Deans Primary School Blog

We have had another busy learning week in Primary 1A. The children wanted to share some of their learning with you.

Literacy -Writing

This week the children have continued to develop their descriptive writing skills. The children were asked to describe a car. They started by looking at a picture with labels (labels were attached to the main parts of the toy car) they then focused on listening to simple sentences which described the car, how it was built etc. (label words are used in the sentences). Below some pictures of the big book we used and some of the children’s descriptive writing.

Phonics – Spelling

New sound this week is “s”. The children have been making it, sorting pictures by initial sounds and writing it. Some of their work below.

Numeracy

This week we have started a daily Number Talk. At this stage children are presented with a dot pattern. They are  asked “how many dots do you see and how do you see them?” I record their answers and we discuss  which was the most efficent strategy. The aim is to recognise groups of dots for example, in a pattern of 5 random dots a child may see a 3 and a 2 or a 4 and a 1. In time, (some are already doing this really well!!) it is hoped that this will increase their speed and accuracy and they won’t drop back to counting in 1’s when presented with larger groups.

We have also been focusing on the story of 6. The children have been writing the number 6 with different materials, they have also been gathering collections of 6 objects and making 6 in different ways. As a challenge some of the children ordered a huge 0 to 30 number line. Fantastic to see the children challenging themselves.

Health and Wellbeing

As part of our covid recovery programme we have been sharing stories of how we helped friends and family during lockdown. Some comments from the children

Katie – “I helped  mummy put away my clothes in the drawer”

Scott – “I helped  mum when she wan’t feeling well”

Emily- “I helped  mum make a cake”

Samuel – “I helped mum make dinner”

The children have drawn some pictures of the people they helped.

I hope you all have a fantastic  holiday weekend and I look forward to seeing the children on Wednesday (23rd).

Outdoor Learning

Primary 4 started the week off with outdoor learning with Mr Turner. The children continued learning about fables and the morals that are a feature of these tales. P4 were given the task of using natural resources in the surrounding area to help them to create a detailed setting for their fables to take place. Using their clay animal that they had made last week the pupils planned their stories and came up with a moral to their story. After the children then confidently performed, their fables and the audience were set the task of trying to guess the moral of the stories.

Literacy

Primary 4 have also been sharing their knowledge and understanding of nouns, adjectives and verbs this week. The children were showing confidence while sharing what they already knoe or now know about these and how they could and will now use them in their writing.

“I know that I am a noun” (Derry)

“I enjoyed learning about these and I can now challenge myself to use these in my writing” (Lewis)

Also in literacy this week the children were challenged to show their knowledge of spelling patterns and sounds as there has been a strong focus towards spelling this week at Deans. The children all worked super hard during these sessions and showed great enthusiasm towards the discussion of unfamiliar words and sounds.

Numeracy

We continued to explore addition using chimney sums with 2,3 and 4 digit numbers with carrying. The children found this a challenge and were able to express this during group and individual discussions. They are now beginning to understand the process of carrying over and that it may be tricky at times but to keep going with it.

“I found it a challenge as I got mixed up with where to place the numbers I was carrying over” (Derry)

“It was fun” (Kayleigh)

“It was hard because I had to remember to add in the numbers I had carried over to the next column” (Shay)

Novel Study/ IDL

P4 used their activing skills this week to work as part of a group to act out a scene from what we have read so far in our class novel ‘Billionaire Boy’. The audience had to try and guess which scene it was.

“It was fun because I like performing to the group” (Summer)

The children also used their learning from this week to write a detailed character description of one of the main characters from our novel. P4 were confident in their knowledge of adjectives and could discuss how they could use these to describe Joe Spud in detail.

To round this off the class were to imagine that they were all tour guides and asked to describe Joe’s house. They shared all of the wonderful things he had in his house. After our class discussion P4 then drew detailed maps of Joe’s house ‘Bumfresh Towers’ with all the different rooms, materials and wacky decorations that they were able to imagine from the story.

P.E

For P.E this week, we participated in a series of races. This enabled the children to work together showing great teamwork and support to their peers when racing. They were also able to display their stamina and work on controlling their speed and body movement for each of the different kinds of races.