FAMILIES CONNECT IS SAVE THE CHILDREN’S NEW AND EXCITING INITIATIVE, DESIGNED TO HELP PARENTS SUPPORT THEIR CHILD’S LEARNING AT HOME.

The eight-week programme provides a series of creative activities, techniques and games that parents and children can participate in together. It focuses on three key area; language development, numeracy & maths and social & emotional development.

Activities include ‘Snack & Starter’, encouraging parents and children to spend quality time together, as well as Talk Topic, Reflection Time and ‘The Science Bit’ – helping parents to understand how a particular topic will support a child’s learning.  ‘Doing it Together’ gives parents simple take away activities to try with their children at home.

We know that the home learning environment can have a huge impact on a child’s learning. As well as being the place that provides for the basic needs of a child, an effective home learning environment will encourage strong parent and child relationships that help build self-esteem and security and help every child to fulfil their potential.

Research shows that parental involvement in their children’s learning positively affects the child’s academic performance leading to greater problem solving skills, greater school enjoyment, better school attendance and fewer behavioural problems at school.

Building a home learning environment – and crucially, increasing parents’ skills and confidence to support their child’s learning, can have a huge impact on a child’s future.

The informal workshops focus on getting parents to reflect on what they already do to support their children’s learning, and inviting them to explore new activities, games and approaches that might enhance this.

We are really excited about Families Connect have already ran a successful session back in the Autumn term at Murrayfield.  We look forward to working with as many of you as possible.

Please come along and join us for our informal coffee morning on Friday 8^th February 2019 at 12:00pm to hear more about this programme and to register your child/ family in the programme.

Families Connect Film: https://player.vimeo.com/video/224672230

This week in P1 we have been working on developing our writing skills. We are really trying to challenge ourselves by using a sentence opener to describe when our stories took place, a joining word to join together two sentences and for some of us, extending our stories by writing an extra sentence. It is hard work and some of us fall in to the learning pit but having a positive mind-set to look for a solution, really helps us achieve good results.

We learned the sound ‘nk’ this week and made ‘nk’ words out of plasticine. We have also been working on sorting pictures to show the sound that they begin with as well as our blending and reading skills.

We have been looking at the different ways to make 9 using numicon and other concrete materials in numeracy.  Mrs Mackie thought she was being sneaky when she added some extra number bonds to different numbers in our tasks but she didn’t fool us and we managed to solve the problems!

A big thank you to Caitlin, Eva and Logan who volunteered to help out at the ‘Numeracy Biscuit and Blether’ this morning.  You did a great job telling the adults who came along how we use numicon in the classroom to help us.

We are still learning about money in Maths.  It’s quite tricky but we are beginning to recognise the different coins and add up their amounts to buy stuff.  We have been playing a super game on the internet to help us.

Use the link below to play the game at home:

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/money/toy-shop-money

The snow and freezing cold weather didn’t stop us from keeping fit and healthy this week.  We couldn’t get outside for PE so we made sure that we worked out in the classroom.  It was hard work keeping up with the entire workout and we had nice rosy cheeks (and sweaty foreheads) afterwards!

Have a good weekend everyone!

P1 and Mrs Mackie

Primary 3/2 have been really busy this week.

We have been learning:

1. To match symmetrical shapes. – Aiva
2. Draw squirrels free hand for our topic, nature and the environment. – Xavier
3. Write instructions on how to look after a lamb. – Sophie
4. We have an interactive wall display where we have to make our own patterns out of colour 2D shapes. -Cody-Leigh

We have a busy week ahead next week and will update the blog on Friday.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend and keep cosy.

Primary 3/2 & Mrs Prentice

Primary Seven started a new topic on STEM last week. So far we’ve explored ‘What is engineering?’ and looked at occupations which are part of engineering. Today we became engineers!

We were challenged to use limited resources to plan and build tall structures in teams. Before starting the challenge we looked at examples of towers, such as The Eiffel Tower and The Leaning Tower of Pisa, and discussed build shapes. We discovered it was difficult to make our structures stable and strong.

#STEM  #DYWF  #murrayfieldpsteachingskillsforlife