All posts by Mrs Inkster

Instructions are important but craft linked to language is more fun!

We always do some craft linked to our language and sounds.  This time we were using the tricky sound of u – this year we decided to go for up!  We made our very own pictures of up houses.  This helped our fine motor skills and listening for instructions, whilst still giving us the chance to be creative.

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Maths isn’t all about sums and writing

We are currently learning number in Primary 1/2 and we begin each maths lesson with some activities.  These can be games, paired work or problem solving.  It helps to get our brains thinking and most importantly it is fun!

Here are some pictures of us doing maths with either Miss Morrison or Mrs Inkster.

This is us doing some problem solving with cubes and trying to find different shapes and patterns for ten cubes to link to the number.

       

Here we are  ordering numbers to 10 and beyond with our partners.

And here we are doing a number activity with Miss Morrison.

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Free time…..what to do I wonder?

We had some free time today and chose to do lots of different things.  Nothing was set, it was all our own interest.  This is how we kept ourselves busy.  We had a picnic, made chilli chicken, pizza in a pan and used the pots for musical instruments.

Some of us made a city, an aeroplane, a car and people out of construction materials.

Others decided to write letters and colour in, taking great care to do their best, as always.

A few of us went fishing, designed tractors, did jigsaws and found dinosaurs.

Inventors and designers were also in the classroom.  A tv is important in our eyes so it was important to design a tv with magical day and night tv screens at the same time.  It was just as important to have the switches, control panel and sockets at the back of it!

Everyone loves some Play doh

We began our day by going to the dough disco.  This is where we have to listen to, watch a video and copy what the lady does.  It helps with our motor skills.  It was great fun…..

but we didn’t stop there, we then had free play and let our imaginations go wild.  From making biscuits, cookies, blueberry cake and pizza…..

to a frog trying to catch some worms for breakfast……

and making sure there were tyres for the tractors.

 

 

 

Pattern art

We read Ugly Five by Julia Donaldson and enjoyed the story a lot.  It got us onto thinking about patterns in art and wildlife.  We made some peacocks.  We had to listen to careful instructions for directional movement with pencil control.

First we had to draw lines from our peacocks all the way out to the edge of the paper.

Then we had to draw some large circles on these lines.

Then we had to draw smaller circles inside the larger circles.  These were a different colour.

Once we had done that, we had to draw even smaller circles inside the second colour!

Next we had to draw diagonal lines on each side of our first lines, this made it look like the feather hairy part of a feather.

Finally we coloured in the body of the our peacocks.

It was great fun but a lot of listening and work.  We did great though and the peacocks are going up in our corridor gallery.  They will make their way home eventually.

 

Gruffalo foraging and cooking

We had a week where we read about The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson.  We read The Gruffalo’s Child too.  We also heard them in Shetland Dialect.  That was very interesting as there were some words we had never heard before!

After that we went out foraging for ingredients to make some Gruffalo recipes.  Here are photos of us doing that.  We had great fun and used great language and role play used in our cooking and searching.

Chasing those blues away and starting the day with a nice easy task

Soft start activities are important to help ease into the school day.  These help with pre-handwriting skills, strengthening hands, grasp etc and most importantly they are fun.

These type of activities may be going to the Dough Disco, which we do regularly.  That is great fun!  It might also be the ‘Cheerio Challenge’ where the children have to try and thread cheerios onto a skewer in a set time.  Then, they have to try and get faster and improve on this skill.  They love it.  Here are some pictures.

Soft start

We get to have soft start activities in the mornings before we begin any writing.  Sometimes our learning begins outside, sometimes it begins inside.  Here are some photos of us with a soft start activity.  This helps us to build up our fine motor skills and is a pre-handwriting activity.  It helps to strengthen our hands/fingers to help us with our pencil grip, writing etc.  We loved it.  What we had to do was build a tower using lego, but we only had a set amount of time to do it in.  Then we got another go at it, the same amount of time and we had to see if we could get more blocks built on our tower to make it even bigger.

Have a look at the concentration while we were doing it!  It was great fun and we rose to the challenge!