Speed, Distance and Time.

We went on a ‘Converting Units of Time Scavenger Hunt’ in the playground. The children were to convert minutes to hours, hours to days etc.

HWB – In Health and Wellbeing our focus for the remainder to term is on Body Image and Self Esteem. The children had brilliant discussion on Appearance Ideals and where these pressures come from to look a certain way. The conversations around this topic lasted days! The children then drew what this ‘ideal’ person looked like, and we came to the conclusion that it was not realistic!

IDL – In the last few weeks in our Energy and Sustainability topic we have learned about pollution. We learned about the causes and effects of Soil/Land pollution, Air pollution, Visual pollution, Water pollution, Noise pollution and Light pollution.

Being guided by the children’s interests, this week we started to look in more depth at Climate Change. We researched how satellite images from space can be used to track Climate Change. We then entered a ‘Logo Lift Off Challenge’ competition to hopefully have our logos displayed on rockets being launched from the UK later this year!

Last week we went for a walk around the village to do some litter-picking. We talked about where the rubbish could have ended up if we did not pick it up. We collected 4 bags of rubbish!

P2/3 – March 2022

In literacy we have been choosing picture stimulus’ to write about and have been self-assessing our work to ensure we have met our success criteria.  We are also learning to read over what we have written to check it makes sense.  For our comprehension we have started to work collaboratively and each have a role to play so we are all accountable when working with our task maps; the reader, the recorder and the manager.  We have focused on our class novel for this and the children are thinking deeper about the characters.  We have also been creating stories using our story stones, focusing on a beginning, middle and end of our story and we are retelling them to our peers.

In beyond number we have been learning about the time.  In primary 2 we are learning the o’clock and half past and in primary 3 we are learning quarter past the hour and quarter to the hour.  We are also learning to read digital time.

In expressive arts we have been focusing on the Bfg and have made our own dream catchers.  We took care to thread them and use colours which make us feel happy so that they bring us happy dreams.

 

And in p.e. we have been doing gymnastics, focusing on balance, travel and shape holds.  We have been working together to form sequences and have been peer assessing our sequences, giving each other constructive feedback on how we can improve our sequences.

P2/3 February 2022

We are continuing with our Fettercairn Countryside topic and have enjoyed a walk around the village.  Some of us captured our walk on camera while the rest of us completed our observation sheet.  We discussed the flood defence area and the purpose of it.

In technologies we have been learning how to use our chrome books to carry out research.  We had questions about the Fettercairn Royal Arch that we wanted to find the answers to and we worked with a partner to retrieve the information.

We also planned and designed how we would construct our own Royal Arch out of Lego.  We worked with a partner and a carefully constructed our arches.  The attention to detail was fantastic!

In literacy we are promoting and encouraging our enjoyment of reading in our classroom; ‘Be Excited About Reading’.  One of the children has illustrated our B.E.A.R while others helped to paint it.  As a class we have decided to name her Berry.  We are also developing our reading corner to create a more enjoyable, relaxing space to read.

In art we had the pleasure of a parent in to help us to design and create story stones.  We will place these in our reading corner so that we can tell our own stories to others.

We have been focusing on friendship in health and wellbeing and thinking about what qualities we think are most important to us in a friend.  The children then created their own ‘friendship recipe’, discussing which ‘ingredient’ was most important in our ‘friendship recipe’.  The recipe was a perfect blend!

P6/7 February 2022

In literacy, P6/7 have been analysing the Tale of the Three Brothers from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. We created detailed story maps depicting the main points of the story. We are now learning to write narrative poems and will use the Tale of the Three Brothers as our inspiration.

We have started to apply our learning of Figurative Language (alliteration, similes/metaphors, onomatopoeia, personification) to our writing.

We finished our Fractions topic in maths and have moved onto Data and Analysis. So far, we have learned how to interpret and read bar and line graphs. The children chose what they would like to gather data on before drawing their own graphs.

Next week we will be looking at pie charts in more depth, before creating a display in the school hall showing how many pupils attend clubs and activities with graphs and charts.

Last week we celebrated Children’s Mental Health week – this year’s theme was Growing Together. We took part in a live assembly before discussing how we can look after our mental health. The children were encouraged to think about their support network that they can go to for help if needed.

We have been focusing on Substance Misuse and have so far learned about the dangers of smoking and drinking alcohol. Next week we will be learning about legal and illegal drugs.

Our current topic is Energy and Sustainability. We learned about what it means to be sustainable. To start our topic, we learned about the Global Goals for Sustainable Development, and we have chosen the ones we would like to focus on (see picture below). We also explored renewable and non-renewable sources of energy, discussing advantages and disadvantages of things like oil, coal, wind energy, geothermal energy, solar energy etc. This week we started learning about Oil and Gas in Scotland – we looked at what happens on an oil rig and how we get oil, and the children will make a poster for our wall display showing what they have learned.

We were very fortunate to have Mrs Armstrong with us last week doing an art lesson. The children made robots using electrical circuits before doing some robot-themed prints. P6/7 have been enjoying drama recently, where we have been looking at improvising and playing a character, thinking about body language and facial expressions.

P1 February 2022

In PE  we are working on balancing into tuck, we will be moving on to rolls and then creating a gymnastic routine using apparatus by the end of term. We have enjoyed a rugby lesson and will be doing two more.

We have begun to read and write words with 2 letter sounds sh and th. We enjoyed listening to and learning some Scottish words such as favourite animals. We were excited to find out that the Bookbug Picture Book Prize 2022 went to ’Inch and Grub’ which was also the book which got the most votes in our class.  In French we joined in a live online lesson during Languages Week and are working on numbers to 10.

In Numeracy we consolidated addition facts to 5 including missing numbers and adding 3 numbers. We have been telling the time on the hour with digital and analogue clocks.

As part of our Weather topic we looked at what makes ice melt, and we are working on presenting our own weather forecasts. We have made winter pictures in Art.

P4/5 – Blog Update February

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a lovely mid-term break.

Topic

I hope all the children are managing to fill in their moon chart for the month! We have been learning about properties of the sun and moon, why we have night and day, and we are now learning about the properties of each planet in our solar system. We are going to use this information to create presentations in groups to feedback to the rest of the class.
We watched a BBC documentary called ‘Universe’ with Brian Cox which was very interesting!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09ybpb8/universe-series-1-1-the-sun-god-star

PE

Primary 4-5 are starting a block of gymnastics. We are working on skills such as jumps, leaps, and rolls with the goal of creating a sequence using elements of all the skills we have learned.

 

Maths

The children finished fractions with learning how to express them in their simplest form and we are now moving on to learning about decimals and percentages. As before, if primary 4/5 are finding this tricky they are not confident with their times tables. If you would like some extra practice at home, you can visit https://www.timestables.co.uk/.

 

Expressive Arts

We were lucky enough to have Mrs Armstrong come in and visit us last week and the children created some amazing shaving foam marbling and used the patterns to make planets on a splatter background. The children then used coloured sand to make textured planets which we hung from the washing line in the classroom. Both projects turned out amazing and we were very grateful for her visit!                                                                                                                                    

French

The children were learning to say and write classroom objects in French. They were telling me what was in their pencil case, and what colour the items were!

P6/7 Update – January 2022

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and Happy New Year!

Our focus in literacy since returning to school after Christmas has been on Scots Language. We listened to The Gruffalo in Scots before unpicking some of the Scots words used. We created individual Scots word banks to keep track of all the new words we are learning! This week we explored the first chapter of ‘Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stane’. We then tried to re-write a passage written in Scots to English. I know lots of children in the class have been enjoying practising their Burns Poems at home!

In grammar we have been learning about more figurative language – we have now explored similes and metaphors, alliteration, onomatopoeia and personification. We have discussed how using these literary devices in our writing can really improve the experience for the reader as they will have a clearer picture in their head of what is being described.

In maths our focus has been on Fractions. We have learned how to find equivalent fractions, as well as how to simplify fractions to their simplest form. This week we have learned how to calculate the fraction of a number. Some children have moved onto ordering and adding and subtracting fractions.

Next in maths we will be moving onto information handling where we will explore charts and graphs.

In Health and Wellbeing at the moment we are discussing the dangers of smoking. P6/7 were very shocked to learn about the substances found in a cigarette! We learned about the effects smoking can have on all our major organs.

         

We have been using the worry box more in class, taking lots of time to talk through anonymous worries and offer advice – it is lovely to hear the children supporting one another.

In the coming weeks we will be looking at self-esteem and body image.

We have now finished our Water and Chemical Reactions topic. We carried out a science experiment using Vitamin C tablets – we put the tablets in a bottle with water and put a balloon on top. The children loved watching the balloons inflate with carbon dioxide.

Our next topic is Energy and Sustainability, which we started this week. So far we have learned about what being sustainable means. The children would like to learn more about climate change, greenhouse gases and how we can help to make our planet by being more sustainable.