A big thank you to all who attended the last family learning session for this term. Another big thank you to all the staff who helped with the organisation behind the scenes and who joined in with the club on the day. Lastly, a massive thank you to our Primary 7 tech team, photographers, digi and play leaders who helped everything run smoothly and are the reason we have so many pictures to add to these posts!

This week’s session focused mostly on maths and numeracy skills and from your vey kind feedback has given you lots to think about and try out at home.

Role play shop

This activity was a big hit and is very easy to do at home and with children of different ages/stages. Using either toy food, empty real food packets or the actual tins/jars from the cupboard, set up a shop. If you don’t have a till then any dish to contain the money will do. Children have great imaginations! Use toy money or real money if you’ve change collections in a money bank. Change the price of items according to how difficult you think your child needs it to be. Use real purses and shopping bags and then let the role play begin. Take turns to be the customer, manager, cashier etc. The initial benefit of this activity is developing imagination through role play however whenever money is involved there’s lots of numeracy learning to be done. Initially children will understand that good are exchanged for money in a retail transaction but as their numeracy skills develop they should be able to estimate as well  as add together prices to work out what the final bill will be. They will also eventually be able to work out what the correct change should be when they over pay. They should be able to recognise and name the different types of coins and paper notes in our currency. There are also opportunities for counting during a pretend stock take or filling out an order form.

Classroom activities

There were a whole host of classroom activities out to demonstrate how the children learn to calculate in the classroom. Some of the counting materials like pasta or milk bottle lids would be easy to have at home to help with trickier homework. There was also a variety of maths games and jigsaws. One of the simplest activities had a deck of  cards spread out face down, the children were to pick up 2 or 3 or 4 at a time and add together the values of the cards in their hands. If they got it correct they could keep the cards and the winner was the person with the most cards at the end. However if they pulled the joker all their cards had to be put  back face down. That’s one game you can do to help develop numeracy skills in a fun and playful way but cards are so versatile that I am sure you could think of even more activities to try.

 

 

Junk modelling

2D and 3D shapes were our top priority at the junk modelling station. It was great to hear children explaining the properties of cubes, cuboids, spheres and cylinders while reminding the younger ones about the difference between a  square and rectangle. They managed to make some incredible models.

Construction

The children were using our loose parts construction materials to build bridges. Design briefs had been set by well known children’s characters like the Gingerbread man and the children had to work together to plan and build bridges that matched the brief. After they had done this, the children took the construction in a different direction and the end result was a very enjoyable ‘obstacle maze’.

 

Making play dough

After weeks of creating wonderful characters with play dough, I couldn’t let you all leave without being sure you’d know how to make it at home. So some of you practised your measuring, weighing and mixing skills to create your own. The results were a lot of fun. If you do try any of these activities at home, please take a photo and let us see what inspired you!

Physical play

Connecting physical movement to learning, particularly skills like counting can really help embed the knowledge. It’s also a great way to get more movement into your day. Children had the option to use a timer to see how many exercises they could fit into that space of time, or they could roll the dice, add up the totals and decide how many to do that way. Dice are a great resource for playing numeracy games!

It has truly been an amazing month getting to know our families better and watching you all enjoy quality family time (with more than a hint of learning time thrown in). Thank you so much for your very positive feedback. We are planning more family learning opportunities for next term so please keep checking school bags, twitter (@holycrosspri) and here on the blog for more information. It would be really great to see you all back!