P1/2 have been busy making helmets and torches ready for the South Mainland Up-Helly-Aa celebrations. They have also worked on various cutting and painting projects to help decorate the dining hall and corridors. We took a class photo beside the school galley, “Fivla” today. I think they look the part! Looking forward to our school procession and galley burning tomorrow and a visit from the jarl squad in the afternoon.
Well that’s our 4 week block finished and I have really loved sharing what I know about sign language with the P1-4 pupils! I am so impressed to see how much they have learned in such a short space of time and have encouraged them to keep their new-found skills up at home! There is a link below for the website we have enjoyed using during our 4 week block that shows the alphabet, has a signing dictionary and has games to play.
http://www.british-sign.co.uk/sign-of-the-day/
Today, we also watched this short advert that shows how a young, deaf man’s day was transformed when he surprisingly met a number of people in the community who could sign. I wish each day could be like this for him. Keep up the signing. You never know when you might need it!
We celebrated Shrove Tuesday (or Pancake Day) this week by making crepes. We have been learning about French food in class and found a recipe online that we could use.
We have been learning how to follow a recipe, measure out the ingredients and take turns. Thank you to Mrs Casey for helping us to cook them, they were yummy!
We dressed up as characters from a book as part of World Book Day celebrations. Well done to all involved!
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?
