Primary 2A 2024 – 2025 – Page 5 – Exploring learning through play, curiosity and the outdoors.

Outdoor Learning

We spent a lovely afternoon at the stoney beach our favourite place. Our intended learning was to revisit road safety, beach risky play particularly rock climbing and the sea depth.

We found some interesting treasures and we enjoyed a windy beach explore. Pupils were using descriptive words to describe rocks and shell patterns.

Pupil voice

‘I think being outside makes me in a happy mood’

‘This rock is stripy but in a circle kind of stripe’

’I found two fossils can you believe it, I know what kind of creature is in here!’

‘The sea is wild waves today, I wonder if the poor fish feel sea sick!’

‘I found a cave and when I put my hand on, I felt a creature inside it!’

Continue reading “Outdoor Learning”

A lovely example of children taking their learning into their play. After our topic lesson learning about the Lerwick Town Hall yesterday. I noticed today learners had applied their knowledge of the shapes and structure of the Town Hall and they used the loose parts, magnetic tiles and wooden dolls do recreate the Town Hall. As we spoke learners shared the following knowledge and understanding that they had learned from our topic lesson the day before:

‘Look this is where the clock tower is and it rings every hour and half past!’
‘here is where you can get married with the stain window glass’

Learners asked for this to go in the class block play floor book. They also shared that they were using their collaboration meta skills.

STEM – IDL Town Hall Models

Our topic is Lerwick, pupils asked to learn about the buildings in Lerwick. Today we spoke about the Town Hall, its uses and how/when it was build and made models using pasta and playdoh. We were focusing on the meta-skill of collaborating and added our learning to our IDL working wall. Pupil comments:

‘if we make a square then it will make it stronger when we add walls’

‘you hold this part and I will hold this side and she can get the roof on, the roof is a triangle!’

‘My parents got married at the town hall upstairs!’

Meta-skill Link – listening to and valuing other people’s opinions and developing language of collaborative learning.

Sports Day

We had lots of fun at sports day, trying our best, cheering each other on and then we’re very very proud of ourselves.

Bigton Farm and St Ninians

What better way to spend the first international day of play than to be outdoors exploring all day. We started our day at Bigton Farm where Amy showed us farm life, we fed pigs and were up close with many animals. We then spent time at St Ninians beach before eating lunch at Dunrossness school and heading to the park on the way home. We are so grateful to our hosts at the Dunrossness school and Bigton Farm for bringing learning to life for Primary 1.

Teddy Bears

P1A have been learning to mix colours and use templates. The children have worked hard to create lovely combinations of colours.

Hot Cross Buns – steady beat & boomwhackers

We have been learning a song about Hot Cross Buns. We practised keeping a steady beat and we suggested lots of different ways we could keep the beat like tapping our heads or shoulders, or clicking our fingers in time.

We have also learned about Boomwhackers and how they are used to create different sounds of different pitches. We worked out that the longer the boomwhacker, the lower the pitch of the note and the smaller the boomwhacker, the higher the pitch of the note.

In the clip below, you can see the class performing the song ‘Hot Cross Buns’ using boomwhackers.

Morning in the life of a Primary 1

We always start our day with at least 45 minutes of uninterrupted free play today we had over 70 minutes as the class were so engaged in their play. Children lead their learning in their play and as adults we join in to further their learning or when invited to share in their play. Following on from floating and sinking activities earlier in the week, pupils wanted to use junk modelling to create boats and asked for water to test if they float. Others created a fantastic block play and loose parts farm which they asked to include in our floor book.

We spent some time revising our tricky words in the messiest manner possible and visited the new school garden to enjoy reading with our friends. Learners were able to recognise their tricky words in real story books and were using their phonics knowledge to read independently.
We then sang our alphabet song and pupils practised writing capital letters in alphabetical order on whiteboards. Then we ate snack and had fun speaking about our best parts of Primary 1. ☺️

Wild Wonders – Flower Printing

Pupils had asked to do art outside for outdoor learning. So we took cloth and stones outdoors and used natural dye from flowers and leaves to dye the cloth into symmetrical patterns.

Pupil voice ‘wow look at those colours the purple is so bright’

‘This one is vibrant pink’

We’ve been learning about 3D shapes, here we’ve been using our magnetiles to create 3D models. We can name the basic 3D shapes and discuss some of their properties.
We’ve been doubling numbers using manipulative such as cubes and halving even numbers using our knowledge of off and even.

Lastly, we’ve been problem solving using our number knowledge on our online 100s square. As always we believe play is the optimum medium for learning and we enjoy the Freeform play offers us to explore and consolidate our understand of what numeracy and maths we are learning.

Meta-skill: Curiosity ‘carrying out self-directed learning and recognising problems and how to solve them’.