Category Archives: Mathematics

Measuring Length P2 & P2/1 – Wk beg Mon Apr 20th

Click on the link below to watch a short video which may help you with this week’s measure task as described on the home learning sheet.

This task is for all  children in P2a, P2b and P2/1.

Remember if you are able to, you can take photos of the things you measure or your home learning jotter page and send these to your class teacher.

 

P1a Lego, Marmalade and Science Week – 18th March

Since we started in P1 we have been practising our fine motor skills to make the muscles in our hands and fingers stronger.  We do this in lots of different ways and in lots of different curricular areas.  For example – using scissors for cutting, using the tweezers for picking things up, finger painting, threading things such as beads etc. The photos below show just some of these and the results of all this practice – look at how fantastic we are getting at handwriting!

 

In maths we are continuing to add and subtract numbers within 10 and one of our favourite activities at the moment is a Lego game where we have to add or take away bricks.  The winner is the person with the largest tower.

Miss McDermott had bought a new book about Paddington Bear in London when she was there at the February weekend. We enjoyed listening to the story but lots of us hadn’t tried Paddington’s favourite snack – marmalade sandwiches.

With Mrs Smith’s help, we made a selection of different marmalade sandwiches and had a little tasting session. You will see from the photographs we had a visitor in the middle of the tasting session!   We then collected the data about our favourites and used this to create a chart.  Miss McDermott also showed us how you can do this on the computer – much quicker!

This week was British Science Week and our focus was on different things that can be pushed  and pulled.  We linked this to our reading as we used a non fiction book to follow instructions and make a “bug” that worked by pulling the strings to make it move. We also practised our fine motor skills as we had to cut and thread.

 

 

 

This week in P1a!

This week in P1a we have been learning about staying safe near electricity.  We made posters to show things that you plug in to the mains and things that use batteries and then we talked about staying safe.  We looked at a special safety website and tried to spot all the things that might be dangerous in the different rooms of the house – here is the link so that you can have a look too.

http://www.switchedonkids.org.uk/

As well as learning about money in maths we are still practising addition.  We are getting so good that we are now doing mental maths and playing bingo using the whiteboards.  The prize is a dojo point and getting to do the funky chicken!

Wednesday is our day for visiting the school library so we were very excited to finally go and do this.  We need to try hard and remember to bring the books back next Wednesday so that we can choose a different one.

You might have read on last week’s blog that we are learning all about emotions and feeling this term.  Our first team challenge of 2018 was to make posters with faces showing different emotions and here are the results…

Happy New Year from P1a!

Miss McDermott and Mrs Smith were delighted to see P1a back safely after the holidays and as ever we have had a busy week!

This term in maths as well as continuing our number work we are also learning about recognising and using money.  We have been talking about how grown ups often use debit cards as opposed to cash so we made our own debit cards for using with our Chip and Pin machine (which was kindly donated by Present Time in Bathgate!) We have been sorting coins and playing lots of games as well trying to make different amounts of money.  This is quite tricky and something we will need to keep practising!

In health and wellbeing our focus for this term is emotions.  We enjoyed listening to a story about Betty and the Yeti and discussing how the Yeti felt and why.  All the classes  in school are learning about the emotions “cogs” and in P1 we are learning about three cogs  in particular.  These are

  • emotion words
  • triggers
  • body sensations

You can see the cogs on our posters which will be in our profiles when we bring them home at the end of January.

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

P2/1 and P6a – Outdoor Classroom Day

This afternoon P2/1 and P6a celebrated Outdoor Classroom Day by taking part in a joint scavenger hunt around the school grounds.  The theme was weight and measure which is the focus for P2/1 maths learning at the moment.  The children had a long list of things to find and do – some of them much trickier than others! Here are just some of the photographs.

Cluster K’Nex Challenge

A fantastic morning with Primary 6 pupils from all cluster schools coming together to take part in a Cluster K’Nex Challenge. The teams had to construct a wheelbarrow to carry a house brick through a challenging obstacle course.  The wheelbarrows were all tested in the gym hall and the ‘ladder of doom’ ended the fate of many of them. All of the teams did a brilliant job and a huge well done to Winchburgh Primary who constructed the wheelbarrow which was the most successful.

Our team of master constructors and their model, well done boys.

Primary Engineers!

P7 are in the middle of working towards the Primary Engineer’s Young Leader award.  The classes have been researching engineering and finding out about all the different areas of engineering that are around.

They’ve also been finding out about inspiring engineers (especially famous Scottish engineers like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Telford, John Logie Baird and James Watt) and this week they have been lucky enough to have a visit from two engineers, Angus and Will, from the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh to talk about their work.

The classes had a chance to take part in activities that gave them experience of some of the skills the engineers use in their work, including robotics, optics, programming and working with lasers.

P2/1 Numeracy Learning

This week we have been practising counting and recognising numbers up to 100 and to help us, we have been playing our new snakes and ladders games.  Here is a link to an online version of snakes and ladders that you can play at home.  You can either play against the computer or an opponent.

http://www.counton.org/games/virtualmathfest/snakesladders.html

Some children have also been doing some measuring in the hall.  We need to know how much bunting to make for the front of the stage for the red nose day assembly.  Obviously as an eco-school we don’t want to waste resources and make too much!