Tag Archives: planning

Time on Desert Island Books

March 9, 2013 User deactivated Leave a comment

In numeracy we have been learning all about time. We started by creating a mind map. In green we wrote all the things that we already know about time. In orange we wrote what we want to learn about time and in purple we wrote how we would like to learn. We all talked about what we would like to do with our role play area and we decided that we would like to have a clock shop in the classroom to help us learn about time. We thought about what resources and activities we would need in a clock shop so we all made a plan of what we would need. We also had to think of a name for our shop. We decided to call our shop Mr Wolf’s clock Shop. We love playing in our clock shop and we have been putting prices on things to help us learn about money, sorting broken and working clocks and writing the times. We have even been making our own clocks to practise telling the time with at home.

At the writing table we have been practising writing and sounding out using blend sounds. We were surprised when we came in to find that the Easter Bunny had visited us and left us an early Easter present of eggs….but not just ordinary eggs they were spelling eggs. We have to turn the eggs and match up the sounds to blend them together to make words. Once we have read them we have to sound them out to write them.

In health and wellbeing we are still learning all about the food groups with Ms Gauld. This week it was the pink builders. In this group there are things which contain protein. This is the group which helps you to build muscles and can help keep your blood healthy. We couldnt do any taste testing this week but we did play a game on the computer with Mrs Mackay where we had to select the healthiest food possible from a supermarket and put it in our trolley, from a cafe and put it on our tray and when we made our breakfast. It was good fun and we had to think carefully about what foods where in which groups as well as thinking about how much of each of the different types of food we should eat to stay healthy.

We are still learning all about Lost and Found, our moving images education project. This time we had to record what we liked and disliked about the book and the film. We did a SATA which is when we Sit About Talk About to share our thoughts and opinions with our friends then we wrote our thoughts on a paper and stuck it on the book or the film board. We all got different colours of paper so we could see which ones were our ideas. We also took a picture of everyone together who liked the film and everyone who liked the book then we wrote in a speech bubble to tell people why we thought that. In our class only one person, Becca, liked the book the best and 22 people liked the film the best.

We have been very busy in art recently and we all made a penguin as we have been researching lots about them for our topic. We decided that it would be a good thing to write and imaginative story about. So this week, for World Book Day we started to write our own story. On the first of day we used our used thinking triangle and flowers to remember and apply so that we could give our Penguin a character name. Next, we had to think about some information for our penguin character using our analysing flower. We had to think about some facts about our penguins so that we could use them to build our story. We were all very creative and are looking forward to writing our stories next week too. When they are finished we are going to turn them into a class book for our library area.

We got a surprise package in the post this week. A very nice doggy sent us a fab book with lots of pictures to put in our story area. We love hearing about the adventures Mrs Mackay’s dog has so when we found out that one of her dog friends had written a book we were very excited. Mrs Mackay told us that the dog, Spaniel Harry, was a famous dog because he interviews people just like the people on the news, and he writes books. He sent us a picture of himself which we put on the wall and he sent us the book. We all love reading the book to see what words we know and we all love looking at the pictures.

We also got to watch a short film that taught us about other jobs that dogs can do. It had Spaniel Harry in it too but this time he had a friend called Nelson the firedog. Nelson has a very important job with the FireBrigade and he helps the fire fighters work out where the fire started and because he has a special nose he can smell lots of things that the human fire fighters can’t. Nelson doesn’t wear a fire suit like human fire fighters but he does wear special boots to stop his feet from getting hurt.We were excited to find out that animals can sometimes need skills for work too!

We all talked about staying safe and we got a special task to go home and get our grown ups to check that our fire alarms worked and to remind our grown ups to check them. Here is a link to the video we watched …

Harry and Nelson really captured our imaginations and lots of us drew pictures of them but they also got us thinking about what jobs we would like to do when we are older and what skills we would need. Edyn and Carys want to be artists becuase they are good at art. Maddison decided she wants to be a ‘police girl’. She made a list of the skills she needed in her yellow homework book.

We were looking around our room this week and we decided that we wanted to make our library a bit more interesting.

First we made a plan of our ideas. we used orange to show what ideas we had about what we wanted it to look like, purple to show what activities we wanted to have in the library and we used blue to show what we wanted to put into the new library area.

Next we set about changing it. We went with an island theme and we have called it Desert Island Books. It is now much more busy and we love using the cushions to lie under the blue twinkly stars and read or listen to a book.

We have been doing so much reading we decided to start a book rating system. We can write a book review, draw a book review or take a picture with our favourite book and a star strip.

In ICT we are getting really good at logging on with our individual log ins and passwords independently. We are also really able when programming a beebot (and a HUGE thank you to Kyra’s dad who helped Mrs Mackay and Mrs Munro out by fixing a beebot!).

We took part in a GlowMeet with lots and lots of other schools all across Scotland. It was called Flushed with Success? The RIGHT Big Toilet Debate. and it was lead by Tam Baillie who has a very important job. He is Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People (which basically means that he want to make sure that we all stay healthy, happy and safe). We had to talk about what our school toilets were like. We had to vote and type talk o other schools. It was really interesting and we all did very well.

This Sunday is Mother’s Day so we thought is would be nice if we made someone we cared about a card. First we had to fold our card, then we had to stick in a message and write who our card is to and who it is from. Next, we got our hands painted and we made a hand print on the card. We turned our hand into a flowering plant by sticking a flower petals and a flower pot on to the card. We think that they look fab and our special person will really love receiving them.

Lastly, Mrs Mackay got a surprise this week from Josh and Lara. Josh made her a beautiful pot on his potters wheel and Lara brought her in some flowers to put in it. It was so kind of them and Mrs Mackay loves her vase and her flowers. It makes her desk look fabulous. Thank you!

Week Beginning Monday 25th February

Friday 15th March is Red Nose Day- come to school in your pyjamas and bring £1. There is a cake and candy stall for pupils (donations welcomed) so bring some money for that too if you want to buy some cakes and treats.

Remember to bring your filled, named water bottle with you every day (no juice please).

HOMEWORK – Please send it to school every day but any tasks should be completed by Wednesday. The teacher will collect in the weeks work on Wednesday. Each week there will be a Yellow Book Challenge to do but you can pick which challenge you want to do from a list of 3 each week. There will be no homework on a Wednesday night.

Gym is on a Monday and Thursday. Please remember long hair will need to be tied back and no jewellery. This means all earrings must be removed. Thank you.

Fruit money for this term is £1.40 please place in a named envelope.

Please return your child’s trip form and money as soon as possible (these do not have to be sent in together).

This week we will be learning about Time – half past o’clocks(numeracy), writing a story with a beginning, middle and end (literacy) and representing our school for Red Nose Day (healthy and wellbeing).

There is no drag-on our school day! Kung Hei Fat Choi!

February 16, 2013 User deactivated Leave a comment

This has been a very funm busy and exciting couple of weeks for us. We had a long weekend and we have been learning all about Chinese New Year! Did you know that the Chinese New Year holiday lasts for two weeks but there is one special day and on that day everyone wishes each other ‘Kung Hei Fat Choi’ which means happy new year and good fortune.

We decided to make our role play area a Chinese resaurant and we thought about all the different things we would need. We looked in some books to get some ideas. Some were fiction (which means they are imaginative books) and some were non fiction (which means that they are all about real events, objects and facts which are true). In one of the books we discovered that Chinese people eat with chopsticks instead of cutlery so we put these in our restaurant and we also saw that people ate sitting on the floor at a low table so we put cushion to sit on instead of chairs. We all really love being in the restaurant and practising using the chopstick to eat as well as using the wok to cook in.

We learnt that instead of presents Chinese people give each other red envelopes with letters of good luck inside and money ( we all liked that idea!). Sometimes at family meals there would be a decoration covered in red envelopes and people would take one when they when home. We have been trying our some Chinese writing at our writing table and some of us made our own red envelopes to give to our friends.

Did you know that the Chinese New Year is named after an animal? 2013 is the year of the snake. We wanted to know about why the years were named after animals and how they worked out which order they would come in. We heard a story all about a race which the Emperor’s daughter organised because all the animals wanted to go first. We all really enjoyed the story and lots of us said that we thought that it was a very clever way to solve the problem.

To try to help us remember the sequence of the animals who won the race by completing a cut and stick worksheet. It was tricky but we all did well.

In literacy we all completed a fact sheet to show what we have been learning about Chinese New Year. Some of the pictures we had to draw were already in our classroom and that really helped us.

In art we all made our own Chinese dragon puppet. We had to design a head design and tail design then fold the paper carefully using the fold and flip method. We all did really well and were so excited about them we all took them straight home to share with our families!

In music we have been learning about chinese music and rhythm which is the musical word for pattern. We learnt two songs. One was about two tigers and the other song was called Gong Xi which means good fortune. We were really good at singning them so we played some musical instruments following the rhythm. We used a tambourines, indian bells, symbols and wooden blocks. It was really fun and we are looking forward to learning some more songs and trying to play different rhythms.

We were lucky to work with Ms Gauld this week. She let us taste and smell lots of Chinese foods. We even got to wear some chinese clothes. It was all really good fun and we learnt lots. Almost all of us thought that the smell of ginger was the nicest thing.

On Tuesday we were all really hungry because it was Pancake Day which is sometimes called Shrove Tuesday.

Some of us remembered that we had read a reading book where Dad makes pancakes ( but they don’t eat them which we thought was funny). We all talked about the ingredients that Dad needed and we made a list. Then Mrs Mackay showed us a recipe on the promethean board and we talked about what it tells us to do and equipment we would need if were going to make pancakes at home would be. Next, we made our own recipe sheet and made a super job of it!

Before we went home we read a really funny book called Mr Wolf’s Pancakes. Mr Wolf was really trying to be nice to all his neighbours but they are all horrible and use terrible manners. Nobody would help Mr Wolf but he still managed to make his pancakes in the end but then his mean and rude neighbours turn up at his door and demand some pancakes (how rude!)…. don’t worry Mr Wolf soon gets his own back but we don’t want to give away the ending!

In ICT we have been learning all about using programmable resources like Beebots and controling the turtle by progamming his path. We all to take turns programming the Beebots to travel to our friends then we took part in a Beebot Challenge where we had to work out how to make our Beebot make a pattern on the floor. We made shapes, flowers and went forward and back as well as in a circle.

We are still learning all about subtraction in numeracy. We are all getting much faster and able to answer more questions correctly using the activexpression in self paced challenges in addition and subtraction every day. We are also finding tha cubes really helpful when we are working out our subtraction and addition work in the classroom and ALZ. After we finish our work we self evaluate and then we show it to our teachers and they evalute our work too. It helps us to think carefully about what we can do well, what we need to work on and we are getting so good at it that we normally have the same evaluation as our teachers.

This week we had our Open Afternoons. It was lovely to see so many of our families and we enjoyed showing them around our classroom and Active Learning Zones. We also had fun telling our grown ups about what we have been learning by going through our folios with them. After their visits our grown ups left us a note in our special folder.

Week Beginning 18th February 2013

Remember to bring your filled, named water bottle with you every day (no juice please).

HOMEWORK – Please send it to school every day but any tasks should be completed by Wednesday. The teacher will collect the weeks work on Wednesday. Each week there will be a Yellow Book Challenge to do but you can pick which challenge you want to do from a list of 3 each week. There will be no homework on a Wednesday night.

Gym is on a Monday and Thursday. Please remember long hair will need to be tied back and no jewellery. This means all earrings must be removed. Thank you.

For the pupils who applied for tennis club it will begin on Monday 18th at 3.15pm – 4.15pm. Please check with the office or class teacher if you are unsure of anything or if your child has a place. Thank you.

It’s all adding up in our new year!

January 18, 2013 User deactivated Leave a comment

What a busy time we have been having since we came back from our holidays! We have all been talking about what we would like to challenge ourselves to do for the new year. We even learnt the long word ‘resolution’. We all talked talked to our families about what we would like to write and some of us wrote it in our yellow jotters then we all wrote it on our resolution sheet to put in our folios.

We also have some new friend in our class (thanks to Mrs Paton!). We have some pet fish but some went on holiday and never came back so our fish ‘Goldie’ was getting lonely. We were so excited when Mrs Paton said that she had two fish who she found out wanted to find a new home! We decided that we couldn’t just call our new pets ‘fish’ so we decided to name them. We all thought of a name we liked and put in on a flipchart. Some of the names were very unusual but some of us thought of the same names as our friends. We had so many names that we all took turns to vote for our favourite one – some of us even decided that we liked other peoples ideas instead of our own. Once we had all voted we counted the results and the top two won. Meet Goldie (our old fish), Meemo (our goldfish who is orange) and Twinkle (our goldfish who is orange with a golden tummy).

In number work we are still practising our adding up. We have been using lots of things to help us work out the answer and some of us have really gotten the hang of it! We have been looking at finding the missing numbers in addition sums. It is tricky but we got there in the end!

Our water tray turned into a magical science experiment. We were all amazed when Mrs Mackay said that a special box had appeared and it was full of snow. Lots of us thought she was kidding because it was not very big but she told us that it was a science experiment made with magic. She showed us what was inside and explained that this bag was full of snow. We didnt think that this was right because the bag was just small and the same size as her head. She asked us if we could think of what we might have to do. George had the idea that snow is made of water so maybe we needed water to make the snow so we tried and something magical happened…. we got cold, snow and lots of it… the white powder reacted with the water and got bigger and bigger until we had lots!!! We have all enjoyed playing with it and investigating what would happen and how it feels.

We have been planning what we we want to know about our new topic ‘Lost and Found’. We watched the film which we thought was very sad but then we were very happy at the end (we even cheered!). We are really looking forward to learning more about the story. We enjoyed reading the book but were fascinated that some bits were the same and some bits were different. Some of us even noticed that there was a different illustrator because the way the pictures looked was different but the story was almost the same so it must be the same author.

Each week Mrs MacDonald sets the whole school a problem to solve. This week the problem was- what should be do about Friday afternoon activities. We decided that the best way to solve the problem was to make a mind map because Carys told us that it was important to plan if we want to do it well. So we all thought very carefully and we made a map with all our ideas on it. Then we picked the three that we thought would solve the problem the best and put a tick. We are very excited to see if our ideas will solve Mrs MacDonald and Mrs Frasers’ problem.

This term we are focusing on being Effective Contributors. We decided that the way to explain this is that we have to try our best, join in and be clear when we are explaining things. This week in our Folio Friday time we all looked at four of the ways we can be effective contributors. We looked at a picture for each one and thought about what we have done over the last two weeks that matched the picture then wrote it on the promethean board to record our ideas. We had lots of ideas. At the end we worked with our shoulder partner and shared if we each thought that we had been effective contributors. Then if we thought we were effective contributors we told our other shoulder partner what we thought we had done best from the four pictures we looked at.

In the ALZ we have been busy with more penguins!

We have made a tremendous Penguin adding wall to help with our adding stories.

We have also been self assessing. We are getting really good at it. Not just putting a green smiley face on but really thinking about if we needed help or managed it ourselves.

At the Promethean board we also have a flipchart to help us add. We need to find all the penguin friends that go together. Then write our name on it.

Week Beginning 21st January 2013

Remember to bring your filled, named water bottle with you every day (no juice please).

Gym is on a Monday. Please remember long hair will need to be tied back and no jewellery. This means all earrings must be removed. Thank you.

Fruit money will be £1.00 until the mid term break in February.

Next week is Scottish Week

Remember to practise you Nessie poem at home for our Scottish Poetry Competition.

On Friday we are having a Scottish themed dinner. Remember to fill in your form if you want school dinners that day. Packed lunches run as normal.

We have been so busy with Percy the Park Keeper and Roald Dahl (and a few other things too!)

November 17, 2012 User deactivated 3 Comments

In the Active Learning Zone this week…

We have been listening to the story of Percy the Park Keeper. He looks after a park and has lots of animal friends. We decided to make our Role Play area Percy’s Tool Shed. We had to think of all the things that Percy would need in his shed. We used a percy story book to help us and we had to think about Percy’s job. He is a park keeper and we had to think about the things he would need to do his job. We have also been painting some cardboard to make into Percy’s Shed.

Our iPad area has changed! It still has an iPad on it but all the apps we are using are music apps. We can create our own music, listen to lots of different musical instruments and even play the piano. We are enjoying experimenting with sounds and singing along to the music we make.

We have been talking about how well we learn and how we feel about it. We use faces to show how we feel. The teacher uses stars and wishes. We use sticky label faces with smiles, a line or a sad face to show how we feel about our learning. We choose this ourselves and can put it on any piece of work we do.

If we are happy with our learning we choose a face with a smile and it means…

I have done very well. I don’t need any help. It was really easy. I am happy with my work.

If we were unsure we choose a face with a line for a mouth and it means…

I’m not sure what I’m doing. It was a little bit tricky. I needed a little bit of help.

If we found something really difficult we choose a face with a sad mouth and it means…

I needed lots of help. It was really tricky. This was hard.

We have been using our Thinking Book’s in the Active Learning Zone to help us share our ideas. We can draw or write anything we want in our books. Libby drew a picture of being at the park and then she wrote a sentence using her phonics skills. Well done Libby!

We are enjoying exploring Autumn and Percy the Park Keeper stories.

Over the last few weeks in class we have been really busy. We have had Halloween fun, bonfire night celebrations as well as all our other learning.

For Halloween we all had to be witches and wizards – even Mrs Mackay. We had lots of fun when we discovered that something ‘magical’ had happened our to our sand and water trays. The water tray was filled with bats blood and we had to use special witches tools (tongs) to find hidden ingredients to make a magical potion. At the sand tray, all sorts of creepy crawls had found there way in there and we had to be witches and wizards and collect them with our special witch tools.

We also had some science experiements which only witches could perform. We had some magic potions in bottles, a glass of special witches water and we had some magic powder. We had to mix the powder with some of the potions and then add some witches water. It was amazing – as soon as we said our magic word ” Alacazam” the potions started to hiss, fizz and bubble- some even changed colour!!!!

We all wrote our own potions in writing. We all cast a spell together on the whiteboard and then we all made our own ones. They were so good that when we said the magic words the spells came to life and we had a cauldron full of yucky ingredients. We all took turns to see what we could find in the potion and because we were so brave we got to keep what we found! Our potions were so good we have made them into a book of spells!

In art we made pumpkin masks. We gave it a design and when it was home time we all put them on to surprise our grown ups. We looked really cute and a bit scary!

After Halloween it was Bonfire night. We talked lots and lots with our teachers about how to stay safe and we read a story called Danielle’s Bonfire Night. It was all about a little girl called Danielle who loved fireworks. She followed lots of rules about staying safe- she kept her cat inside so that it wouldn’t get hurt or scared. She was so excited though that she forgot some of the safety rules. She didnt wear gloves when she played with sparklers and she held two at once and so burnt her hand. It gave us lots to talk and think about and we all listened so well that we all stayed safe of Bonfire Night!

We are still learning all about Roald Dahl books. As part of our Enormous Crocodile plan we made a jungle in our role play area. We had to think really carefully about what we would need to make it into a jumgle from a castle. We made lots of leaves and painted the animals. We even decided to put camoflage on the floor and we have some of the Rolly-Polly Bird’s in the jungle to play with. Lastly, some of us thought that if we used the woods which were outside the deep dark woods could be the trees in our jungle so we used them with some crepe paper. We think it looks fab and we have lots of fun there!

We have been writing about theEnormous Crocodile too. We drew a picture of him and them we had to think about some words that described him. Most of us amazed Mrs Mackay and Mrs Munro because we sounded them out and they think that we did really well.

Since we finished our Enormous Crocodile story we have been reading the story of the Twits. They are HORRIBLE!!!!! They are dirty and smelly and cruel. As if all that wasn’t bad enough they used to be pretty and handsome but because they had so many nasty and unkind thoughts everyday they slowly got uglier and uglier. It even happened to their dog!!! We think it is a really funny story and we are looking forward to reading more about it.

In number work we have been learning all about symmetry. We started by making symmetrical paints of butterflies and we discovered that when we painted half a butterfly and folded the paper over it was the exact same on the other side. We thought that was really cool but we thought that the computer was even more amazing. We used textease paint to draw our own symmetrical pictures and we were amazed the special symmetry line was magic on the computer and when we drew a picture down one side the computer drew the symmetrical line on the other side. We had lots of fun. We all made a shield and butterfly symmetrical picture too – we are super symmetrically smart!

We are learning all about addition at the moment and we have learnt the story of 1. We have watched some addition songs and clips on the computer and played a matching game to help is remember all of the addition words. Here are some clips to watch at home:

http://youtu.be/uKD148lpBAE

http://youtu.be/pqltNDD5Ycs

http://youtu.be/MMZJWmJB5uA

On Sunday, it was Remembrance Sunday. This is a special day when people all across the country remember people who were hurt or died in a war. We learnt that to help people remember these soldiers, people wear poppies. On Remembrance Sunday special poppy wreaths are laid on special monument and in Dundee this is the Law Hill Momument.

Something very exciting happened this week- we all got our new writting jotters. These are special books where we are going to do all of our best writing. This week we wrote our own news with help from our new visiting teacher Miss Peace. It was tricky to remember to form our letters correctly and to use finger spaces so we told her what we wanted to write and she wrote it for us. Next we went over it with our writing pencils and then we had to be very careful to use our best writing and we wrote it underneath by ourselves. We can’t wait to write some more in them!

As part of our homework some of us made our own storys up. They were all fantastic! Edyn took what she had been learning about in the Active Learning Zone with the story of Funny Bones and created a new story called Funny Bones Goes To Hospital, it is fantastic. Kayla wrote her own story of version of the Sleeping Beauty story and it is brilliant too. If you haven’t already written or made your own storybook – it would be super if you could and then bring it in to share with us.

Week Starting 19th November 2012

Remember to bring your filled, named water bottle with you every day (no juice please).
We will send homework out on a Thursday. Please send it to school every day but any tasks should be completed by Wednesday. Mrs Mackay will collect in the weeks work and any other material on Wednesday. Each week there will be a Yellow Book Challenge to do but you can pick which challenge you want to do from a list of 3 each week. There will be no homework on a Wednesday night.
Gym is on a Monday. Please remember long hair will need to be tied back and no jewellery. This means all earrings must be removed.
ICT is on Wednesday afternoons.

Our project is ……. Roald Dahl Stories. We are looking at the story of The Twits this week.

This week we will be learning ;

the addition stories to 5
songs for our Christmas Show