Mrs Roy

Time goes quickly in P1R!

Sorry we can’t post photographs this week but there is no media space on the blog, hopefully I can add these later.

As you may have guessed from the title we started a new topic in maths – time. The children have been learning about daily routines, clocks and recognising o’clock times. They have enjoyed taking part in a variety of activities this week to help them learn, eg. making a clock, playing time apps, using small clocks to make times, being teachers and checking others clocks, time bingo and using the time playdough mats. It has been great to see everyone making links in their learning and the children are now using the class clock with ease, especially to remind me when it is lunchtime!!

A game which we used for our plenary sessions was Stop the Clock, Oma is the current class champion with 18 seconds to beat. Try playing this at home and see how quickly you can match the times.

http://www.teachingtime.co.uk/draggames/sthec1.html

In phonics we were learning about ‘sh’ and ‘ch’, these are not easy yet the children were confidently reading and spelling words with these sounds very quickly. Some of the activities which helped us were glitter tray writing, sounds bingo, interactive games on the smartboard and much more! Here is a game to try out which practises sh,ch and th.

http://splash.abc.net.au/res/i/L7855/index.html

In IDL this week the focus was on Scottish produce – we had a great afternoon on Wednesday tasting lots of different Scottish produced food – salmon, tablet, porridge, raspberries, shortbread, oatcakes to name a few! Everyone had to choose their favourite which we then wrote about in Thursday’s writing lesson. It was interesting to see so many different foods being chosen, shortbread was very popular! My favourite was the tablet, delicious!!

PE was good fun as we continued to learn about travelling with objects, we introduced some new equipment this week and we are now using basketballs, footballs and tennis bats/balls. Some of the boys were showing off their dribbling skills they have learned at their out of school football clubs.

We ended the week with some outdoor learning, Mr McCurdy joined us on an environmental walk in our local area. We were able to spot many signs of spring and at the same time increase our fitness levels by walking 2 miles, yes that’s right, 2 miles! We used a map and followed the signs as we walked. It was only fair that the children were rewarded with some time at the playpark on the way back to school.

Thank you also to P7 for teaching us about the Stations of the Cross on Friday, we learned a lot about the Easter story. We will continue to learn about Easter next week.

P1R need your vote!

They have entered the Easter Bonnet competition in our local Hobbycraft store. All entries will be placed on display in the store, with a public vote selecting the top three winners from Saturday 12th March. Don’t forget to tell families and friends to pop in store and vote!

Voting will end on Sunday 20th March, after which the votes will be tallied and then the winning schools will be announced.

Working together to become better learners!

Yet another jam packed week in P1r, it’s been so busy I haven’t had much time to take photographs so I’ll share the few I do have with you!

In IDL we have continued to learn about farming, with a particular focus on animals and how they give us milk, meat and lots more. The children wanted to make a new collage in the classroom so with some sighs we took down one of our pirate displays. Everyone contributed to this display:

“I helped colour in the farmer” said Madison.

“I made some farm animals and wrote some signs” said Ahmad.

“I worked with the blue table to make the barn” said Alice.

In maths we are learning about time and this week focused on days of the week and months of the year. We enjoyed this and used songs and games to help us learn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIvQOab00OQ

A few of us found day before/after tricky so for homework next week I’ve given you some activities to help with this. We have also changed our maths wall to help us remember the days of the week and months of the year.

In literacy we continued learning tricky sounds and words, this week we introduced the rude sound, “th”. The children enjoyed sticking their tongues out at me when making this sound! To help us learn our tricky words we tried 2 new games this week, bean bag toss and the fly swat game. We had to work together in teams and take turns at being the teacher. In our written tasks we had to be a codebreaker and try to break the code, we also had to read ‘th’ words and then draw a picture for each word. Some of us got to build words with the letter cubes, “I was very good at this” said Elenta. Everyone was very focused at the reading table and every week I am amazed at how well they are all reading – I can’t keep up!!

In PE everyone progressed from dribbling with a basketball to a football, it was agreed by all that good control and focus was needed in these lessons. At the end of the lesson we had a team game, everyone was a great sport!

To end our week we took part in a competition organised by our local Hobbycraft store, we had to design a class Easter Bonnet. Voting starts tomorrow so please go into Hobbycraft and vote for St Ninian’s, if we are successful we will win vouchers up to £150 to spend in the store. We are all really excited about this and hope we can be one of the lucky winners!

One final thing, thank you to all the children who donated to our Lenten Appeal today and wore their PJ’s to school, I loved coming to school dressed in my PJ’s too!!

Healthy, happy learners!

Well as you can see from the title Health and Wellbeing has been a focus for us. We have been doing our daily mile most days and yesterday we managed the full mile in the allocated time – go team 1R! Ahmad says, “I’m really fast”! In PE we have now started a new block focusing on travelling with objects, we have been working with a partner and as a team using balls and hoops. Tomorrow sees the launch of our school healthy tuck shop which we posted on our class dojo story page.

In phonics we have been learning about ‘ou’ which is from Vowel House and we are confidently making sentences and reading ‘ou’ words. We enjoyed a new activity this week which was highlighting words in a story, Angelina said ‘ I love this activity’! There was a challenge at the reading station as the children had to make longer sentences which were muddled up, Matthew said, “I’m good at this” and he was!!

In maths we revisited the concept of money but challenged ourselves by now adding combinations of coins to make totals. We played at being the people who work in a bank by counting all the coins, played a game on the smartboard where we had to do the shopping and then work out the change and we played a team game of matching amounts.

We also started a new topic, “Farming”, the children used their talking book to plan the learning experiences for the rest of the term and they came up with some really good ideas – have a look in our book when you’re next in class. They started by building their very own farm which is now proudly standing up in our library corner (if you have any soft toy farm animals to add to our farm we would be really grateful) and worked well in teams to colour all the different parts. In art they used printing to make fantastic farm landscapes, our hands got very messy! They learned about the parts of a plant and new life in Religious Education, watch out for next week’s homework which involves some outdoor learning about this. In music we made a sound story for Old McDonald has a Farm, the children had to select instruments to play for each of the animals, it was good fun but noisy!

Have a lovely weekend!

Bookworms in P1R!

Happy World Book Day! We had great fun today with all our lessons themed around this – paired reading with P6/7, a reading carousel, writing book reports, sharing our favourite stories, reading a story with the nursery children and our Achievements Assembly. Well done to the children for making such an effort with their costumes!

1 + 2 resources

Following our Curriculum evening I have been asked to list some resources which would support your child’s learning in French and Spanish.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primarylanguages/spanish/

http://www.spanish-games.net/spanishlessons

https://rockalingua.com/videos Spanish songs

http://www.lajolieronde.co.uk/ French and Spanish

Apps

Spanish school bus

Learn Spanish for kids – bilingual child

Fun Spanish – language learning for kids

Learn French by Mindsnacks

GIRFEC Resources for Parents / Pupils

Following our Curriculum Evening I have posted a note of some resources which will support you and your child when discussing GIRFEC.

“Wellbeing for young Scots” website -http://www.wellbeingforyoungscots.org
Scottish Government website – Q and A for parents
Education Scotland http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/parentzone/mychild/entitlements/girfec.asp

Your school – newsletters, weekly updates, blog

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/wl/stninian sps/

The learning cafe

http://healthy.thelearningcentre.org/

Pirates at sea

Today was the day we had all been waiting for, Pirate Pete had set us a final challenge to find the hidden treasure. We followed the map all the way to Glasgow and found the treasure(and some rats) on the Tall Ship. A great day was had by all, the children were a credit to us all!

This week’s news in P1R – our values in action!

The week may have been short but it’s been action packed in P1R!

In phonics we spent time looking at the Vowel House story and learned the trickiest sound of all ‘igh’, ask your child if they remember the special name given to 3 letters that make the same sound and leave a message for us on this blog post,it’s worth 20 House Points!! The children were sorting sounds with the igh sound that had different spellings then made their own sentences, they had to write from memory and play phonics games on the smartboard and ipad. We all agreed that this work was challenging but everyone rose to the challenge and succeeded!

In maths we continued to revise shape, addition, subtraction and money. We had good fun working in teams to make a number line to 20 using number names which earned us extra dojo points, played a shape matching game in trios, gave change from 10p using a smartboard game and completed a maths assessment!

In PE we had a choice lesson before starting our new block next week. The children could choose 2 aspects to focus on from our Significant Aspects of learning in PE to focus on, they chose Rhythm and Co-ordination. After some discussion we decided to do some pirate dancing to demonstrate this and film it to review our performance.

Digging for buried treasure was the theme for outdoor learning this week with Mr Hunter, everyone had great fun trying to find the hidden treasures!

As promised some of us went to visit the nursery to share our use of technology with the children, the P1 children from both classes visited the AM and PM groups. I was really impressed at the leadership skills shown by our P1’s, they had the nursery children engrossed in what they had to say and took it in turns to use the various ipad apps. We will continue to provide opportunities to share our learning with the nursery children over the coming months.

I think you will agree that we have made sure our school values are at the heart of what we do in P1R!

Successful learners in P1R

This week in literacy we introduced a really tricky sound, ‘qu’, the children enjoyed learning a little rhyme to help them remember the rule when writing qu. If you click on the link you can learn the rule too!

QU rhyme

Here are some pictures of the children showing off their spelling skills!

In maths we decided to revise all the concepts taught so far, the children amazed me at how much they have learned and remembered! They enjoyed revising addition, subtraction and money using a variety of activities during carousel time – smartboard games, money sorting, smartpal worksheets, using the rekenrek, question time, etc.

The theme for Religious Education this week was Lent, the children learned about Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. On Shrove Tuesday we enjoyed learning about celebrations around the world and thought it was really funny that in France and USA it is called ‘Mardi Gras’ which translates as ‘fat or grease Tuesday’. We had the opportunity to try some pancakes with our favourite topping, chocolate sauce!! I was really proud of how well they all participated in our whole school Ash Wednesday Mass, it was lovely to see so many children joining in with their prayers and mass responses.

Technology was a whole school focus and we decided to look at food technology but with a pirates twist! We learned about how to prepare our work surface for making different foods, how to prepare ourselves and how to safely use utensils. We enjoyed making treasure map pizzas and pirate ships. Some of us also did some extra food technology at home and made pirate snacks for Friday morning, thanks to Harry and James for making everyone a pirate cake, they were yummy!!

We also had a visitor called Sharon who works in the construction industry. She showed us lots of pictures of different buildings and we were able to link this to previous learning by telling her about different materials they were made from. She set us a challenge in teams to copy a building she had made using bricks, this was really good fun and all teams managed the challenge! To finish off we had a go at P4 work, yes you heard us right, P4 work!! We were able to build a city using co-ordinates and a grid. Thanks Sharon!

Safer Internet Day was on Tuesday and we watched an animation which taught how us about how to stay safe on the internet, we were all really sensible and identified what we should do if people were being mean to us online.

It was also lovely to see our nursery friends as they celebrated Chinese New Year, they certainly celebrated loudly as we could hear them before we could see them! Next week we are going to visit both morning and afternoon groups to teach them how to use the ipads in preparation for when they come to big school.

Have a lovely holiday weekend and I look forward to seeing all the children back in school on Wednesday!