#stninianskidscan
A huge well done to our UN Ambassador’s committee for organising this week’s Cool to be kind focus. All classes have taken part and are currently selecting evidence to send to UNICEF.
Thank you to P6 for leading a class assembly for P4-P7 and families, it was very interesting and informative.
We would also like to thank Amera and Catherine’s mum for speaking to us about her work with refugees. She very kindly gave up her time to come along and share her stories and answered lots of our pupils and staff questions.
Keep an eye on facebook, class blog posts and Twitter for further news.
As the title suggests we had a focus on ‘kindness’ this week and as part of this we learned about children’s rights, in particular those of refugees. We learned about the long journeys that some children had to make, often without all of their family members and spoke about how we would feel on those journeys. We then drew pictures of refugee children making their way to a new country. Paul M and Isla drew a family walking across an old train track, Brooke drew a family moving to a new country, James drew refugees on a boat. In our writing lesson we looked at photographs of refugees and discussed what they might need to make them feel safe, Lucy said they needed a comfy bed, Lloyd said they needed love, Dawid said they needed a house. We are going to send some of our work to UNICEF to show them what we have learned.
In phonics we learned two new sounds, d and g, these are both quite tricky to say correctly. We did some formation and blending activities during our carousels. 
In maths we continued to learn about addition, we are really confident in making number stories up to 5 now. We persevered with missing number sums and Mrs Roy showed us a strategy using the number line, we all agreed that this was a good way to find the missing number. We enjoyed linking our CLIC sessions to our numeracy carousels this week and learned all about doubles. Join in with the song we used in our warm-up sessions this week.
Miss McGuire did some finger painting with us and we made butterfly doubles for our maths wall to help us remember our doubles facts. Another good game we played was the ‘dice’ game, we all took turns to roll the big dice then had to double the number it landed on and find the answer on our smartpals. We finished our lessons with a ‘Beat the teacher’ challenge game. Mrs Roy challenged us to beat her best score in a doubles game on the smartboard. Well done to Dexter who was the ‘Hit the Button’ champion this week and beat Mrs Roy!!!
Another letter arrived from Santa telling us that to be a good elf we needed to learn about what toys were made from. Miss McGuire led us in these lessons and we had great fun sorting out all the toys from her Christmas Goody Bag. We described the toys as painted plastic(Ephraim), wooden(Nathan) and metal (Bernice). Part of our work was to sort the toys out into these different sets which links in well with maths so we showed that we could make links in our learning.
We also got a surprise on Thursday morning when we saw that Elvis the Elf had been busy setting up Santa’s workshop in our classroom. The design station and writing area opened this week, next week we will be opening the wrapping station too. It’s been great fun using these stations during freeplay and IDL.
Friday was great fun as we did our ‘Toy talks’ and got to sit on the talking chair, everyone took their turn and were good listeners when someone was speaking. We also took part in Crazy PJ day which was an act of kindness towards Children in Need, thanks to those who have kindly donated to this on the Fundraising link.
Have a great weekend and Happy Birthday Ephraim, 5 today!!!
OutRight is a special campaign for schools in the UK that lets you speak out about children’s rights and celebrate the anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
We have decided to join this campaign and speak out about children’s rights, particularly those of refugees. All classes will be taking part in this campaign in different ways, eg. writing letters, making posters, having debates, making videos, etc. Ask your child next week what they have been learning in class.
The UN Ambassador’s committee will be gathering a selection of evidence to send to UNICEF to gain recognition for their campaign. They also hope to reach out to their local community via the P6 class assembly on Friday 18th November and through Twitter and Facebook. The committee are also hoping to make a short video which they will share with you next week. Please take the time to engage with the campaign as we really need your voice too!! It would be great to hear your thoughts on the refugee crisis via our blog page, facebook, twitter or dojo.
Can you believe that another week has gone by in P1r, the clocks might have changed but we’ve certainly noticed that time is flying!
Our focus in number continues to be addition and we have been consolidating our knowledge of number stories to 5 in a variety of ways. The children have enjoyed using the ten frames and smart board games to practise making different number stories. In number talks we have enjoyed taking about how we see numbers,it’s amazing to hear how everyone’s mathematical minds work differently. It was great to see some of the children trying number talks activities at home this week. We then moved onto missing number sums which proved to be quite tricky for everyone. We learned different strategies for working them out,for example, using cubes with our imaginary partners, using the number line or using our fingers. What’s your favourite strategy for working out missing number sums,share this with your child. We finished our number work on Friday with our weekly Big Maths Beat That test,it was great to see so many children beating their scores from last week.
In phonics we learned 2 more sounds, h and u. Miss McGuire planned some exciting lessons to help us write and blend these sounds. We also had a visitor during one of our phonics lessons and she commented on how clever we all were! Everyone enjoyed using the new blending cups and blending tree that Miss Mc Guire made for us to use in our carousels. Reading time was busy and we all took it in turns to read aloud using expression,ask us about exclamation marks!
We got another important letter from Santa this week with our tasks for the week. We had to learn all about toys, old toys and new toys. We enjoyed looking at photographs of toys that our parents and grandparents might have played with. We also wrote stories about our favourite toys,we have filmed ourselves reading these and will be putting the videos in our online journals for you to see. Real life learning skills was also a focus as we used toy catalogues to research our favourite toys. It was good fun making a collage of these.
You might be wondering why we are all so tired on a Monday and Wednesday,well it’s because we’ve been working hard on our personal fitness during our PE lessons. We are determined to have “strong abs” by Christmas to help us with all the heavy lifting in Santas workshop.
Have a lovely weekend!
Mrs Roy & P1r
This week the article for discussion is Article 31: You have the right to play and rest.
We don’t know where to begin with today’s post, we have been so busy and have so many things we want to tell you about!
Reading has been the topic of discussion as we are all really excited about our new reading books and the Fry’s words we have been learning. Everyone enjoyed the Fry’s word challenge to see who could spell the most Fry’s words correctly before the timer ended – the highest score was 14!! During our reflective reading time we read aloud and spoke about the stories. Mrs Roy, Miss McGuire, Mrs Stewart and even our buddies were really impressed with us all!! We can’t wait to see what next week’s books will be about…
In phonics we have been learning 2 new sounds – b and f. Ask us at home where in our mouth these sounds come from. We did lots of blending work using the new sounds are getting more confident at wordbuilding.
Storywriting was very mysterious when Mrs Roy turned up in our classroom dressed as a witch! She showed us an animation of a Haunted House and we had to think about WOW words to describe what we saw. Then we worked on a story about the animation. We all tried our best to write the sounds we could hear in words and some of us were also using our Fry’s words in our sentences.
Miss McGuire has been leading our number lessons and she has been teaching us all about number stories to help us with addition. Ask us what number stories we know for 3,4 and 5. We have used different resources in our carousels to help us with this – ladybird pictures, counters, cubes, smartboard games, pumpkin seeds, ipad games and lots more. Next week we will look at missing number sums using the facts we have learned to see if we can make links in our learning.
IDL was our favourite this week as we had a visit from Elvis the Elf with a letter from Santa. Santa has asked us to be honorary elves this term and help him get everything ready for Christmas. He asked us to write down our ideas on our visible plan and in our talking book. Remember to have a look at these next week when you visit the classroom for Parent’s Evening.
In RE we are learning about God’s Holy Book and have been listening to some Bible stories – The Great Flood and The Secret Baby. We also learned about the Feast of All Saints and attended a whole school mass. We all tried really hard to join in with the prayers and hymns. Mrs Roy was very proud of us all!
We also started our structured play afternoon on Thursday, we all got to plan, do and reflect, ask us what we chose for our play afternoon. Have a look at our learning through play display next week to see some of our pictures. Mrs Roy, Miss McGuire and Mrs Stewart enjoyed playing with us and having fun!
Phew, what a week, well done everyone!!! Can’t wait for more exciting learning opportunities next week…
The UN Ambassadors committee have decided to start a weekly blog post that is “All about Rights”. Each week there will be an article from the UN Convention for you to discuss at home. It would be great to see some comments below about what you have discussed.
This week the Articles are:
Articles 28 and 29 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child focus respectively on a child’s right to an education and on the quality and content of education.
As the title suggest the theme of the week was STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. The children took part in some classroom and outdoor STEM challenges to help them learn more about the STEM subjects.
Challenge 1: As a SMARTSTART activity one morning the activities were linked to Technology and Engineering – using the ipad apps, using straws to build things and using sticklebricks. Some children worked individually or in pairs.
Challenge 2: The children were delighted to come into the classroom to see LOTS of marshmallows and cocktail sticks on their tables. In teams of 2 or 3 they had to build something using the materials they had been given. This challenge was all about teamwork and creativity. It was great to see what they came up with!! They also used maths and had to predict how many sticks or marshmallows they would need, counting the actual amounts, links to 2D and 3d shape and patterns. Amazing what you can do with some sticks and marshmallows!!!
Abigail made a diamond and a square shape, Nathan made Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, Dexter made some fantastic towers, Klaudia made a house, Sahara made a triangle, Ephraim made a star and lots more….
Challenge 3: The children worked in 3 teams to take their learning outdoors and go on an Autumn walk to see what materials they could find which we could use in our play. This was a great opportunity to talk about seasons, look at day/night, light/dark, colours, nature, etc. Everyone loved being outside in the wind and filled 3 bags full of leaves, berries and twigs, we even found a hairy caterpillar and some slimy slugs!!
Challenge 4: Using the materials from the walk each child had to make something, again this needed creativity and problem solving. James made a sensory bottle and filled it with leaves and water – we will keep an eye on the bottle to see if anything happens to the colour of the water, Bernice made an autumn collage using leaves and twigs, Mark made a tree picture using twigs and leaves, Paul L did some leaf rubbings. We have started a new ‘Play’ display in our classroom to show off some of our learning through play and have added some of our Autumn pictures to this.
It may have been the last week of term 1 but P1R still managed to squeeze in lots of learning and fun! It was lovely having one of the St Margaret’s pupils in our class this week for their work experience placement – a big thank you to Billy for all his help!
On Monday the children noticed a new play area in their classroom – their very own office! This has been popular this week and lots of mark making and writing has been happening here. Every week there will be 2 new challenges at this area for everyone to try out or children can be creative and make up their own writing tasks. Dawid and Klaudia have enjoyed ‘answering the phone and taking messages’, ‘Abigail has ‘enjoyed leaving messages for others on the coloured post-it notes’. In phonics we had our final week of assessments and spent time practising writing all the sounds, blending all the sounds and reading and spelling our tricky words. After the holidays we will move onto set 2 sounds and some new tricky words. The children’s efforts with their tricky words have been rewarded with lots of dojo points! Congratulations to James and Brooke who were our star writers this week and got a dojo picture message sent home!
In maths we have been learning about addition – we learned some new mathematical language – how many altogether, add, plus, totals. We did lots of practical activities in our maths carousels to help us practise the skill of adding 2 groups of objects or numbers together. Everyone did really well with their tasks and many children completed some extension activities to challenge themselves.
Our IDL and HWB lessons this week have often overlapped as we have been learning about our local area and the jobs people do. We learned that there are lots of different types of jobs and that many people have a part to play in keeping us all safe. In PE we had our final lesson of the block which was great fun, we can’t wait to find out what skills we’ll be developing next term with Mr McCurdy. We had Ninian’s Natter on Thursday and enjoyed looking at each other’s online learning journals and reflecting on our goals for term 1.
To end the week we had a visit from ‘Miss McGuire’ who will be joining our class after the holidays to work alongside Mrs Roy, she is really excited to join our class! Calder and Glasserton had a lovely movie morning and Whithorn and Galloway made a lovely new display for our P1 area. And finally, congratulations to James who was our class achiever of the month at our whole school achievements assembly.
Have a great holiday everyone!
Glow Blogs uses cookies to enhance your experience on our service. By using this service or closing this message you consent to our use of those cookies. Please read our Cookie Policy.