Mrs Davenport

P1M Weekly News

What an exciting week for us all in P1M.

This week in numeracy we have been working on our number bonds to 5. We are now super stars with this and can tell you very quickly number bonds to 5 e.g. 5+0=5; 4+1=5; 3+2=5. We completed a range of different activities this week to help us with this. We jumped out the missing jumps on our number line to get to Pedro the Parrot who was hiding on the number 5, we had to count out how many jumps it would take us. We also matched up ladybirds wings to create 5 spots on each ladybird. Stefan successfully completed his matching numbers worksheet to create 5. Kayla and Jarred were partners in a game because both of their numbers on their back made 5 when added together. Casper was using our ‘number talks’ strategies to talk about how he found the missing number in the addition sentence. Here is one of the games we have been playing this week to help us understand this concept a bit better:

http://www.iboard.co.uk/iwb/Alien-Pairs-to-5-2316

This is another game that we have been using for an ‘exit pass’ task this week. An exit pass means you have to correctly answer a question (pass the test) before you are allowed to exit this classroom.

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button (in this game select ‘number bonds’ then select ‘up to 10: addition within 10’)

We have learned the ‘d’ and ‘g’ sounds this week. The ‘g’ sound is quite a tricky one to write correctly but we have been trying our best. Kaimee and Adam were practising writing this letter in the sand tray. Kerr has been practising writing the letter ‘g’ on a whiteboard. We are continuing to work on blending sounds together to make words. We really enjoying playing ‘race car blending’. In this game, we race the car across a word and blend all the sounds together, if we correctly read the word we get to try blending with a new word. One of our written tasks this week was to listen really carefully to the middle sound in a word. We were learning about how if you change the middle sound in a word, this can change the meaning of a word. Sophie was a successful learner in this task and was very proud with her work.

We love reading in P1M and this week we were given the opportunity to return our books to the library and take out a new book. We know how to return books and take out books from the library. We even managed to squeeze in a quick play in the park on our way back to school.

We have also included a picture here of us showing off our listening skills during our talk from the SSPCA.

Have you heard about our cinema trip this week? I’m sure you have! We all loved the opportunity to go to the cinema with our peers this week and everyone enjoyed the movie – The Good Dinosaur (even the teachers enjoyed their trip!) In our writing lesson this week we decided to put our thoughts and feelings into words and write our favourite part of the film. Here are some examples of our writing this week:

Adam: “I liked when Arlo and Spot tried to kill.”

Kerr: “I liked when Arlo and Spot shared.”

Kyle: “I went to the cinema.”

Casper: “I liked Arlo playing together.”

Ernie the Elf sent us another letter this week to tell us all about a naughty elf who made a mess in Santa’s workshop again! Ernie asked for our help to sort out the toys. The naughty elf had mixed together the toys made from wood, plastic, fabric and metal – we needed to sort them out again. We used 4 different hoops to help us. The blue hoop is for toys made from metal; green for plastic toys; red for toys made from fabric and yellow for wood. We realised that most of the toys we play with are made from plastic. After we tidied up the mess for Ernie we chose one type of toy to play with. Ask your child if they played with the wood toys, the plastic toys, the metal or fabric toys? What was your favourite toy? Trex even joined in the fun! Can you remember what Trex is made of?

This week is ‘cool to be kind’ week. Throughout this week we have been thinking about being kind to our peers. Every day Miss Meechan chooses someone to get a letter home for working hard. However, this week our letter home was for people that had been kind in class. Well done to those who have shown acts of kindness this week: Casper, Kayla, Kerr and Jakub. Who is going to get the letter home tomorrow? We also had our achievements assembly today. During this, Miss Smyth presented an award to someone from each class who has been kind all year. Well done to Jakub from our class to win the award.

During ‘cool to be kind’ week we have been learning about refugees and talking about our rights. We have spoke about what rights we have and how we found feel if our rights were taken away from this. We decided that we would feel sad if we didn’t have our rights. Tomorrow, Mr Slater is going to teach us about refugees and the journeys they make.

WOW! What a busy week. Enjoy your well earned weekend everyone!

PIM Weekly News

P1M our week in pictures:

We began our new numeracy play focus this week. Here are our different tasks to complete over the next 2 weeks.

Red: Addition station – building on our addition skills using a range of different resources and games.

Blue: Car small world – we have to drive the cars through the bridges in the correct order. We know to start at bridge 0 and then drive to bridge 1, then bridge 2 etc.

Yellow: Counting station – we are working on our counting skills through lots of play based activities – dot to dots, matching tasks etc.

Purple: Technology station – developing our knowledge of numbers and addition through using the smart board and the ipads. We love the post sorting game on top marks. Why don’t you try this at home?

Orange: The sand tray – big making sand shapes, small shapes, using different sized cups for measuring etc.

Green: The shop – we buy different shapes with money and use the shapes to build different sized towers.

Ernie the Elf visited our classroom with a letter this week. Ask your child what this letter was asking us to do. We wrote back to Ernie. Miss Meechan was very impressed with our writing skills – we all remember where we write the address in a letter.

We are continuing to develop our knowledge of addition through using numicon. We love using this resource in class.

We have learning about how to use page numbers in a story book to help us find our place when reading. This week we worked with a partner to make our own books called ‘The Snowman’. We read the book ‘The Snowman’ on the oxford owl website. Have you used this website at home yet?

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan

P1M Weekly News

Here are our highlights of this week in P1M:

We are loving our Play: Plan, Do, Review sessions – this week was our last sessions with a literacy focus. The focus for our play for the next two weeks will be numeracy. We shall update you next week with the different tasks. One of the play sessions this week, Miss Meechan joined in with the puppet theatre group. During this, Stefan and Kerr acted out the vowel house story using puppets.We then showed off our actions for sounds we know. Daniel showed us the ‘c’ and ‘o’ sound actions and Kerr showed us the ‘ee’ sound action. This week, Kerr also built a lego vowel house – great job!

Our sounds for the next week have been ‘f’ and ‘b’. Check out the ‘f’ and ‘b’ jolly phonics songs on youtube – we really like the ‘b’ song. We found that ‘b’ is quite a tricky sound as it very similar to the ‘p’ sound we already know but we all worked really hard and can now easily tell the difference – ‘p’ is a quiet sound and ‘b’ is a loud sound. Below are some pictures of us learning more about the ‘f’ sound. Jarred made the word ‘fan’ with the spelling stones; Rutendo is finding words beginning with ‘f’ on the smart board; Stefan is practising the correct formation for the letter ‘f’ and Romera and Poppy are playing ‘f’ sound bingo.

This week has been our first week using reading books in class. We have loved getting our books and reading them aloud in class. We now have a reading buddy in primary 6 and every Wednesday morning one of the P6 children will join us to read together. We will be reading our reading books, the books we have chosen from the library as well as practising our tricky words. Ask your children who their reading buddy is.

We have started our ‘fitness’ block of learning in PE. We are learning about developing our fitness levels and participating in a range of different activities to help with this. What was your favourite activity this week?

Our writing skills are getting better and better. This week we were shown a picture of a haunted house. We thought that it was an old empty house but we soon spotted that there was a light on in a window in the house. We wondered who might be living in this house? We have some fantastic ideas! Who did you think lives in the house? When we were writing our story Miss Meechan asked us to try to use finger spaces between all of our words. We were given finger spacer helpers to remind us to use spaces between words. Below is a picture of Partryk using a finger spacer; Jarred is showing us his picture of a haunted house he coloured in and he wrote on it ‘beware’ – fantastic! Kerr is also showing off his story writing. His story says: “2 vampires live in the haunted house.”

Did you hear about our special visitor this week? On Thursday Rudolph appeared just outside our classroom! He was holding an envelope and we guessed that it must be a letter for us inside. We thought that the letter might be from Santa – and it was!! The letter asked us to be honorary elves! WOW! Santa is going to need lots of help this year and he needs us to help him. Our first task was to think about ideas for our new topic ‘Santa’s Workshop’ – what can we do to help Santa? Have a look at our ideas?

Our last highlight of this week was our ‘health and wellbeing’ focus. We are constantly working on turn taking, sharing and playing fairly. On Thursday, Miss Meechan set up lots of games in the hall for us to participate in. All of the games involved us sharing and taking turns. We were all really good at this and Miss Meechan heard some beautiful manners from the children when they were playing!

What a busy week! I wonder what job Santa will ask us to do next week…

P1M Weekly News

We all came back from our October break refreshed and eager to learn more! It was a fantastic start back and all children have continued to show their love for learning this week.

This week we met Mr Slater who is going to be working with us for 5 weeks. We have really enjoyed showing Mr Slater our classroom and learning and we look forward to working with him over the next few weeks.

We are continuing our addition work in numeracy and a mysterious machine had appeared in our class this week – an addition machine! This machine helps us with our addition work. We enjoyed using it so much in our numeracy lessons that there was a big queue to play with it at golden time! Kayla, Esmee and Rutendo were using the machine at golden time and knew that 100 add 1 would make one hundred and one… great job girls! We are really enjoying learning big numbers and we love the big numbers song on youtube – have you listened to this at home? Kerr was even able to write the number 100 on the board this week too! WOW!

We learned the ‘e’ and ‘o’ sounds this week. These sounds (along with all other vowel sounds) live in a special vowel house. Ask your child to tell you about the vowel house story? It is quite a long story but can you remember 3 parts of the story? Next week our sounds are going to be ‘f’ and ‘b’ – can you think of any words that begin with the sounds ‘f’ or ‘b’. All new sounds will be added to the sounds jotter on Monday for homework.

We started a new initiative this week called ‘Play: Plan, Do, Review’. We love playing in P1 and it is not ‘Just Play’. One of our favourite ways to learn is through play. We have been focusing on literacy through play for 6 sessions. We have 6 stations to explore during these stations:

Puppet theatre – children use their talking and listening skills through play. They are also required to share and take turns. When some make up and showcase their own story using the puppets others are required to listen to the story.
Story corner – children choose a soft toy and a story book. They are then asked to read their story to a soft boy. Miss Meechan enjoys joining in with the play at this station and reading a story to us too. We also enjoy finding words and sounds that we know in the books.
The office – this station encourages children to use their phonics knowledge and write out notes for each other, taking phonecalls and in general writing for enjoyment. Whilst at this station this week, Jarred drew his own representation of the vowel house – Miss Meechan was very impressed with this!
iPads – we are constantly developing our technology skills and we have been playing literacy games on the ipads. Our favourite one is the ABC app. Have you played this at home?
Story telling – a favourite so far has been the blue table. At the blue table there are lots of character toys for us to play with. Some characters which we can recognise – fireman sam, iggle piggle – and others which we make up characters for. This week, Adam created a story “iggle piggle was driving the giraffe through the jungle and a bad guy chased him but fell off the giraffe”. Adam also drew a picture of this in his play diary.
Letter formation – at the yellow table this week there has been a range of materials to use to practise our letter formation – paint bags, chunky pens, sand tray, cubes, play-doh. We love using the paint bags to write our names and letter shapes.

Below are some picture of our ‘Play: Plan, Do, Review’ highlights:

This week was STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) week. We took part in a range of different activities to begin to develop our knowledge of STEM. We all participated in 3 activities. Firstly, we were looked water and absorption. In pairs we were exploring what would happen when we put a sponge into water. We used lots of different scientific language during this group: “soaking, floating, sinking, changing” – it was very wet but very fun play! Secondly, we watched the three little pigs story. We were then given pipecleaners, lollipop sticks, lego bricks and animal figures and we acted out this story – what house was the strongest? What house was the weakest? And finally, we completed a session which looked at forces. We were racing toy cars down a ramp and we predicted how far the car would travel by looking at the number line. We found out that if the ramp for the car was higher or steeper the car would got faster and further. We have loved STEM week this year!

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan

Charity Committee

The Charity Committee are organising a ‘Crazy PJ Day’ in aid ofChildren in Need on Friday 18th November. Think crazy – crazyPJ’s, crazy hair, crazy face paints! The crazier the better! We willalso be running a mile in our crazy attire. We are aiming to raise£1,500 for this great cause. Please note, cash donations will not beaccepted. Please share this and help us reach our goal!Fundraising link below:

https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/stninians?View+your+page=View+your+page

P1M Weekly News

What a fantastic first term we have all had in P1M. We have all settled in to school life so well and everyone has such fantastic attitudes towards learning. Well done P1M!

Our numeracy focuses for this week have been counting and recognising numbers and addition. We are working really hard in these areas and our mental addition is improving every day. One of our activities this week was quite tricky but so much fun. Miss Meechan showed us some counters and then covered them up with a piece of paper. She then showed us some counters which she added underneath the paper and we had to say how many counters were under the paper now. This is something that you could try at home too. Here are a few games that we have played this week for you to try at home too:

http://www.iboard.co.uk/iwb/Adding-Two-Dice-716

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/learning-to-count/ladybird-spots

Can you spot Trex doing his addition work?! Trex even earned some dojo points this week too!

We have been working so hard on our writing these past few weeks. We are all trying so hard with our spelling and we are listening carefully for all of the sounds that we know to help us spell correctly. This week we even used some of our tricky words in our writing – great work everyone! For our writing lesson this week we were asked to recall and write about our trip to the park. Miss Meechan gave us some photographs of us playing at the park. We showed our partner our photographs and used our talking and listening skills to discuss these with our peers. Here are some examples of our writing this week:

Jarred: “At the park I was on the slide.”

Esmee: “At the park I was swinging.”

Kaitlyn: “At the park I was climbing.”

Sophie: “At the park I was playing in the tunnel.”

This week we really enjoyed our structured play session. There were lots of different tasks for us to participate in. Next term we are going to introduce 3 ‘play: plan, do, review’ sessions each week. These sessions will offer literacy and numeracy activities and allow us to learn through play. We are really looking forward to this. Look out for our ‘Just Play?’ display in our classroom.

We really enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on our learning in our Ninians Natter this week. We completed a few different activities. With Miss Meechan we started to complete our GIRFEC wheel – we had to think about how safe and healthy we feel. We also were asked to choose a piece of work which were most proud of. This was a tricky choice – have a look for the post-it note in your child’s jotter. We also drew a picture about something we have learned this term too. You can find these pictures in ‘our special work’ poly pocket in our yellow profiles.

Well done to Romera who was one of our stars at our achievements assembly this morning. Miss Meechan was asked to choose someone who had settled into their new class and is working well. Great job, Romera. What a wonderful achievement.

Finally, this week we said a sad farewell to Miss Burns (only for a little while!) as she goes off on maternity leave. Miss Burns has been working with us since the beginning of the term and we are so thankful for all of her support and helping us settle into P1. Today, we decided to throw Miss Burns a surprise baby shower. We wish Miss Burns all the best in the next part of her adventure and we cannot wait to meet your little princess!

I hope everyone enjoys a well deserved holiday,

Miss Meechan and P1M

A surprise for P1M

This week we have been really busy completing all of the tasks that Trex asked us to do. We took a walk around the school grounds to look for the different things in our local area. We saw shops, another school (Dedridge Primary), the park, the Lanthorn and we recognised the path that would take us to the pond. After our walk we had a look at all of these different landmarks on google earth – this was lots of fun! We then made our own maps for Trex. We gave each different route we created a number to help Trex find his way around our local area.

We had a fantastic afternoon at the park on Thursday. The children wanted to bring in their own teddies to meet Trex so we decided to take our teddies and Trex to the park together. When we were at the park we all played so well together. We shared the apparatus and took turns too. We also spoke about ‘stranger danger’ and we know that we should only speak to adults that we know.

Thank you to all who sent in photographs of your houses and your address. We had so much fun looking at our houses on google earth. We then used the photographs of our houses to paint our own representation of these. Our painting skills are constantly improving. This week we were working on using the correct amount of paint on our brush and ensuring we cleaned our paint brush properly so the colours didn’t mix together if we didn’t want them to.

Last week, we went to the library and took out some books which we would like to read in class. We have enjoyed reading our own books in class this week and sharing our books with our friends too. Ask your child what book they took out from the library?

Do you remember about our letter from Trex last week? Trex told us that his baby brother was going to join our class. Well… you will never guess what has happened this week! A nest with an egg in it has appeared in our classroom. When we came into our classroom Trex was watching over the nest so we think it must be his baby brother that is inside the egg. We are so excited about the egg hatching, we keep checking on the egg throughout the day to check it is safe. This week in our writing lesson we wrote stories about what we think Trex’s baby brother might look like. Our writing is fantastic and well done to Adam our star writer this week!

Our numeracy skills are constantly improving and this week we participated in some fun activities to improve our numeracy skills. We are becoming much quicker at recognising random dot patterns and we loved using sand trays to work on our number formation too. We played the caterpillar ordering game on the smartboard. Search for this on your device at home too to play this game. We are continuing to work on our ordering of numbers, we used numicon and lollipop sticks to order our numbers this week. Can you believe that we are also learning about addition too! We are clever clogs in primary 1!

A big well done to Kerr who joined Mrs Purdie for ‘hot chocolate with the head’ today. Kerr always works hard and is a good friend to everyone in our class. A well deserved treat for you, Kerr.

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan

P1M Weekly News

Another busy and productive week in P1M. Here are our highlights:

Monday was ‘European Day of Languages’. We learned how to say ‘hello’ in a few different languages. Polish “cześć”: pronounced “cheh-sh-ch”. French “bonjour”. Irish Gaelic “Dia dhuit” Pronounced “gee-ah-ditch”. Spanish “Hola”. We have been really enjoying learning more and more Spanish in class. Pedro our Spanish Parrot is very impressed. He even joined us on the daily mile on ‘European Day of Languages’. We also made Spanish flags to celebrate this day.

We have been learning all about God’s world as part of our RE lessons. We have watched and responded to the Creation Story. This is the link we watched:

This week we explored the school garden to look for evidence of God’s creation. We loved finding some animals, there were lots of bees in the garden and Patryk told us that the bees were collecting nectar. We found some plants which we loved the smell of, Miss Meechan told us that this plant was called lavendar. Trex enjoyed watching the bees too!

On Tuesday we went to the library. We were very excited to take Trex with us because this was part of our topic plan. We found out about how to behave properly in the library and all of the different things the library can help us with. We listened to a story called ‘The Library Lion’. We even got our own class library card and we all chose a book to take back to the classroom. We will return to the library in a few weeks time to return our books and choose a new one.

We have now learned all of our set 1 sounds and we are busy completing lots of different activities to consolidate our knowledge of these sounds. Ask your child to tell you about some of the activities from this week.

On Thursday when we came into our classroom we were very happy to find an office area! In the office area we have been very busy answering phone calls and writing out important notes and filing them away. It has been a very busy office! Trex sent us a new letter this week. He told us that his baby brother was going to be joining our class. He asked us to write his brother a letter to tell him all about our classroom. We can’t wait until Trex’s baby brother joins us! Watch this space…

Trex also wanted us to take some photographs so he could send them to his Mum and Dad. We have made a book for Trex with lots of photographs; all of our names in the book and some drawings too. Have a look for this next time you are in our classroom.

This week we have been continuing to order numbers to 10 as part of our numeracy lessons and we have also been learning about number names. We completed some dot-to-dots but instead of numbers, it was number names. This was quite tricky but we all tried our very best. We have been using a resource called numicon and ordering these from smallest to largest. One of our favourite games in our class is bingo and this week we played number name bingo. Miss Meechan has been so impressed with how well we are learning number names.

Pupil voice. Our favourite parts of the week:

Casper: “I liked getting dojo points.”

Kyle: “I like when everyone gets dojo points.”

MacKenzie: “I liked play time.”

Kaitlyn: “I liked handwriting.”

Jakub: “I like saying my prayers.”

Kerr: “I liked playing in the office.”

Kaimee: “I liked playing with Sophie.”

Jarred: “I liked going to the library. I like the book I picked from the library.”

Adam: “I liked taking pictures of Trex around the school.”

Oliver: “I liked playing with toys.”

Sophie: “I liked going to assembly.”

P1M Weekly News

P1M managed to squeeze a lot of learning into this short week. Our sounds for this week were ‘i’ and ‘n’. We completed lots of different activities to help us learn these. We have also started to blend our sounds together to make some words. We had fun playing with stones and building words – even Trex took part! Well done Trex!

As part of our ‘Travelling Trex’ topic we really wanted to show our buddies Trex. Therefore, this week we participated in a structured play session with our buddies. We only managed to complete a few stations so we are looking forward to finishing this on Monday. Here are some photographs of the different activities. I think Jakub makes a fantastic dinosaur! What do you think?

Finally, this week we celebrated ‘International Day of Peace’. We learned about what peace means and some symbols for peace. We created some art work displaying these symbols – either the peace logo or a dove. Today, we used our art work to create a path of peace between our school and Dedridge Primary. Well done to Jakub who represented P1M at this. Check out the school facebook page for the photographs. Also on ‘International Day of Peace’ we took part in some yoga. We enjoyed it so much that every day after lunch time or break time we are going to take part in some yoga.

Today we joined our first committee. Ask your child if they can remember their committee and what activities they completed during that committee?

Trex joins P1M

What an exciting week we have had in P1M and the highlight for all the children has been the arrival of Trex. On Tuesday we found a letter in our classroom. The letter told us about a new visitor that would be joining our class. This person is from a land far away and wants us to show them about our local area. The letter told us that the person is very tall, with a long tail and 3 claws on each foot, they also have green skin. We listened carefully to these instructions and drew a picture of what we thought they would like. We decided that it was going to be a dinosaur that was joining our class! Thankfully, the letter told us that it wasn’t a scary dinosaur and in fact he is very shy and nervous. Finally, after a long wait, on Thursday Trex appeared in our classroom – he was hiding on Adam’s chair! We took Trex a tour of the school (we loved visiting P4/5 and Mrs Wassell) and we even took him on the daily mile. We have decided that we want to teach Trex all of our sounds and numbers that we now know – he even has is own dojo account too!

In PE we have been developing our gross and fine motor skills. Our PE lessons with Mr McCurdy and Miss Meechan follow the same pattern where we make our way around 9/10 circuit stations with a partner. Each station helps us build and improve our gross or fine motor skills. Each week we add a few new stations to explore.

Have you heard about Pablo our Spanish parrot? This week Pablo was teaching us how to say our name in Spanish. Me llamo Pablo (my name is Pablo) – pronounced: mee yamo. Pablo has already taught us how to say hello (ola), adios (goodbye) buenos dias (good morning) buenas tardes (good afternoon) and buenos noches (good night). What a clever parrot he is! Here is Kaimee and Poppy telling Pablo their names in Spanish. Have you practised your Spanish at home?

We are continuing to work on our 1:1 correspondence and number formation in our number lessons. This week we took part in lots of fun activities to help us with this. Did you see our paper plate and pom-pom activity on display on our maths wall last night at Ninians Natter? We have also made different shapes and towers with cubes. We had to count out the correct number of cubes and make a tower with them. We played a new game on the smart board this week. Here is the link for it if you wish to play it at home too:

http://www.ictgames.com/newduckshoot.html

In the photographs you can see 2 photos of us participating in a counting exercise song. Why don’t you try this at home too?

This week we learned the ‘a’ and ‘t’ sound. The ‘a’ sound is a very special vowel sound. It is a black sound because to make the sound it comes through a big black tunnel in our mouths, at the back of the tunnel is a special house where all the vowel sounds live. Check out the ‘a jolly phonics’ video on youtube for our song for this sound. The ‘t’ sound is a blue sound as it comes from our tongue. Have you listened to this song on youtube too? This week as part of our literacy activities we played phonics hop-scotch, i-spy and bingo. We also used black play-dough to form the ‘a’ sound and blue paint for the ‘t’ sound. We have even started to stretch our sounds together to make some words – cat, map, cap etc. What a busy week!

Our writing lesson was very exciting this week. Last week, we created our own dinosaur character. This week, we had to imagine that our dinosaur came alive and jumped out of our jotters. He walked about the classroom for a little while and then decided he wanted to go somewhere. Some dinosaurs wanted to go to the park, some wanted to go swimming and some even wanted to go camping! We are beginning to share our ideas with our peers before we begin our writing and Miss Meechan is so impressed how much our listening and talking skills are improving through these tasks. Before or after we complete our story writing we can participate in a range of different literacy based activities. Below are some pictures of Patryk reading a book in the story; Sophie is watching a puppet show that Romera and Rutendo were putting on; Daniel is playing a phonics game on the smart board; Jarred and Esmee and drawing and colouring in pictures and Kaimee is writing her story. We are all really enjoying our writing lessons.

Have a lovely long weekend everyone, see you on Wednesday.

Miss Meechan and P1M