It’s amazing to see how quickly the group are recalling signs each week and how well they can use the finger spelling alphabet to sign words and to “read” words back. Today we learned the days of the week and learned food signs to go with our topics. We spent time on the laptops searching for words we use at home and words we were keen to learn. The “Sign A Day” website is excellent!
Callum searched how to sign “school”.
Drew looked up “brother”.
Callum learned “teacher”.
Last week we spent time sharing our weekend news writing with a friend.
A big focus for everyone this term is to write a sentence with a capital letter at the beginning, clear finger spaces between words and a full stop at the end.
After reading our own news books, we swapped with a friend and became the teacher for the morning! Everyone had to check to see if their partner had included all of the things needed for a sentence. We used a pink pencil to show what had been done well (tickled pink!) and a green pencil to show what could be worked on next time (green for growth). Some pupils even added a comment in their partner’s book to say what they had done well.
We had another good session today. We revised the signs we learned last week and were taught lots of new animal signs. We learned to ask, “How are you today?” We also learned lots of ways we could answer this. We looked again at finger spelling and played a sign language word search on the laptops.
Watch Jay and Lewis say, “How are you today?” “I’m happy!”
What a super first week of sign language! We have talked about what sign language is, why it is needed and why it’s an important life skill to have. The pupils have learned various greetings and have been studying the finger spelling alphabet. They also learned how to ask, “What is your name?” and how to answer. They learned lots of colour signs and played Bingo using these signs. They concentrated SO hard for the full session.
Watch Iona and Callum in action below.
Lorelei and Christina signed really well together!
We have been busy looking at the food packaging from our fruit tasting afternoon. It was amazing to see where our fruit has travelled from to get to our classroom! Most of the fruit came from Africa, South America and Spain. As a class, we plotted these fruits on a large map and had fun looking at an atlas to see if we could find these countries for ourselves. Some pupils couldn’t believe how tiny Shetland was in comparison to other places around the world!
We discussed how important it was to try and buy local produce as much as we can, but of course this is not always possible when buying pineapples or bananas!
Following on from our fruit tasting afternoon, we gathered together all the results and worked with a partner to create a bar chart on the laptops. Then we worked together as a class to make a giant bar chart for our classroom wall. I wonder which fruit was the most popular?
As part of our topic, we have been tasting lots of different types of fruit. We recorded whether or not we liked each one. It was great to hear some pupils saying that the fruit they had previously disliked were now quite tasty!
Just goes to show how important it is to keep trying!
