Tag Archives: Skills for Life

Soft Start Activity

Each morning, P1/2 start with a gentle activity to settle us in.  Sometimes we focus on general motor skills, sometimes it’s a task to develop writing skills and sometimes activities that promote listening and attention.  Today, we worked on fine motor skills to decorate our names by dabbing paint with cotton buds.  We talked about our “Doing Hand”, “Helping Hand” and gave our “Sleeping Fingers” a soft pillow to hold on to!  This aims to encourage a good pencil grip.

Cutting Skills – Fine Motor Skills

This week, everybody has worked on their cutting skills.  Our hard work has been made into beautiful pictures that will be displayed outside our class.  Scissor cutting takes a surprising amount of skill, patience and perseverance!

French Food Fun!

P1/2 have been using the laptops to research French food this term as part of their Food topic.  Some food sounded really yummy – macarons, crepes, baguettes and tarte tatin just to name a few.   Others were a bit surprising.  Have you ever tried frogs legs and snails?!

We decided that we wanted to try making some of the yummy treats for family and friends to enjoy.  Once we found some simple recipes, we wrote shopping lists and began the preparations for our French afternoon.  Invitations were made and sent out.  Then it was time to begin making and baking!  We also made a milk chocolate tarte and a white chocolate tarte but forgot to take photos!!

 

Wider Achievement Sign Language

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!

 

Wider Achievement Sign Language

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”.

 

Wider Achievement Sign Language

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!”

 

 

 

Wider Achievement Sign Language

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.

The Wider Achievement pupils from P1-4 playing Colours Bingo. Callum was a great signing bingo caller!
The Wider Achievement pupils from P1-4 playing Colours Bingo. Callum was a great signing bingo caller!

Watch Iona and Callum in action below.

Lorelei and Christina signed really well together!