Hello, my name is Yasmin Da Prato and I am a third year education student from the University of the West of Scotland in Ayr. I am currently on placement in P1/2 until Easter. I was also in the nursery before Christmas. I am thoroughly enjoying working in Glenluce Primary School with all the staff and pupils. As part of my placement, I have been asked to complete a parental partnerships task. This includes keeping the parents and carers up to date with the daily activities that happen in the classroom. I hope to be able to provide a little snippet of what happens in at least one lesson each day.
Week Beginning 22/02/16
On Monday, the P1/2 class had a very busy day. They started off by having a quick circle time to discuss what they did at the weekend and what was happening in the up coming week. Later on in the afternoon the class recapped what they had learned on Judaism and started to look at how they celebrate Shabbat, their holy day. All the children enjoyed watching a video, which showed a day in the life of a young boy on Shabbat. Making farm animals for the classroom display brought an end to the day.
Tuesday afternoon consisted of a walk up to Castle of Park to look for signs of Spring. It was a lovely cold day and everyone enjoyed walking with the P3/4 class up to the castle. Lots of daffodils and snowdrops were spotted, as well as the occasional rabbit. The walk allowed the children to be outside and make the most of the gorgeous day whilst giving the children some practical activities to help them spot the signs of Spring. Lots of the children built upon their general knowledge and put this into a new context. By the end of the walk, many of the little legs were sore but once we were all settled we all enjoyed a story called “All Pigs are Beautiful” which links to our topic of food and farming.
Fruit was the topic of conversation on Wednesday afternoon as we had a fruit tasting session. This was to link into our topic of food, specifically healthy eating. We tasted strawberries, raspberries, oranges, grapes and apple. As we went along we talked about what each fruit tasted, smelled, felt and looked like. The children talked about why fruit is good for you and discovered how many portions of fruit and vegetables they should eat everyday. Many of the children stated that they tried fruits that they had never had before and really enjoyed them. All of the children were able to remind me at the end of the day that tomatoes are fruits and not vegetables!
On Thursday we started looking at predictions and used the book Elmer and Rose as a context. We started off by playing a game of ‘what happens next?” in groups and everyone came up with some amazing predications. The children were given a scenario and they had to go away and work in groups to come up with three different predictions for each. We then came back together as a class and started to read the Elmer and Rose book. I stopped reading at a certain point and the children had to predict what colour Rose’s herd would be. Everyone went away and drew a picture of Rose’s herd and coloured it in. When we came back together and talked about our predictions and explained why we thought that. Finally, we read the end of the book to find out if we were correct.
On Friday morning we continued to look at predictions. We went over the pictures and started writing down what colour we thought Rose’s herd would be. After discussing how we arrived at our predictions, many of the children were able to explain why they thought that their prediction was correct. After break, the children had P.E. and loved doing fitness. This included playing lots of tag games and cups and saucers. At the end of the day, everyone enjoyed some well-deserved Golden Time after a very busy week.
Week Beginning 29/02/16
There was lots of measuring activities happening in the class on Monday morning. The children were spilt up into groups to try out different pouring and filling activities, which allowed them to find out about capacity. Lentils, rice, sand and salt was used to fill a multitude of containers giving the children the chance to see which container held the most. Each group was then able to work out that capacity is the maximum amount that something can hold. In the afternoon, we looked at the Creation Story as this linked to our recent lesson on Shabbat in Judaism. This involved understanding what happened on each of the seven days. Lots of cutting and sticking concluded the day, as a matching activity helped the children pair up the creation process and the days it happened on.
During Wednesdays topic lesson the children looked at a variety of adverts and started to discover what makes a good advert. Lots of food advertisements were used to link in with the food and farming topic. Part of the topic involves looking at advertising and the children were set a challenge to decide whether or not adverts always tell the truth. After much debate, we found out that that adverts make their product sound like ‘the best’ on the market and can tell some fibs. Lots of adverts used exaggeration and make things sound better than they actually are. Wednesday’s maths lesson was based on time. The Primary 1’s were looking at days of the week and months of the year whilst the Primary 2’s explored the seasons. A washing line was put up so the Primary 1 children could rearrange the days of the week into the correct order. Outside in the cloakroom, a months of the year hop scotch had been made so the children could jump along and say the months of the year in order. The Primary 2’s worked in groups to draw and write as much about each season as they could before it was shared with everyone else.
Elmer in the Snow was the theme for Thursday’s reading skills lesson. The children were looking at visualisation and creating mental images from listening to the book. No body was allowed to look at the pictures in the book so the story could be imagined. The children started of by acting out what they heard and pretending they were Elmer’s herd. Then after everyone had created a mental image, the children went off and drew their image into a glasses template, so it was like they were looking at it. When everyone was finished we read the book again and looked at the pictures to check if we had created an accurate mental image. All the P1/2 boys and girls drew images that conveyed the same idea as the book.
Friday was a busy day and in the writing lesson the children wrote about their mental image and described it. First of all, we talked about all the different words you can use to describe snow as it played a big part in helping us imagine what the elephants were doing in Elmer and the Snow. Each description contained where the elephants went, what they were doing, what they saw and what the snow was like. At the end of the lesson, all the children gathered round to look at everybody else’s work, as there was some amazing descriptions and lots of good adjectives to describe snow. In the afternoon, the children had a music lesson specifically looking at finding the beat and understanding a little bit more about pitch. After lots of singing along and clapping to the beat, the class was shown 4 different recorders and they were able to describe the sound that each of them would make based on their size. At the end of a long, hard working week the children finished with some well-deserved Golden Time.
