Literacy – Page 5 – East Calder Primary School Blog

Listening and Talking

At the start of this session classes will be focusing on our Listening rules and will refer to these daily.

Listening and talking skills are essential for good communication. We aim to give learners a wide range of opportunities to listen and talk for different purposes both at school and at home.

Many thanks to all of you who popped in to see us at our recent Meet the Teacher event. You might have picked up a copy of our school Listening and Talking leaflet.

We have included a copy on this post for those that might have missed it.

Listing and Talking Leaflet

If you have any concern’s about your child’s speech, please see details below of West Lothian’s Speech and Language service where you can get information about any concerns you might have.

Working hard in P3B!

Article 29: We have the right to develop our talents and abilities.

We had a very busy week in Primary 3B last week. We were learning to read and write Fry’s words in Literacy and we also learned to identify nouns and adjectives. We are going to be learning to write descriptions in Writing and we will find lots of nouns and adjectives in descriptive texts.

We had a very exciting morning when we found a mystery box in our classroom. It was full of words inside, along with a note asking us to find the other missing words. This sent us on a word hunt around the classroom! We then realised that all the words were nouns. We used these words and a power point to help us write sentences using nouns and adjectives. We worked with a partner and wrote on white boards.

In Numeracy, we have been exploring Place Value and we have been learning to order and sequence numbers to 100. Some of us have been ordering and sequencing three digit numbers to challenge ourselves more. We engage in games, smart board games, white board tasks and pencil tasks to support our learning. We use concrete materials such as cubes, counting sticks and counters to help us if we need them. We also use number squares and we have been developing our confidence using 100 squares to identify the value of a number.

We also take part in Number Talks every day and on Thursday Miss Marra wrote a missing number addition calculation on the board for us to solve. We used concrete materials, number lines or number squares to solve the problem and we enjoyed sharing our strategies.

Spring Sway – Nursery

Get all the latest updates and find out what our youngest learners have enjoying and learning in our Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) setting by clicking on the link below to our ‘Spring Sway’.

Go to this Sway

A Busy Week for P5/4

In P5/4, we have had a very busy week with all our learning. On Thursday, it was World Book Day and we celebrated by starting the day with “Relax and Read.” Our favourite thing about this is choosing where in the classroom we would like to read (as long as we choose a safe place.) As you will see from our photos, we chose some interesting places to enjoy a book.

We have been learning how to see ourselves as readers and we know that we enjoy reading more when we get to choose books we like. One of the highlights of our week was our first visit to the library. Unfortunately, Miss Marra forgot to pictures as she was enjoying it so much too. Caitlin proudly cut the ribbon and we were so excited to enjoy our new space. It was hard to choose from so many comfortable and exciting places to read. The choice of books was amazing too. Some of us even chose to read some nostalgic books from when we were younger. One of our favourites was Stick Man and Elmer. We can’t wait to go back for our next visit.

Another highlight in our learning this week was when we engaged in Drama to clarify our understanding of a text. In class, we have been reading the Harry Potter series as our class novels. We are currently reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. We engaged in a “Hot Seat” learning activity in which we chose to be in role as a character from the series and everyone had to ask us questions. Miss Marra modelled our learning first by being “in role” as Draco Malfoy which everyone found hilarious. Our Drama skills were very impressive and we used our knowledge of our chosen character well to engage in this learning activity.

We engage in Mental Maths daily and we have been working hard on using division to solve problems. We are developing our confidence using the “Bus Stop Method” and this is helping us apply our knowledge to word problems.

Our new Maths Topic is “Time.” We started our topic by having a great class discussion about why we need to learn to tell the time. We use time so much in our daily lives! We have been practising some of the different times we already know e.g. o’clock, half past, quarter past and quarter to. We engage in outdoor Maths and Numeracy every Thursday, and this week we practised telling the time in the playground. Struan did the honours, drawing a large analogue clock with our chalk. We then practised different times with some of us representing the hands. We had to jump to the correct number and we were able to talk about why this was the correct number, using the Numeracy skills we know and our prior knowledge of time. Our next step is to move on to five minute intervals.

Article 29: We have the right to develop our talents and abilities.

Coming soon .. our Library opening event ..and World Book Day!

As part of our Reading Schools Award we are working to promote reading for pleasure and enjoyment.

A growing number of studies show reading can have a major impact on on children and young people’s attainment, self-confidence and well-being.

Next week we will be opening our long awaited, refurbished library (just in time for World Book Day on Thursday 4th March) We hope everyone will enjoy reading and exploring all the fantastic books we have. Classes will be invited along for an opening event and then will have an allocated time each week to spend in the library.

This is what our library looked like before..

Each pupil has been given a token for World Book Day which can be exchanged at participating retailers (Waterstones book shop in Livingston is one) for a selection of short, free books or used to discount other books by £1. The tokens can be used from now until 27th March.

NEXT FRIDAY 4th March we will be celebrating World Book Day by dressing up ..or down .. if you wish. We would really love to see some characters from books!

We are looking forward to a fun…and book-filled week ahead!

Article 31 (leisure, play and culture): Every child has the right to relax, play and take part in a wide range of cultural and artistic activities.

Scots whae hae!

Over the last few weeks all classes have been working on Scots language activities.

A knowledge and understanding of Scots language and Scottish texts allows children and young people to explore and appreciate Scottish culture. Learning Scots can often improve learners’ engagement in learning and their development of wider literacy skills.

In the nursery I enjoyed reading a story in Scots to the boys and girls. Some made beaks and built a ‘waa’ for the three ‘Craws’. The Primary ones have made some super displays about ‘The Teeger that Cam for his tea’ and ‘Katie Morag’. Primary 2’s and 3’s have been learning and using lots of Scots words. Primary 4-7 have worked on creating their own Scots word lists and dictionaries. They have even been writing in Scots!

Primary 4-7 also took part in a live author event about Robert Burns with author Victoria Williamson. Primary 7 are really enjoying reading her novel ‘Hag Storm’.

We have been learning Scots poems and 2 pupils from each class were chosen to recite their poem at one of our two Scottish Assemblies. Well done to everyone who read aloud at assembly or in their class. It’s not easy to speak aloud in front of an audience.. and a special mention to Primary 1B for their amazing performance of ‘There was a wee lassie who swallowed a Midgie!’

We are currently working towards our Reading Schools Silver Award and part of our action plan is to celebrate books and special reading events. We now have lots of fabulous displays to demonstrate our learning of Scots language. Fantastic work everyone!

Article 30 I have the right to use my own language and culture.

P3 Book Week

We had lots of fun activities to help in our learning this week. We received new books for our class library and have been reading them each day when the bell rang to tell us to ‘Drop everything & read’. We were read some new stories and created a big display with our ideas from the book Octopus Shocktopus. We used an idea from the book to design and label our perfect house. We took part in ‘design a book mark’ competition. We learned about exclamation marks and found some in books in the class. We listened to David Williams & Julia Donaldson on Author’s Live. We took our books to the playground to read during Outdoor Learning. We found verbs in our reading books, completed some Readingwise and Giglets tasks and we each received our ‘Read, Write, Count’ bags containing two new books and lots of other surprises.

P2/1 Learning this week

Primary 2/1 have been working hard this week.

We have taken a small break from our Romans topic and introduced a mini-topic about Pandas in response to questions the children had about the Red Pandas coming to the Five Sisters Zoo. The children were very interested to learn that Red Pandas and Giant Pandas are not related and this made them more curious. We made a list of what questions the children had about Pandas and then decided to watch factual videos to find our answers then make a Fact File about them. The children also enjoyed following an artist to learn how to draw Giant Pandas. So far we have been learning lots about Giant Pandas.

In numeracy Primary 2s are learning about money and Primary 1s are having more practise with addition.

In literacy Primary 1s are making great progress in their reading and our Primary 2s are learning about reading with fluency and expression as well as comprehension techniques.

At the start of the day before Register, the children have also enjoyed finishing off our Roman Colosseum display picture by adding Romans, gladiators and wild animals in the arena.

I hope you’ve all had a lovely weekend,

Mrs Meikle

P2/1 Learning this week

Primary 2/1, it was a short week of learning but we still managed to learn lots of new things.

Primary 1s, we worked on our numbers 11-20 and we used our cubes and paired up with a partner to use lots of fingers to show different ways of making the numbers 12 and 13. We enjoy our learning from the board that gives us lots of active learning tasks to practise our understanding and we enjoy our Numberblock videos and our discussions about where we see Numbers outside of the school (shops, buses, doors and registration plates). In Literacy we moved onto a new reading book and practised that alongside our longer sentences from the board. Primary 1s also carried out Class Talks this week on ‘My Favourite Animal’. The whole class had to remember our rules about a quality audience and when presenting you had to remember to talk in a loud, clear voice whilst making good eye contact with your audience. I was so impressed with the amount of facts you could remember and how well you answered the three questions at the end. Well done, Primary 1s.

Primary 2s, we progressed in our learning of the time; quarter to/past the hour and you applied this new learning to your airport/train station theme (where you are applying learning ownership). In writing you practised more of the new phonics from last week (st, ft and mp) and you made some beautiful pyramid writing to learn your spelling words. Primary 2s also carried out some beautiful handwriting whilst learning the spelling of words commonly used.

In our Romans topic we learned about the Roman Army and Forts. We learned all about what they would need to survive in the fort long-term and then we created our own versions of these using card and coloured pens. We had a lot of good discussion on why the Romans used metal in their armour and what the Roman Empire entailed (invasion of countries). We also enjoyed a new Roman mythical story about the Goddess Juno and the Golden Chair. Primary 2/1 are thoroughly enjoying these mythical stories and we will soon transform one of our corridor walls into a storyboard of these myths.

In French we practised our weather question ‘Quel temps fait-il?’ What’s the weather like? We practised our answers Il fait beau, Il fait froid, Il fait gris, Il pleut and Il neige. (It’s nice, it’s cold, it’s cloudy, it’s raining and it’s snowing). We also reminded ourselves of our commands. It was fun doing the actions fast for these!

Have a great weekend,

Best wishes

Mrs Meikle

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