Today I am writing to you to raise awareness for children at war.
This is Israa, she is 13 years old she used to live in a small village in Syria, she went to school like all of us, she loved art! She even wanted to be an artist! And even has 5 little brothers and sisters!.
But then one day a bomb hit that small village and she had to flee to a small refugee camp in Jordan. Now she doesn’t have anything she used to Toys, electronics, perfumes all she was allowed to bring were a few pairs of clothes.
Now she only goes to school once a week. So tell me how would you feel if you were in the place of Israaa how would you feel sad, scared, anxious, terrified, please let me know?
Israa’s country was attacked and they needed to move to Syria and she couldn’t take the toys she wanted to. Israa’s family could just take clothes.
About Isra,
Isra lived with her mum , brothers and sisters and she was just 13 years old. She just go 3 times in a week to school. Israa had to find new friends because all her friends need to go to the different country .
She was almost always playing with her sisters and brothers and Israa’s house was very small.
Today I wanted to write a blog about children and how they are affected because of war and conflict. I want to raise awareness of what their life is like because I learned about a child called Israa. She lives in a refugee camp in Jordan with her family. Israa was a normal child like you and me until she had to leave Syria because of war.
She said ‘’I miss my garden and the roses in it, school and friends” She used to go to school Mon/Fri like me and you, right now she goes Mon/Tue/Wed, this is a big change, right.
WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR LIFE IS LIKE COMPARED TO HER’S?
The First Minister’s Reading Challenge is a programme for Primary 1 – 7 pupils in Scotland, providing opportunities and resources to help them develop a love of reading.
There are a range of challenges to encourage children to go on their own reading journeys, explore different types of books and celebrate personal reading achievements. The Reading Challenge aims to support schools and communities to develop reading cultures and for these to be embedded and go on to benefit your children in the long-term.
The First Minister’s Reading Challenge will run from September 2017 until May 2018 and there will be a celebration event in June 2018, where good practice from across the country will be showcased and prizes awarded.
Why is it Important?
The importance of developing a life-long love for reading cannot be underestimated for children and the impact it has on all aspects of education – the curriculum and beyond – is immeasurable. Allowing children to enjoy the fun and pleasure of reading by developing a reading culture in schools, communities and families is therefore incredibly worth-while and something which lies at the heart of the First Minister’s Reading Challenge.
What can you do to help?
Your child has now received a Reading Passport (P1-P3 have a class poster) where they will be able to record books they have read throughout the Challenge and what they think of them. Talk to them about the books and reading materials they enjoyed and the ones they didn’t. You might want to discuss challenges they and you face as readers, and that it’s ok to start a book and realise it’s not for them. They could also take their Reading Passport along to their local library and record recommendations inside.
One of the most important things you can do with your children is make time to talk about books, stories, and words. Let them develop their own interests and, above all, help them to value reading and the world it opens up to them
Our chosen lead learners this week were James and Isla who did a great job of capturing some of the highlights of the week for us to add to our blog and Talking Books.
Literacy
In spelling we worked as a whole class to discuss spelling strategies and words that are commonly misspelled. Each team had to think of as many strategies as they could and then share them with the class. We then focused on 3 of these: make a song, make a mnemonic and does it look right.
We enjoyed this catchy tune to help us with there, their and they’re.
Can you make a mnemonic for the word ‘people’, post your efforts on our blog post for an extra dojo point?
In literacy we also learned about the work of author’s and how many stages it can take before having a finished piece of writing. We had a go at this and tried to up-level our diary entries from last week by revising, editing and redrafting. This led us nicely into an online meeting with Pamela Butchart, author of many children’s books. We logged onto BBCLive to hear about her work and joined in with the session by making sound effects, answering questions, having a go at illustrating and tweeting, we were delighted when we were mentioned on the BBCLive event and Pamela even tweeted us privately after the event!
Inspirational Maths Week
Wow, where do we begin…This week was all about mathematical mindsets and being creative in maths. We started the week by working in teams to create 2D and 3D shapes with a 7 foot piece of rope in the outdoor space. Lots of laughter, confusion, creativity, frustration and success was had by all! We then examined our own mathematical mindsets and carried out a class questionnaire which led for some interesting discussions. We made some mathematical mindset keys for our tables and maths working wall.
We studied the work of a famous artist/sculptor, Sol Lewitt, and how his work connected to mathematics. The best part was then working in teams to create our very own sculptures using marshmallows and cocktails sticks. Mrs Howley had us learning more about symmetry and did some fun activities connected to this.
Thursday was one of the favourite lessons as we, the pupils, led the lesson by sharing the maths activities we had worked on for homework last week, everyone had made a great effort with these.
Throughout the week we also took part in Numbertalks , the Sumdog contest and Mathanagrams. It was great to see some of the parents getting involved to through dojo. Congratulations to Oskar, Shiv, Mia Stewart and Max for completing the 1000 question Sumdog competition and to Mrs Nicol for winning the parents mathanagram quiz on dojo. A big thank you to the parents who also came along to Ninian’s Natter, it was lovely to see you taking part in some of these activities.
RE
On Tuesday the P7 children accompanied their P1 buddies to mass at St Philip’s. It was a lovely morning and well done to the P7’s for taking their roles so seriously and supporting the younger children.We celebrated St Ninian this week and participated in a beautiful mass on Friday morning. Mrs Purdie awarded us some extra playtime to celebrate the day. The Parent Council also organised a fantastic Scottish afternoon to continue the celebrations. Mrs Roy’s quiz team, the numpties, came 2nd! Everyone got into the spirit and had a fun afternoon!
Have a lovely long weekend, see you all on Wednesday.
In literacy we wrote a diary entry as if we were the main character in the story. We focused on chapter 3 this week, at the end there was a bit of a cliffhanger as Michael went overboard. We can’t wait until next week to find out what happens next… Some of us were brave enough to read our diary starters to the class to help motivate and inspire others. We even put a tweet on Twitter, Chi-Chi is famous!! Remember to follow our class @mrsroy16 as we regularly Tweet throughout the week. We also worked in teams to do some comprehension work, that was good fun!
We have been playing maths games to help us develop our understanding of place and value, eg. maths pacman, roll the dice, roll and stick game and close to the target. Some of us also did a maths population task using the http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ website. It was really interesting as it was a live website and people were being born every second! Cole and Max also made a place value poster for the maths working wall.
Don’t forget the Sumdog Maths Contest is now live until next Thursday, points means prizes!
In PE we were doing some more rugby skills. We had the ‘ Scoop Pass’ competition, James, Nicholas, Leon and Shiv were the scooping champions this week. This game involved concentration, speed and co-odrination. We progressed onto some rugby skills focussing on the ‘back pass’, this took a few attempts to master, Leon was hilarious at this activity as he kept getting confused about when to run and when to pass.
Chi-Chi and Krzysztof were our first Lead Learners and did a great job taking responsibility for the Talking Books this week – well done guys!
Our classroom is taking shape now and there is some fabby work on display for you to see when you next visit us. Remember Ninian’s Natter is on Thursday 14th September 6-7pm if you want to drop in for a blether and some Inspirational Maths activities.
Some pupil highlights:
Cole enjoyed the maths work this week.
Chi-Chi enjoyed using the population site.
Rachel W enjoyed doing the homework challenge.
Remember next week is Inspirational Maths week so come prepared as we may be taking the learning outdoors at times. We are hoping to also start using AAL – Anytime, Anywhere Learning for those who have returned their contracts. Please load the Class Dojo and Sumdog apps onto your device if possible, both are free apps.
James gave us the title of our blog this week as we discussed how quickly the week had gone.
It all started on Monday where we did some focused vocabulary work linked to our class novel, everyone agreed that it was a pretty tricky task as we had to guess what the word meant by using the text surrounding it then look up it’s actual definition in the dictionary. Do you know what these words mean – reproached and suppurating? Place value is our focus in numeracy this week and we did some paired, independent and group tasks on Monday morning using resources like dominoes and flashcards to play different games to develop our confidence in reading different numbers. The afternoon saw us being introduced to Emotion Works, a whole school HWB resource. Again we linked this to our novel and used the emotion cogs to unpick each of the characters feelings in chapter 1 whilst working in teams.
On Tuesday we were very excited to start our rugby block with Mr McCurdy and everyone came well prepared for the outdoors! We had our first numbertalks session and showed Mrs Roy our explanation skills and mathematical thinking. In our novel study we read chapter 2 and were introduced to our Blooms Superheroes which will help us develop our reading comprehension skills this year. We all chose which questions we would like to tackle and tried to match these up to the superheroes. The afternoon continued with a novel theme and we started some ‘Hokusai’ inspired pictures, we used pastels to try and recreate the famous ‘Great Waves’ painting. Mrs Roy was in awe of our artistic skills!
Writing was a focus on Thursday morning and we used a previous talk lesson linked to our novel to write a balanced argument with the title: Sailing around the world. Everyone gave it their best shot and tried to use persuasive language. In numeracy we began to split numbers and partition them, as the numbers got bigger this became more difficult. We will continue to focus on this next week.
Friday ended the week nicely as we finished our earlier art work and got to do our first Big Maths Beat that challenge. We also went outside with Mrs Roy for a fun rugby session where we learned how to play banana tig with a rugby ball and practised our passing in small teams. The sun stayed out and we didn’t get wet, so that was a bonus.
This week we also welcomed Mr Turner to our class, a 3rd year student training to be a teacher, he will continue to work alongside Mrs Roy each week to support us in our learning.
And finally, the UN Ambassador’s came round all the classes this morning to announce that we had successfully achieved the Level 2 Award for RRS. We were all really pleased especially as some of the people in our class were in that committee last year. Well done everyone!!
Pupil voice:
Louise – We played rugby and it was lots of fun.
Isla – We did Big Maths on Friday.
Amera – Rugby was fun and wet!
Isabel – Our Kensuke’s Kingdom collage is now up on display and looks good.
Rachel H – We all dressed down today to raise money for charity.
Well what a great start to the year it has been, everyone has been really enthusiastic and raring to get started!
The week began with some creativity and we worked in small teams to create a class song/rap and wordle. We used the mindmaps we had made on our moving up day in June to help us. It was lovely to see the confidence in many as they stood up in front of a new class to perform. Follow us on Twitter @mrsroy16 to see some of the videos we took.
Our Wordle is now at the heart of our new class charter which has taken the theme of ‘Animals’ as voted by the class. Everyone came up with suggestions as to the content of our charter and this is now on display for all to see.
We have enjoyed taking part in the ‘Door Challenge’ this week and made an emoji themed door display. We discussed what emoji represented each of our personalities and then made mini emojis for display. They look great!
We started our class novel ‘Kensuke’s Kingdom’ by Michael Murpurgo. We have listened to an audio of chapter 1 whilst following the text in our shared books. There has been lots of scope for discussion and one of the first debates we had was about sailing around the world, are you for or against? We came up with our arguments and then presented these to another group using persuasive and emotive language. Everyone thought it was great that they got to argue with one another!! We have also started creating a class collage which is coming along nicely.
Pupil Voice:
Shiv: We did face portraits with Mrs Howley.
Nicola: We did our own animals for our class charter.
Mia Sok.: This was a fun week.
Rachel W: It was a good week.
Isla: At PE with Mrs Roy we went out and played rounders.
Chi-Chi: We made emojis that represent us and put it on our door display.
Amera: I liked PE because we played rounders.
James: I enjoyed the self-portrait task because I usually don’t do that.
Nicholas: I liked drawing the animals.
Leon: This week was fun.
Isabel: An amazing start to the school year.
Rachel Mc: This week was amazing. We were making a boat and sea for display on our class novel.
Louise: We did today’s number of the day and we did it on whiteboards.
Mia St: We got to stick tissue paper to a wave outline for our display.
Have a great weekend everyone, see you next week!!
We went to a Gruffalo party with the PM Nursery Group, went to mass in the Lanthorn, had a class party, joined in with Crazy Hair Day and lots more!
We spent time discussing memories, here are the children’s thoughts:
James: Goldentime – I got to play with all my friends
Brooke: Christmas Party – Santa came and I enjoyed the food.
Amber: Playtime – I got to play with all my friends.
Lucy: Structured Play – I got to play with lots of things.
Bernice: Health Week – We had a fun run and got to do lots of sports.
Mark: Gruffalo Party – I liked singing the Gruffalo song with the nursery.
Dexter: Numberwork – Each day we got harder and harder sums to do.
Paul M : Pirates topic – I loved making the big pirate ship for our display.
Dawid: Art and Craft – I liked making things, especially the flower pictures with Mrs Thomson.
Ephraim: Movie night – I enjoyed coming back to school at night with a snack and cushion to watch a movie.
Lloyd: Crazy hair Day – It was funny when people came to school with crazy hair.
Sahara: Dress Down Days – I liked wearing my own clothes.
Isla: Numberwork – I liked learning all about numbers.
Abigail: Everything – I liked doing different things every day!
Klaudia: Maths – I liked learning about numbers.
Rafay: Goldentime – I liked playing with all the toys in the classroom.
It has been a fantastic year for everyone and I am really sad to say goodbye to them all. I wish them all the luck for P2 and P2/3 and hope they come to visit me in P6/7.
Have a lovely summer everyone and thank you for all your support/gifts over the last year – it’s been emotional!
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