Hope you are well this morning and ready to start a new day!! A little note for your grown ups- there is a Deans Den booklet within their class work folder. Today the children could look at number formation and using pencil control to write the numbers correctly. Also, ask your child to sing you the days of the week song and the whole body listening song. Have a great day everyone and stay safe.
Category: Primary 1
Deans Den update
I would like to say ‘hello’ to our Deans Den group and hope you’re all well. I will keep in touch with you through the blog, but just a little reminder that if you haven’t already done so, then school work packs can be collected from the front of the school until 3pm today. Thank you and stay safe xx
Primary 2/1 Sharing the Learning
We have had yet another busy week in Primary 2/1 with one of our main highlights being our sharing the learning afternoon on Tuesday.
Prior to Tuesday we had a surprise in the story corner on Monday…. 3 bowls of porridge and 3 little bears! We think the dragon was telling us that he wanted us to read the fairytale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, which we did! We then tried our hand at making our own story map, this is where you retell the story but instead of using words you draw pictures. They were really successful and helped us improve our retelling and sequencing skills at the same time.
Elkie really liked this activity because it helped her to improve her drawings.
On Tuesday afternoon we welcomed parents and carers into our classroom to share some of the fantastic learning which has been taking place. We had a ‘Goldilocks’ theme for the afternoon with a main focus on literacy based activities. These are some of the activities we had in place.
Word building using the magnetic boards and CVC cards, a Goldilocks story sequencing, Goldilocks free writing with story mats, Story telling with our puppet theatre and props, word splat and the chance to share a fairytale with your adult using our word pointers to find some tricky words.
Euan enjoyed using the puppets to put on a show for his mum and gran, he even acted out the story of Jack and the Beanstalk too.
Nathan enjoyed making a bear face with his mum and sharing with her.
Andrew loved adding all the details onto his bears face.
Ashley enjoyed making the porridge bowls using patterns with her mum and gran.
It was a successful afternoon and we loved showing everyone around our classroom and having the opportunity to talk about our learning and even help create our Goldilocks display. A huge big thank you to everyone who attended, we very much value your support and encouragement and thoroughly enjoyed having you all in our class.
Here is our finished Goldilocks display…. we think it is super and love the fact that our parents and carers helped us create it.
On Wednesday we had a go at writing letters to the three bears from Goldilocks to say sorry for all of the chaos she caused in their cottage. We are getting very good at reflecting on our learning at the moment. We are using green for growth (for something we could improve on) and tickled pink (for something we did well). This is helping us to identify our own next steps in our learning.
In numeracy, we are still focusing on Subtraction and applying the tools to help us answer calculations. This week saw us focus on word problems, where Mrs Stevenson would read out a problem and our task was to write down the calculation to find the solution. We are getting very confident at this and have enjoyed leading our learning by making up our own word problems for our friends to solve.
In PE we are still working on developing our football skills. This week we played body ball where we took our ball for a walk by passing it carefully from one foot to the other and when a body part was called our we had to place that part on the ball, it was tricky getting into some of the positions especially for ‘back’ ball! We have been improving our ability to dribble and pass the ball with control and co-ordination, so this week we put this to the test with a simple game. We got into groups of 3 and made a triangle shape and passed the ball to our partners. We had to pay attention and make sure we could stop the ball with our feet only..no hands allowed and then pass the ball to our other partner with control and accuracy.
Let’s go fly a kite!
Last Monday, in the Den with Mrs Wallace, we were talking about how windy it had been recently. We looked at some books and videos that told us all about the power of the wind and the affects it can have. We made paper bag kites to play with in the wind and took them outside to test them!
Deans Den celebrate World Book Day!!
It has been another successful and busy week in Deans Den. We continue to support and encourage each other to follow our group charter and our focus this week has been to work on our listening skills!
As part of World Book Day, all of the children dressed in their pyjamas and brought a book from home to enjoy with others. We also designed our own bookmarks and learned when to use them. The children are becoming more confident to talk about stories, authors and making predictions about what will happen next. Well done boys and girls, keep up the good work!!
An exciting week in Fairyland for Primary 1/2
It has been an exciting week in Primary 1/2 as we continue to build Fairyland in our classroom and have had exciting deliveries from our friendly dragon.
On Monday we had an unexpected delivery after lunch. A bag of compost, some seeds and a selection of plant pots!! We knew straight away that we needed to plant the seeds to grow our own mini beanstalks in the classroom. We learned all about how to care for our seeds to nurture them into proper beanstalks. We learned that all plants need water, sunlight, soil and the right temperature to grow. We have been very diligent when watering our plants every day and have been filling in a special bean diary to observe and record any growth.
Jordon was happy to add the castles at the top of our beanstalks.
Nathaniel felt excited to plant his very own beanstalk.
The dragon also delivered a little pot of beans with all of our sounds written on them. We think he wants to help us get better at spelling, we have been having lots of fun spelling fairyland words with the beans.
Belle was practising her common words with the beans.
Euan had a go at writing speedy Gonzalez because he was watching it at home.
We were so excited to come into class and see that Jack’s beanstalk had appeared in our home corner. We worked so hard on creating different leaves and are very proud of how fantastic and realistic it looks. We think the dragon will be very happy with it and Elkie thinks it looks good.
On Tuesday we had yet another exciting delivery, Castle booklets and a trail of green glitter EVERYWHERE! He’s one messy dragon!! We couldn’t wait to get started writing in them. Mrs Stevenson even let us use the fancy pens.
On Wednesday we continued to practise our writing skills with a special focus on ‘listening carefully to the sounds in each word to help us spell independently. We thought about what magical things we would like to happen to us if we got our hands on some magic beans.
Georgia thought she would get a mansion for her family.
Ashley wanted her magic to make everyone in our school happy.
Erica’s magic beans would turn into an aeroplane to take her to the candy shop!
We decorated castles and wrote our magical ideas onto a special bean. Mrs Stevenson put them on display in the classroom and once again we are so proud of our learning.
It really has been a week of exciting deliveries, on Thursday yet more magic beans appeared. This time they were colourful ones, this got us talking about our favourite flavours of jelly beans! We decided to conduct a survey of our favourite flavours and then display the information on a class bar graph. It was really interesting to see all of our choices on the wall and we were able to answer questions like, what was the most and least popular flavour. Then we had a go at making our own bar graphs! This dragon really is helping us learn so much.
On Thursday we also had the added excitement of World Book Day. We thoroughly enjoyed wearing our comfy pyjamas, bringing our favourite soft toy and of course sharing our most favourite stories throughout the day. We enjoyed our library time with P5/6 and sharing our most favourite stories.
Archie brought in Goodnight Tractor because he likes the pages.
Robyn brought in The Stinky Sprouts and the Station Mouse because she likes them and they are very good.
We are very much looking forward to our Sharing the Learning event next Tuesday (10th March) 2pm to 3pm and hope you can all make it.
A Mysterious Visitor…..
It’s been a very exciting week in Primary 1/2! On Monday a very curious and strange thing happened. During our wet lunch time we returned to the Primary One classroom where we found a sparkly glitter trail leading into the story corner! It was such a surprise! At first Mrs Fleming and Mrs Stevenson thought it was us children! Some of us even thought we had a ghost in the class. Tadas thought it was a glitter monster and Ashley thought it might be a robber! Upon further inspection we discovered a very smoky smelling and burnt letter addressed to us. This letter was from a very sad dragon who has nowhere to live, his home Fairyland has been destroyed because people aren’t reading enough fairytales and believing anymore. It is so sad. Primary 1 and Primary 1/2 have decided to help this poor dragon out. We are going to help rebuild Fairyland and give the dragon and his friends somewhere to live one again.
We wasted no time in getting straight to work. In the letter, the dragon spoke of Jack not having a beanstalk anymore, so our first job was to read Jack and The Beanstalk. We had couple of different versions of the story which we have been reading and listening to over the course of the week, we discovered that there are many differences between each one. We definitely love the ‘Stinky’ Jack one the best. Euan loved that he had to sleep outside in the barn with Daisy the cow!
In Primary 2/1 we are all fantastic artists and very creative, so we decided to make Jack his very own beanstalk in our classroom. We used lots of different materials to create textured leaves to add to the vines. We even used fine black liner to add little beasties. Watch this space as our beanstalk grows over the next week, it is going to be amazing!
Reading the fairytale Jack and the Beanstalk got us talking about whether we would climb a beanstalk or not, or what we would trade for some magic beans. I must say we are all very brave in Primary 1/2 as most of us said we would definitely want to climb up!
Belle wanted to see the view and Ashley fancied a golden egg so she would be rich!! Kayden said he would trade his Xbox for some magic beans to be rich. Nathaniel said he would trade his toilet!!! for some magic beans because he has two already!
We practised our writing skills and as we are focusing on extending our sentences we used the word ‘because’ in our writing to explain our reasons. We created a lovely display of our work by adding dangling legs and clouds to our pictures. We think Jack would be impressed. We also added some pictures of Daisy the cow to our display. We worked really hard on our listening skills to follow instructions to draw a cow step by step. Jordon thinks our display looks good and is excited to add more to it.
Later on in the week our friendly dragon delivered a shiny mail box to outside our classroom, we have had great fun writing letters and drawing pictures to him to help cheer him up.
In Numeracy and Maths this week we have still been working hard on our tools for subtraction. We are getting really good at using a number line to help us jump backwards to take away. The friendly dragon must want to help us with our learning too, as he left us a little maths measuring challenge. We had to find classroom objects longer and shorter than the giants footprint. This was a great activity for estimating and using a variety of non standard units and of course getting us used to using this mathematical language.
Other learning highlights this week.
Andrew really enjoyed making a castle in the Den this week, he used pencils and pens and made sure to colour in the lines.
Elkie loved building the leaves for the beanstalk, because she liked painting and even added ladybirds to hers.
Euan loved making the giants legs in our writing task.
Kayden felt really proud of himself this week for writing so many oo words by himself.
Belle really challenged herself when writing the oo sound and joining the two letters together.
We are really excited about what is going to happen in Fairyland next week.
Primary One Science Club
Today in science club we finally got to make our own volcano eruption.
We started off by learning a little bit about volcanoes and what makes them erupt. Did you know that lava starts off as magma when it is below ground? We also learned that there are many different types of volcanoes, the one we found most interesting was an underwater one!!
The experiment was really simple and one that can be easily tried out at home. All we needed was bicarbonate of soda and some vinegar ( we added some food colouring …just for fun!)
We made some predictions about what we thought was going to happen and took turns to put the ingredients into plastic bottles. It was great fun watching the volcanoes erupt. Not every volcano erupted and we had some super discussions about what we would change and do differently next time to ensure a more dramatic eruption.
It was lots of fun watching the eruptions and learning about volcanoes.
Snack choices in Deans Den
It has been a short but busy week in Deans Den. The children continue to develop their reading skills by using known strategies such as looking at the picture clues. Most children are becoming more confident to share their suggestions with others, well done !!
Snack time and preparation is a key part of group time as it enables children to become more independent and develop their social skills, whilst sitting at the dining table. This week we have discussed changing our snack options and here are some of the suggestions:
” cheese sandwiches with sauce” Andrew
” bagels, oranges and carrots” Charli- Mae
” cherries and carrots” Maddison
” Crackers and cheese” Max
Updated snack menus will be sent home on Monday.
Deans Den visit P5/6
We were lucky enough to be invited to the P5/6 class to watch them perform their musical talents which they had been developing during a music workshop. We were so impressed that the children could keep in time with the music and perform a variety of songs. Some of the Deans Den children joined in the singing and dancing and Mrs Morrison was so proud of them all, well done boys and girls!!
