Tag Archives: Fine Motor Skills

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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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.

 

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!

What the ladybird heard

We listened to the story called ‘What the Ladybird Heard’ and then we followed it up with ‘What the Ladybird Heard Next’

It got us thinking that we could be quite creative and make some ladybird stones while we were doing outdoor learning.  We had great fun, here are some pictures.  We learned about colours, symmetry, numbers, ladybirds, language and many other things.  All whilst having fun and working with friends.

The Three Little Pigs

Some of us tried to make a house of straw for the three little pigs.

There were a lot of helping in different ways and teamwork was key.

Then we decided the wolf might be hungry and need something to eat, hopefully not one of the three little pigs!

So a group set to to make delicious soup that the wolf would like.  With a little bit of this and a little bit of that, the soup was made and the trap was set!

Other people in the class set to building different types of houses for the three little pigs.  These were made of branches or pallets of wood.

They thought if there were leaves on the branches, the wolf might think it was a home!

The wolf fell for the trap, climbed down the chimney and ended up in the pot so we were able to make wolf soup!  It was delicious!

Here are some architects, planning their next houses to build.  I think they decided on houses made of tyres!

Scholland Farm Soup

 

We made soup using the vegetables from Scholland Farm.  First we washed the vegetables ready for peeling.

Then we carefully peeled the carrots and parsnip. We peeled away from us to help keep our hands safe from harm and we did it carefully.

We added the onion to our pan. Mrs Inkster chopped that for us and it made her eyes water!

Then we chopped some carrots and parsnip.

Some of us watched while others prepared the vegetables.

Then we chopped and added some neep .

Next it was the broccoli and cauliflower.

Then we put the soup on to cook.  We decided to have vegetable soup and lentil soup using the vegetables too.

While it was cooking we were being good listeners and following instructions for our activity.

We had a break and tried some raw carrot and raw neep.  Some of us had never tasted raw neep before and it was delicious!

Once the soup was cooked we tried the lentil soup first.  We thought that was delicious.

Then we tried the vegetable soup. Some of us didn’t like it but some of us like it so much we had another bowl!

It’s been a busy morning in our class but we really enjoyed using the vegetables that we got from the farm and we all agree that it tastes great when we know and have seen where the produce comes from.