What a great start everyone has made to Primary 1. We’ve all been learning our school routines and making new friends.
We have started learning our phonics and this week have been practising ‘s’ and ‘a’. We continue to work with numbers; sequencing, ordering, writing and counting.
We have been learning about the 4 listening skills; looking at the person who is talking, listening to all the words, sitting still and being quiet. We try to use this at assembly and love learning new songs.
This P5 pupil successfully completed the Summer Reading Challenge 2023 and shared his favourite book with us – a great achievement, well done!
This week we have continued to take part in our literacy and numeracy activities. We have started looking at 2D shapes this week and thinking about the properties of these. We continue to look at our numeracy learning through numbers before, after and in-between up to 100. We continue to use play throughout our lessons to support our learning. We have begun to look at our new topic of ‘Animals around the World’ this week and we started by creating some Cubist art. 
This week in Primary 4A we have been exploring numeracy tools in class. We have been looking at using tools to help count, solve calculations and order numbers.
We have been exploring Cuisenaire rods, Numicon and number lines. We have been completing daily number talks and building our bank of strategies to find the most efficient way to solve a problem. We have also been using Sumdog to practice our numeracy skills.
We listened to a story and thought of all the positional language we heard. We then worked with a partner to write down all the words we could think of. We watched a short video and discussed where items were in a house using the vocabulary we had learned.
We started learning about writing a description. To do this we read a passage and had to find all the nouns in it. We learned that a noun is a naming word for a people, place or thing. Later in the week we then used the same passage and highlighted all the adjectives. We though of other describing words that could be used.
We have been using concrete materials to help us with our Numeracy. We have lots of different tools in our class to support our learning. We use them to help us solve calculations. This week we were given the problem 24 + 12 and worked with a partner to solve it. We then had to keep adding 12. Some of us saw a pattern to the numbers and managed to work the problem to over 100. They then shared their strategy with the rest of the class.
We are constantly discussing our work with other people but sometimes we need to remember our listening skills. This week we worked in small groups to discuss our emotions. We had to remember to take turns, look at the person who was talking and listen to all their words.
We have been very busy in our science lab since we returned to school! In our first week back we were growing rainbows, creating crystal geodes, planting rainforest and desert biodomes and beginning to set up a wormery (no worms have been added yet!)
We have also started our topics for the term:
P1 & P2/1 are learning all about electricity and how to keep safe:
We have been working on our classification skills this week and sorting items into electrical and non-electrical groups.
P2, P3 & P4 are investigating forces and magnets:
This week we have been investigating the affect weight has on the speed of a ball rolling down a ramp, and testing out balanced forces.
P5, P6 & P7 are exploring light:
We have been exploring how to use reflection to control light and have been using this knowledge to build our own mirror mazes.
The Hive children have all returned from the summer break and are now settled back in to their school environment and ready to learn. We have done a variety of Maths and Literacy activities, at our workstations and through play!
Article 29: We have the right to develop our talents and abilities.
In Reading Comprehension, we are focusing on prediction this term. We learned that “prediction” means having a good guess about what we think will happen next in a text. Texts come in a variety of different forms and we used an exciting picture from a web site called “Once Upon a Picture.” Miss Marra asked us “what do we notice and what do we wonder?” We shared our ideas and used clues to predict what we think would happen next. One of our favourite parts of this task was working in “random partners.” We have been using our randomiser wheel or our magic box to choose a name at random. This is how we find out who we are going to be working with and it means we can work with different people each time.
We made some great predictions and shared our ideas confidently with the class. We worked well as part of a team which is one of the skills we identified when we co-created or Success Criteria. Miss Marra was impressed by how well we worked together on this task.
In Numeracy, we have started to explore addition strategies this week. We are learning to use the CPA Approach – concrete, pictorial and abstract. We started by adding Mathematical vocabulary to our Maths and Numeracy Learning Wall that we can use to help us when we learn addition. We came up with plus, add and addition and we are going to keep adding more. We also added vocabulary to support us with the other three operations (subtraction, multiplication and division.) We will re-visit this vocabulary and add more as part of our learning process.
We worked in random partners today and use our Numeracy Tools to show a calculation that was written on the board. We shared the strategy we used to calculate the answer and how we used the Tools to support our learning. We were provided with a challenge once we solved the first problem. We loved sharing our strategies with the class. In this photo below, Caelin and Olivia worked very well as part of a team to add 22 + 9. They could confidently explain how they solved the calculation.
One of our amazing learners was challenged even further in his group and was introduced to column addition. This is very early in primary 3; however, he was provided with the opportunity to learn this strategy and he then used his learning to teach others in his group. This learner was very proud to share his learning and support his peers.
During our first week in Primary 3/2, we worked together as a class to create our Class Charter. We started off by talking about our three school rules (Ready, Respect and Safe) and what these meant to us. We also reflected on our LEARN Values and then engaged in listening talking with a partner to share ideas about rules we thought we should have in our class. Some of us chose to draw and write our ideas. One of the most popular rules was “we will be kind to each other” so we added that to our Charter first.
Miss Marra showed us the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and we decided which Rights linked closely with our chosen rules for our class. Our favourite part was creating the artwork. We were given a plain body shape and we could turn it into anything we wanted. Some of us drew pictures of ourselves, some of us drew a character of our choice. Barbie, Pokemon, Stitch and Marvel characters were very popular choices. We will continue to reflect on our Class Charter as part of our daily routines to ensure each and every child in our class is safe and happy at school.
Article 12: We have the right to be heard.
P2 have been working hard on learning about the school rules and the school values over the last couple of weeks. We have created our class charter and thought about what our class rules should be to go alongside the three school rules of Ready, Respect and Safe.
We are continuing to look at the well-being indicators in health and well-being as well as getting to know other.
