Month: November 2018

Today we held our P1 Bookbug event. Thank you very much to all the parents and carers who made it along, and to all the primary 1 boys and girls who took part so enthusiastically. The children enjoyed a variety of literacy activities, including; making words with magnetic letters, reading stories with friends and grown ups, practising writing skills on whiteboards, looking at the books we will be getting in our Bookbug bags, and visiting the school library.

Reminder – we welcome your child to borrow books from our school library at any time, please just ask their teacher or pop a note in their book bag.

Today in maths we were learning about angles. We learned what a right angle is. We also learned that an obtuse angle is bigger than a right angle and an acute angle is smaller by Paige

Today was our final Families Connect session. 8 weeks have flown by! Today we evaluated what we have covered across the sessions – feelings and emotions, the importance of praise, the importance of listening, book talk, reading beyond the page, the importance of counting and number talk. Everyone agreed the programme had been really worthwhile for them and everyone had enjoyed the experience. To celebrate we held a party in The Den, we had food, games and music and each child and their parent/carer was presented with a certificate.

We will miss getting together each week to learn new things alongside parents/carers and their children but we will hopefully be running the programme again in the new year – keep your eyes peeled for information about this, places are limited.

We have been enjoying exploring rhyming words this week. We read lots of stories with rhyme and had fun predicting what word would come next using our awesome rhyming skills.

Kullyn confidently made a set of ‘at’ rhyming words during busy start and was able to explain why they rhymed – they all had the same end sound.

Charlie kindly brought a rhyming book to share with the class. It was called ‘A Commotion in the Ocean’. He was able to explain it was a Julia Donaldson book and that she was also an author we had read before. Next week the children have requested that we read more Julia Donaldson books. We made a floor book to display all our ideas. We are even going to try to write to Julia and see if we get a reply. We are SO excited.

As Sunday was Remembrance Day we researched why we wear poppies on this day. We couldn’t believe that they used to be made by just 2 people and all by hand!! We had a go at making our own poppies. We are glad we don’t have to make millions by hand, it would take a VERY long time!

We have been having a go at being Authors. We are learning what makes a sentence and we are trying to use the target stamps to help us when we write. This week we wrote about things which we have lost and our feelings.

We have been using formative assessment techniques to help us improve our writing. This week we learned all about ‘Tickled Pink’ and ‘Green For Growth’.  Finlay and Lucy were able to look at their Green For Growths and correct them to turn them into Tickled Pinks. Well done to both of you!

During purposeful play, Aaron spent a lot of time practising his letter t formation.  He didn’t give up and look at this amazing work… We are so proud, Aaron.

As part of our new data handling and analysis topic we have introduced different ways of gathering and displaying information. We have started to answer a ‘Question of the Week’ and look forward to learning more next week.

In our Titanic topic we have been learning to place the order of events on a timeline. We did this by watching a video about the events and then sorting  cards with the events into the correct order. Each group then made a poster showing the events from when it set sail to when it sank. 

By Paige and Miss Aikman

In maths this week we have been learning new addition strategies in our Number Talk sessions. We have worked on using number lines, partitioning and the column method, (written sum format). Your child may be able to demonstrate some examples of these to you and we will continue to work on them next week. We have continued to revise our number bonds, 5 times tables and counting on and back in 2, 5, 10 and 100’s. It would be really helpful if these were also worked on at home. In our written tasks we have worked on addition sums with and without carrying and pupils are making good progress with this.

In literacy we have just completed a new round of  reading and spelling assessments which will help us plan our next learning steps for pupils. We have also been working on information writing and we based our writing this week on schools in Malawi. Pupils made a good start to this and we will build on this in our next two writing sessions.

In our topic work we have learnt about schools and wildlife in Malawi so far. Next we will be researching some Scottish wildlife and comparing the school system in Scotland with Malawi to identify similarities and differences.

We have been using ICT to help us consolidate our learning. We have set up maths and spelling activities on Education City for each group which is tailored to their level. Sumdog remains a firm favourite with everyone and is great for building maths skills.

In gym this week Mr Patterson led a hockey skills session where pupils worked on dribbling, passing and re directing. The class really enjoyed this and are already looking forward to their session next week. In art we have been drawing some animals from Malawi using the step by step approach which breaks the picture down into smaller, simple steps.

The pupils enjoyed having family members in class during our open afternoon. If you were unable to attend then don’t worry as we will be having another one later on in P4.