numeracy and mathematics – Page 8

Christmas Fayre

With the school Christmas Fayre tomorrow (Thursday), we have been making chocolate Christmas shapes to sell on our stall. Discussions about what would happen when we put chocolate in the microwave then the fridge developed the children’s learning about sciences. We also used numeracy skills to count the squares of chocolate as well as reading the dial to set the microwave so there was lots of learning going on as we prepared our chocolate shapes.

We hope that lots of Nursery children and their families will be able to come to the Christmas Fayre tomorrow between 2.00 and 4.00 in school. We can certainly recommend the chocolate shapes to anyone who has a little money to spend.

Story, Rhyme and Number Bags

Story, rhyme and number bags will be given out from this Tuesday 3rd November to those who would like them. These bags are designed to encourage your child to enjoy reading and numbers. Each story/rhyme bag has a book and a game or puppets connected to the story/rhyme. The number bags contain a game.
If your child attends morning Nursery sessions you can collect a bag at the end of the session from Eileen, our Family Learning Co-ordinator, in the Family Learning room opposite the school hall. Those attending Nursery in the afternoon can collect bags at the start of a session. Bags can be kept at home for a week and exchanged the following Tuesday. If anyone can spare twenty minutes to help Eileen check the bags, it would be much appreciated. We hope that lots of our families will join in with the activity bags “library”.

Read, Write, Count

We would like to share some great ideas from the Scottish government on a site called “Read, Write, Count”. As a parent or carer, you’re the most important teacher in your child’s life. In fact, research shows that when parents help their child with learning outside of school, the children do better with things like reading and counting. This is a site with ideas to make it easy for parents to bring fun and learning into everyday activities. Whether it’s in the supermarket, on the way to school, at bedtime or sitting down for a meal, “Read, Write, Count” has lots of simple ideas that put smiles on children’s faces while giving them the best start in life. We hope that you have fun with your child using some of these great ideas. Click on the link on the right to “Read, Write, Count” under the heading “Useful Reading”.

Family Pride

Emma and Ben’s families were both delighted with their certificates and left us comments to say how proud they are:

“Well done Emma. Very proud mummy, daddy and wee sister. Have enjoyed hearing all about Autumn. You’ve certainly learned a lot.”

“Ben was so excited to FaceTime his Nannie and Poppie in Edinburgh when he came home from nursery with his first certificate. We’re all so very proud of him. Well done Ben. X”

Ben’s family also liked the photo of him measuring Captain Furrybeard:

“Good measuring Ben, wonder if Captain Furrybeard was the same height as you!!”

We did talk a lot about who was biggest and smallest. It was certainly tricky getting Captain Furrybeard’s ship the right size but the children made a good job of it.

Captain Furrybeard Visits Nursery

The children in the Sunshine Room have continued to be motivated by their interest in pirates and the learning has been developed in several directions with the help of Mrs. Bell, our student teacher.
Pirate stories have been very popular, with some of the children keen to tell the stories themselves. They also received a letter from Captain Furrybeard who seemed to have left his telescope and hat in our Nursery and needed some help from the children. Maps, flags and telescopes were produced and the children had to think about how to make a new pirate ship for Captain Furrybeard. This, of course, involved measuring Captain Furrybeard to help us work out what size of ship was needed. As you can see, his ship worked out just the right size for him.
We had treasure hidden in the sand tray and there was some counting had to be done to ensure it was all found. Good turn taking skills were also shown as the children played a pirate game. We hope that you enjoy these photos of the children engaged with all the different pirate activities. As you can see, lots of valuable learning has taken place with Captain Furrybeard.
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Money Magic

Recently the afternoon children had a visit from the Financial Education Officer to talk about what we do with money and to help them in their work on coin recognition. They loved the story just as much as the morning children had earlier this year and took part enthusiastically in helping to tell the story. Bev’s huge purse held the children’s interest and they too enjoyed the magic of coin rubbing. We would like to thank Bev for her visit and look forward to seeing her again next year.
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Learning About Money

Last week the morning children had a visit from the Financial Education Officer who provided a range of activities to involve the children in thinking about money and how we use it.
It comes as no surprise that they had lots of ideas about how they like to spend money and they enjoyed taking part in the interactive reading session which included lots of rhyme and actions. There was an activity to learn about the value of different coins and the children then had great fun making rubbings of coins. Thank you very much to Bev, the Financial Education Officer. We look forward to your visit next term when the afternoon children will enjoy learning about money with you.

Outdoor Shapes

As we have been learning about shape and pattern recently, the children have been keen to form shapes with the materials available outdoors. They have talked together a lot to work out how to make their shapes and some have taken it to a different area of the curriculum by forming some letters. One little boy even managed to make his whole name from twigs and rope. As you can imagine, making a circle was the trickiest shape but the children showed themselves to be good problem solvers and came up with great ideas.

Learning In Wellies

Today we have two new comments on our blog. Julia’s family said:

“Julia was delighted to receive her certificate. Thank you.”

We also had a lovely comment from Mrs. Waugh about our outdoor measuring activity:

“What good fun this looks! Great, practical learning about mathematics and building up talking and listening skills too- I hope you all wore your wellies, though!:-)”

Wellies certainly were essential for our outdoor maths activity and the children showed great concentration while having fun learning about measure. Thank you to everyone who takes the time to leave us a comment. We really appreciate it.

Water Working

While the afternoon children were showing their creative side last week in their outdoor music making, the morning children were talking about measure when playing in the garden. As you can see, they used a range of containers to develop their understanding of the concept of measure as they poured from one vessel to another. Apart from being great fun, the children were being encouraged to develop the language of measure using vocabulary such as full, empty, bigger, smaller, biggest, more than, less than and much more. They enjoyed working out, for example, if one container of water would fill a different container or if it would spill over and good teamwork was shown by all those taking part.

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