Have a look at what we have been up to since coming back to school.
EY and Class Blog September 2020
Early Years Centre
Since coming back to nursery, we have been very busy. We have been pirates sailing on the high seas in our boat. We made our enemies walk the plank!! We’ve enjoyed walking the Barr Trails and walked all of the Devil’s Footprints trail!! We took a picnic with us and enjoyed the view from the top of the hill. On the way back down we saw a mouse, butterflies, dragonflies, cows, lots of birds and wild flowers of all different colours. We had a great morning and walked for miles!!
Mrs Chesterman, Miss Millarvie
P1-3
P1 Settling In
We have had the absolute pleasure to welcome our new P1s into the class and they are settling in well. The have already picked up on the rules and routines in the class and have begun to explore their numbers and sounds.
Feelings
In our Health and Wellbeing sessions, we have been exploring feelings and how we can manage them. We first began by reading the story ‘The Colour Monster’ by Anna Llenas and talking about the colours the book uses to relate to the different feelings. We have decided to adopt these colours into our daily routine and each morning we share what colour we are that day and why. We are very often feeling yellow (happy), pink (loved) and green (calm) which is great. We have now moved on to discussing key feelings in more detail using the characters from the movie Inside Out. We have looked at Anger and Fear and talked about this in relation to our lockdown experiences. We were very afraid that the park was never going to open again and we wouldn’t get to play with our friends! We are going to continue to explore our feelings and find different strategies we can use to manage them.
IDL – Biodiversity
Our topic this term is Biodiversity and we are exploring this outside, in our school garden. We have created some environmental art using natural materials, found different living things in our garden and studied the trees. We made stick stories and shared what we had found. We love being in the outdoors and we are going to find out more about what lives and grows in our garden and in the wider village. If anyone has any interesting information they could share please let us know! We are also hoping to develop this outdoor learning further with Aaron (Active Schools) and Mrs McTaggart.
Numeracy and Mathematics
In numeracy and mathematics, we have been learning about patterns. We used a variety of different objects to copy, continue and create patterns and even learned about patterns in numbers. We had lots of fun using the peg boards and sorting bears to make patterns of our own.
Literacy and English
In Literacy and English, we have begun to learn our new sounds. The ‘Gryffindors’ love the Jolly Phonics rhymes to help them remember their sounds and have been learning the correct formation when writing them. They are beginning to spell some simple words and we especially like ‘chopping’ our sounds down our arm to learn how to blend. ‘Hufflepuff’ had great fun stamping their words using their special stamping pads and ‘Slytherin’ and ‘Ravenclaw’ have been identifying the number of sounds in words using dots and dashes, this helps us with our spelling when we are writing.
We have been reading the book ‘Mr. Goose’ by Grant Kennedy, which is about a goose who goes on an adventure around Doonfoot. After reading the first page we predicted what we thought would happen in the book and then read the rest to see if we were correct. We have looked at the character of Mr. Goose and made our own characters for a story about an animal adventure around Barr. We have also described the setting of the book and have chosen the places our character would like to visit in Barr. We are learning about how to write super sentences and we will build up a story map about our character’s adventures in Barr using what we learn.
We are taking part in sentence mentor activities every day to learn how to write super sentences. These activities help us understand what is needed to write a good sentence and what we can use to make our sentences better.
Play Based Learning
This session we have developed a play-based area in our classroom. In this area we become explorers, builders, problem solvers, team players and much more. We work together in our play to consolidate and develop the learning that takes place in the classroom and it gives us an opportunity to create friendships and explore our feelings. We love having an opportunity to visit the area and we let our imaginations soar. Lately we have been enjoying playing in the kitchen, making a wide variety of different dishes for Miss Burton to try, building with the blocks and creating things with our playdough. We have problem solved how to make dominoes using the blocks and then experimented with taking slow motion videos of them falling, slow mo. videos are now our favourites. We have a big blue beanbag to chill out on when we need some space or want Miss Burton to read us a story. We explore writing using our chalkboard and whiteboard on the easel and we made a variety of different items with cardboard boxes, including stop and go signs which we then used in our fitness outside.
Daily Fitness
Each morning we take part in some daily fitness outdoors, we play lots of different games to keep our fitness levels high and help us get ready to learn. We love the ‘Video Game’, ‘Iceman’ and ‘The Transport Game’.
Welcome Time
Each morning we start the day with a welcome time, here we discuss the day, month, date, weather and season. We learn this in English and in French – we are getting more confident with this each day. We hope to learn some more languages this year too! We also share our feelings colour and talk about why we feel that way. Welcome time allows us to settle in the morning and catch up with each other.
P4-7
We have experienced a very positive start to the new school session as a class of 10 P4-7s. The pupils are resoundingly delighted to be back learning alongside their friends and I cannot express how proud I am of them for taking the changes of rules and routines in their stride. It is as if we have never been away! We have been making the most of the sunny days and taking our learning outside. The children are particularly enthusiastic about the opportunity to participate in outdoor P.E with Mrs McTaggart. Our interdisciplinary focus for the first few weeks has been ‘Express Yourself’ and has involved lots of health and wellbeing and expressive arts. The class also experienced our first ‘live assembly’ as we learnt how to ‘Be Internet Legends’. We took the opportunity to try the game for ourselves and I am proud to say that the class are a pretty savvy bunch when it comes to internet safety. We are looking forward to getting our teeth into our ‘Energy & The Environment’ topic and look forward to updating you about our learning.
BACK TO SCHOOL PUPIL QUOTES
Being back at school was very exciting for me because we were off for so long. I was so happy to be learning properly again, and see all my friends, classmates and teachers. I’m so joyful for being at Barr Primary School.
Being back at school is very thrilling I get to see my friends and I get to do learning, being back at school has been a big relief I don’t have to worry about forgetting everything its really been a very enjoyable time we’ve got to do loads of fun things like art we also have class points and personal points.
I was really excited when we started P.E because that’s my favourite subject, and I was especially excited because we were doing cricket and it was at the Muga.
