All posts by Miss McDermott

Having lots of fun teaching and learning with P2/1!

P1a team challenge – make a chair for baby bear

Like our Maths activities , this week’s team challenge also had a teddy bear theme.  We read  the story  A Chair for Baby Bear and then  we had  to design and make our own chairs.  We talked about trying to make the chairs the right size and “stable” so that baby bear didn’t fall over. We also talked about how teamwork meant everyone had to take part.

At the end of the challenge all the teams tested their chair with our class baby bear.  None of the chairs fell over –  and as you can see some were big and some were small! One team even made their very own baby bear from the construction materials. Well done everyone  – super teamwork!

Scottish Maths Week in P1a

Scottish Maths Week is a new initiative for 2017 by the Scottish Government and the aim is to help everyone in Scotland to see maths positively.

As you probably know we have had a teddy bear theme for maths week in P1a alongside our Goldilocks and the Three Bears topic.   Our teaching and learning activities have included learning about

  • numbers 0-30
  • counting backwards and forwards
  • making patterns
  • sorting
  • measuring and of course singing lots of number songs and rhymes.

We have been learning both indoors and outdoors and we hope you agree when you look at all our lovely photographs that we are well on our journey to seeing maths positively in P1a!

Below is a link to some online games for Early Years children suggested on the Scottish Government Making Maths Count website.

http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Education/Schools/curriculum/MakingMathsCountScotland/MathsWeekScotland/Play/EarlyYears

P1a Porridge Tasting

As part of our Health and Wellbeing curriculum the boys and girls are encouraged to try new and different foods in different social settings and what better way to do this than to try some porridge just like Goldilocks in the story!  Just like Goldilocks we also tried porridge that was sweet and salty and we have started to make a pictogram to show what we thought.  Here are the photographs of us stirring the porridge with our school cook, Mrs Boyd and of course tasting it.

Photograph of the completed pictogram to follow!

 

A quick look at some of the things that P1a have been doing this week!

This week we had a visit from Rob and Gavin from Tiny Tales. They brought along their guitar, fiddle and accordion and everyone enjoyed singing, clapping and dancing to their super Scottish songs and music as well as learning about the instruments.

We have been working very hard practising our fine motor skills.  As you can see in the photographs we concentrated really hard to make these super necklaces as part of our phonics work for the sound ‘n’.  Originally we were supposed to thread nine pieces of straw on to the string ( because nine also begins with ‘n’)  but some of us were enjoying the task so much that Miss McDermott just let us keep going!!

Every day we also practise our pencil control and this also take lots of concentration!

Friday, however, is our Golden Time day and this week lots of us enjoyed the dressing up box.

 

 

P1a’s first team challenge – bridge building!

In honour of the Queen coming to Scotland to officially open the new Queensferry Crossing today, P1a undertook their first team challenge – to work in small groups to build their own bridges.

The children were not allowed to choose their groups or the materials that they were given.  They had to work together to build one bridge per team and as you can see the results were super – well done everyone!

P1a Learning Update – 3rd Sept

This week as part of our numeracy learning we have been learning to play some number games. As well as practising our counting these are also good for practising skills such as sharing and turn taking and of course they are good fun too!

We have also been practising our cutting skills and using scissors safely.  We made snakes and cut out squares which we then tried to put in order from smallest to biggest – which was not as easy as it first seemed!

On Friday we enjoyed taking part in “Let’s Move” drama activities which was all about people who help us.  Miss McDermott was very impressed with our good listening skills and partner work especially as this is just our first week in P1!

P1a Update – Monday 28th August

This morning P1a were able to show Miss McDermott who was in class by removing the T shirts that we made with the buddies on Friday from the washing line and putting them in the basket.  Miss McDermott was delighted that everyone was in class again after the weekend!

Today we had an Incy Wincy Spider theme in class.  As well as reading a story about Incy Wincy Spider we sang the song and made our own spiders which were very tricky to cut out!  This week one of the sounds that we are learning is “s” for spider so we had to look for the sound and listen for “s” words in the story. Mrs Bennie has made a giant web just like in the story so that we can display our spiders on the wall.

Here we are enjoying lunch with the buddies!

This afternoon we learned about a little boy called Kipper.  He is in lots of the reading books at Linlithgow Primary School.  We coloured little cards with his picture and his name on to help us remember him. Haven’t we done a good job?!!

Our first Friday in P1a!

On Friday P1a were delighted to be joined by the buddies to complete a small task.  We designed T-shirts for our self registration washing line so that Miss McDermott doesn’t need to read the register out every day to know who is in school.

Here we are hard at work!

If you look at our blog again next week you will be able to see the finished washing line!

A busy second morning in P1a!

Despite the rain the boys and girls were delighted to get outside and play with the buddies this morning.  The buddies also helped them to practice lining up smartly – one line for boys and one for girls rather than one big long line.

We were delighted to welcome our music specialist Mrs McWhirter to join us in P1a this morning.  Mrs Mc Whirter knows some of the boys and girls from our nursery class but she was pleased to meet lots of new children too.  We played some singing games and then played some bells and sang a special rain song which has hopefully chased the rain away for the rest of the day! Mrs McWhirter will be teaching us music on Wednesdays this term.

After milk and a story we went for a walk round the school.  After meeting Mrs Robertson and the ladies in the office we popped into the hall and had a quick practice of how we will need to sit for assembly when we go on Friday.  Fortunately because we are P1a we will be sitting in the front row but this means we will also need to sit properly and do good listening as Mrs Robertson and Mr Taylor will be able to see all of us!

Last of all, we said hello to our school cook Mrs Boyd.  She told us that she is looking forward to seeing us all again on Friday for the special P1 lunch and that one of the choices on the menu is pasta bolognaise – delicious!

A busy second last week of term in P2/1!

My apologies for not posting this last week but here is a little update of a few of the things that we have been doing even though it is just about holiday time!

As you may have seen on Twitter we have enjoyed learning about the Scottish artist Steven Brown and were even more delighted that he retweeted our post and obviously some pictures of our art work too.  I’m sure you’ll agree that there could well be some famous artists in P2/1 some day soon! Here a few more of the finished McCoos.

As the weather was nice last week we went outside to do some “wild writing”.  This is part of the outdoor classroom initiative and we were able to write about anything we chose although spiders did seem to feature in quite a lot of the stories.

One of the reading groups was recently reading about a book about World Instruments which included the didgeridoo.  MissMcDermott just happened to have a didgeridoo in her loft so she gave it a good clean and we all had a go at trying to play it. However, it was not as easy as it looked so we did some internet research ( which also said it was fun and easy!!!) and gave it another go.  With a lot of perseverance we finally managed – well, some of us did!

On Thursday some of the P6a buddies game to our classroom to join us in playing a variety of maths games.  We have been practising telling the time and money skills throughout the year and these are something that ideally we need to keep practising over the holidays. We would like to say a big thank you to the buddies for all their help this year!

P2/1 sun safety videos

As part of our  Health and Wellbeing learning P2/1, have  been learning about staying safe in sunny weather. You can watch us singing our sun  safety song on these video clips.  Well done to all the boys and girls who dressed up – we had hoped to make our video outside but as you probably know it has more or less poured with rain all week in Linlithgow! Fingers crossed we can practise our sun safety tips throughout the summer holidays! 😊

https://vimeo.com/220784385

https://vimeo.com/220784461