Update from Primary One

We have had another extremely busy learning week in Primary One. We have been reading books about Winter and why some animals migrate and others hibernate. The children were amazed to find out how far geese fly and how many months hedgehogs hibernate. We began thinking about the changes we make during Winter and have created a display showing a bare tree covered with hats, gloves and snowflakes.

We have also listed the skilled we used to create our display – cutting, gluing, painting, drawing, scrunching, using primary colours to make a wash and creating a collage to demonstrate different textures.

We have continued to follow Hamish McHaggis on his adventures around Scotland. Hamish went to visit the Loch Ness Monster but unfortunately she was on her holidays. The story caused great excitement and discussion, so next week we will look at evidence from some non-fiction books and try to decided if there is enough evidence to prove that she exists. We also enjoyed learning about Edinburgh Castle and looking at pictures of the Forth Bridges (Hamish and his friends broke down there on their way to the Edinburgh Tattoo). The children used black fine line writer pens to draw an outline of these famous landmarks.

Pupil Voice

It is very important to us that children within our school have an opportunity to express their thoughts and ideas on matters which affect them. We had a discussion about the learning environment and what the children would like to change within our own classroom. The main message was that they wanted to have their own chair so with that in mind, all children created a name label and now have their own space in the classroom.

 

Health and Wellbeing – Dreams and Goals

We have been discussing what success and achievement means to us. The children chose one thing that made them feel proud of themselves. A few examples below.

 

 

Developing the Young Workforce

Following on from last weeks post,we have had a number of children leading the learning. Below is a picture of Oliver leading a math’s activity during smart start.

Collaboration is another essential skill needed to develop the young workforce. We reminded ourselves of the skills we should use at all times- listening, looking at the person who is talking, allowing others to talk, offering an opinion at the appropriate time. We are practicing effective collaboration every day.

Numeracy

This week I have set up number challenge using Numicon. Numicon is a practical way of representing number and the children have enjoyed exploring it and using it in different ways. We have also been using rekenreks which helps to develop number sense. We have been working on double numbers, rekenreks are a really useful tool for teaching this skill.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend.

P5 Act Up in our New Role-Play Area

Class Environment

Having discussed our class layout and how we could improve it we have started to make changes. We thought that it would be a good idea in the library to change our display in order to encourage children to read our new books. Some of us designed book covers and others created book reviews by some of our favourite authors. This is what it now looks like:

Mrs Stewart discussed what changes we could make to the library in order to make it more inviting with a small group of children.

Watch this space!

Dinosaur Park

We are presently reading Dino Egg by Charlie James in class. We are enjoying the novel and have created a role-play station. Here you can be a scientist, park keeper, van driver, dinosaur or tourist!

Maths

We learnt about chance and probability to describe the likelihood of events happening. As a class we discussed certain scenarios and then had to hold up a card describing if we thought the event was impossible, unlikely, likely or certain.

Georgie – It was fun holding up the cards.

We disagreed about some events.

Mason – It is impossible that England will win the next World Cup.

However most of us agreed that it was just unlikely.

Lewis Duckworth – It is impossible that I will eat cornflakes for breakfast tomorrow. His justification was that there was none in the house.

However some of us argued that his mum might go out and buy some!

Eva – It is certain I will have cornflakes.

Some of us thought that might be a problem if they had all been used up. We tried to persuade Eva it was ‘likely’ she would have them.

Liam – We learnt that there could be different answers to the same question and both would be correct.

For example the likelihood of it snowing depends upon where you live in the world.

Numeracy

We continued to practise our tables including making use of loop games.

Literacy

One of our class writing targets is to use a variety of connectives. We played ‘Connectives Blockbusters’ to practise using connectives in sentences.

Writing

Emma – I enjoyed drawing and decorating my dinosaur egg and it has been fun making up the story about what happens to the dinosaur.

R.M.E.

We used our research skills to find out about the life of a famous Scottish Christian – Eric Liddell.

Chloe – We learnt that he was a famous Olympian.

Georgie -He would not race on a Sunday because of his faith.

 

Terrific Teamwork in Primary 2/1

This week we have been focusing on improving our collaboration or team work skills.

Mrs Stevenson set us a challenge where we had to work in small groups to make a days of the week poster with all the days in the correct order. We started off our challenge by discussing what a successful team would act like. Here are some of our ideas.

We will help each other.

We will share and take turns.

We will listen to each other and take turns to speak.

We will always follow our class charter and remember our school values.

We will all try our best to finish the task together.

We then got to work on our posters.

There were some excellent examples of collaboration such as…

Emma  -‘ It’s Nathan’s turn now’.

Elkie ‘ Tyler can go first then we can all take turns’.

Andrew ‘I shared the pencils with Ethan’.

Alfie ‘Friday begins with F so it goes next’.

Well done boys and girls for such a super afternoon of collaborating with each other. Our fantastic posters will go on our Maths working wall to help us with the rest of our learning on Time.

Here are some of the finished posters. The boys and girls even all helped to hold the poster together for the photos because that was fair.

Another Busy Week in P3/4

We have had another busy week in P3/4 this week.

We started our mini topic this week. Our ‘wee tour’ of Scotland. We worked collaboratively with P3 as we explored the names of the different cities in Scotland. P3/4 helped the P3 pupils use an Atlas to discover and correctly place our Scottish cities on a blank map of Scotland. The children also shared some interesting facts that they already know about this amazing country. We completed mind maps to show our prior knowledge of this topic and also came up with some things that we would like to discover.

Keeping with our Scottish themed topic we looked at how to make Scottish Shortbread in our literacy lesson this week. The children were given the instructions, however, these were all jumbled up and the children had to write these in the correct order. But before that we discussed the language that is used in instruction writing. The children were also set the task to include sentence openers that flowed in a sequence of events. Such as: First, next, then and finally. The children really enjoyed this lesson and to expand on this they will use the instructions that they have ordered correctly to make shortbread next week. Look out for a special delivery next week!

Also in literacy the children were introduced to a number of new spelling strategies this week that will help with their spelling words for this week. One of the strategies had the children exploring alphabetical order and showed them that its not always the first letter that we go by. Ask your child to show you some of these spelling strategies.

The children were continuing to work on addition this week. We were using the chimney sum strategy as this has proved tricky for some of the children in the class, especially carrying over those cheeky 1’s! If the children could practice these at home that would be brilliant as we are moving on to subtraction strategies next week.

Thank you for all your continued support and encouragement. Have a lovely weekend.

Lead Learners in Deans Den!!

It has been another busy week in Deans Den as we continue to work on achieving our individual targets. Mrs Morrison is proud of the efforts of all the boys and girls, well done!!

Another success of Deans Den this week has been the children’s enthusiasm towards developing the role of the lead learner within the group. Children are given the opportunity to take a main role in learning opportunities such as storyteller, line leaders and group helper. These are all important skills to develop to help the children become independent learners. Keep working hard boys and girls!!

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