Primary 1 – Page 37 – St Ninian's Primary School

International week in P1R

This was the theme of the week across the school and the children took part in various learning experiences to explore the word ‘international’ and Global Citizenship. We looked at friendship as an important value for all to have and shared what we thought were good qualities in a friend. Here are some of our suggestions:

Klaudia-someone who plays with you

Lloyd-someone who likes the same things as you

Brooke- someone who is kind

Abigail-someone who loves you

We then asked some of our friends in the classroom to share their culture and mother tongue language with us. Klaudia and Dawid taught us some Polish phrases which we tweeted about! We continued this international theme by looking at children who lived in Malawi as we are linking up with St Margaret’s Academy during Lent to do some work with them on Malawi.

In addition to the above we also continued with our core learning and IDL learning throughout the week.

In phonics we learned all about the ‘ee’ and ‘oo’ sounds who live in Vowel House. We played sorting games, practised writing them and lots more. Did you know they are joining letters but only make one sound? We are really good at joining them and letter join helps us with this.

In writing the focus was to use our imaginations and think about he title ‘If I were a pirate…’ We listened to a song and a poem to inspire us then all had a turn at sharing our thoughts.

Lucy would shoot the cannons.

Dexter would sail the seven seas.

James would steer the ship.

Well done to our 4 star writers this week, check out your dojo messages to see if you were one of these!

Maths was great fun as we learned all about pattern and symmetry. We did lots of practical tasks, sponge pattern painting, smartboard symmetry, pirate symmetry using the smart pals, finish the pattern activities, Pom Pom patterns, peg board patterns. We all agreed that it was easier to stick with 2 colours when making patterns as using 3 got a bit tricky.

PE was exhausting as we have a started a new block of gymnastics, this weeks focus was on balancing and rolling. Ask us about the space shapes we learned and try some of them at home, the squatty alien was the trickiest!

Pirates have taken over the classroom, aarrrr…we’re all enjoying our new topic and have made a start at transforming our classroom and area into pirate territory. We did some fantastic pirate portraits using paint and oil pastels, they are on display on our new Art Gallery wall. We also drew pirates based on the descriptions we were given, they turned out well. We learned about the pirate code and some of the jobs the crew did. Check your letters in future, if you see a black spot it means the pirates are after you!! It has been great to see some of the activities you have been doing at home too-keep up the good work!

Finally we had something sad to think about on Friday, we had to say goodbye, Adios, Au Revoir to Miss Smyth. We have really enjoyed her visits to our classroom and playground and will miss her smile and laughter. Thank you for all your help and we wish you luck on your next adventure!

School-Home Learning: Here are some apps, websites and videos we have used to support our learning in class this week.

http://www.ictgames.com/dinosaurEggs_phonics/index.html

http://resources.hwb.wales.gov.uk/VTC/simple_patterns/eng/Introduction/StarterActivity.htm

http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/math/games/preschool-kindergarten/pattern-matcher/

http://resources.hwb.wales.gov.uk/VTC/simple_patterns/eng/Introduction/MainSession.htm

http://www.abcya.com/shape_patterns.htm

iPad app: spelling bug

iPad app: doodle app (use this to practise writing the sounds you know – make sure you use the correct colour)

Videos:

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all our friends and family! It’s been a busy start to the year and P1R got straight back to business this week with lots of learning.

The focus of the week was Vision and Values.We spent time looking at our school vision statement and values in the classroom and what it meant to us. We discussed that we should try to be like Jesus when we are at school and here are some of the children’s thoughts:

We should work hard-Dexter

Be kind-Brooke

Make friends and play together-Amber

Pray together-Ephraim

Share with one another-Klaudia

Have good manners-Lucy

Respect everyone in our school-Dexter

We then decided to look at our class charter and refresh this for the New Year, we chose a pirate theme.

In literacy we had some revision of all the sounds we know and spent time wordbuilding. Next week we will move onto ee and oo.

In maths we finished off our addition topic by learning the number bonds for 10. We watched a news flash to help us and also watched a video about rainbow facts which helped us remember the linking number facts for 10. We also had another go at missing number facts using the number line to help us.

IDL was exciting as we found a message in a bottle, a pirate hat and a pirate eye patch. The letter was from Pirate Pete Pigeon asking us to join him on the Squeaky Sail for some pirate adventures. We’re really excited about this. We used our talking book and visible plan to think of ideas for our adventures. Over the coming weeks we are hoping to transform our classroom and area with some pirate props.

P1M Weekly News

A very exciting and busy week for P1M. Our week began with our dress rehearsal for our nativity. This was a great opportunity to show off our nativity to the rest of the school. We then completed another 3 performances for our families. We all had a great time showing off our nativity to you and we hoped you enjoyed yourself just as much as we did!

It has been a very Christmas themed week for us and on Wednesday we enjoyed our Christmas lunch at school.

Also on wednesday we were treated to a pantomime! We loved the beauty and beast panto and a favourite part for most of the children was then paw patrol song! Miss Meechan liked this part too!

We continued the christmas theme into Wednesday. We were all VERY excited about our Christmas party but before this we participated in a whole school achievements assembly. Well done to Kaitlyn from our class who was recognised for her hard work. In the afternoon we all got into the Christmas spirit at our party.

Finally, today we had Christmas jumper day! Miss Meechan lover everyone’s jumpers!! We also took part in the christmas house quiz today. Well done to the Whithorn children who won the quiz.

Everyone deserves a rest this weekend after such a busy week!

I hope you all have a lovely Christmas.

Miss Meechan

P1M Weekly News

Our week in pictures:

Here are some links for our learning this week:

http://ictgames.com/poopDeckPirates/index.html

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Flash.aspx?f=PostSortingcalculationsv2

P1M Weekly News

Our weekly highlights:

Literacy: we have been building sounds together to make words. We listen to a word, spell it using bricks, copy it down and then draw a picture to show the meaning of the word. Our reading skills are coming on a treat too. We are all working really hard with our tricky words as well. This week we have been working on alternative endings in a story. We listened to a story called ‘Melting Snow’ (from Oxford owl) but we decided we didn’t like the way the story ended so we made up our own endings. Instead of the snowman in the story melting, our snowman went on an adventure. Ask your child what adventure their snowman went on?

Numeracy: This week we have been working on number stories of 6, 7 and 8. We have been finding out how we can make these numbers in different ways. e.g. 5+2=7 and 6+2=8. We are fantastic at doubles now and we can tell you our doubles as quick as a click. This is a great song to help us practise.

Mathematics: Our topics in maths at the moment is measurement, shape and pattern. We have been working on measure, shape and pattern through our ‘play: plan, do review’ sessions. We will be furthering our knowledge on shape more next week.

We are really enjoying practising for our nativity and we can’t wait to show this to you. Please remember to bring in your child’s clothes for the nativity by Monday. We need this for our dress rehersal.

We have been so busy this week that we don’t have much photos! Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan

All about numbers in P1R

This week our school took part in a numeracy review and our learners were able to showcase what they have been learning in numeracy. James and Lucy were selected to meet some special visitors and talk about their learning-well done to both of them for speaking so confidently!! On Wednesday Miss Smyth and Mr McDowall, the Depute Headteacher from St Margaret’s visited our classroom and joined in with our number talks lesson and a numeracy carousel. They were really impressed at how well the children could talk about their number work and enjoyed using play dough, the ten frames and the iPads. Everyone was keen to share what they had learned about addition and number stories.

The children were all excited this week when we began learning about Advent. We all went over to our class altar and set up our purple colours and the manger were baby Jesus lay. We all learned that Advent is a time of waiting and preparing. On Thursday we also began opening our Advent calendar to help us count down the days to Christmas.

Looking after ourselves is really important to us and we managed to get outside to do our daily mile. Everyone is managing to run more and walk less! In PE we are getting really skilled at dancing and impressed Mr McCurdy in the Grand Ole Duke of York dance. We are also looking after our teeth and brushing them during the school day.

In literacy we learned our last sound for this term, z. Everyone made their very own z zebra and thought of different words with z in them. Bingo was one of the favourite activities of the week. Our focus for the rest of term will be blending all of the sounds we have learned and spelling. We have been continuing to work on our Frys words and our word wall is looking very busy. Some of us are now using these words in our writing and are looking for them in our reading books.

Busy little elves in P1R

This week the elves have taken over our blog and want to share their highlights of the week:

Bernice: We have been learning our Fry’s words.

Dexter: We have been started practising our Busy Busy Bethlehem show.

Dawid: Our new sounds this week were ‘v and x’.

Isla and Brooke: We wrote stories about Santa’s workshop and played in the different parts of Santa’s workshop.

Paul L: I like playing the car and the Santa game on the ipad.

Klaudia: We have been learning our number stories.

James: We have all been trying hard to earn lots of dojo points.

Mark and Amber: We made a pictogram showing our favourite toys.

Abigail: In Art we were making Christmas trees.

Ephraim: We got to sing our Snowflake song and record it for a Christmas CD.

Wow elves I can’t believe how much you have managed to fit into the week. Well done everyone!

We need to say one last thing and that’s thank you and goodbye to Miss McGuire who is leaving us today to return to University. She has been a great help in the classroom and we hope she comes back to visit soon!

P1M Weekly News

We have been lending a helping hand this week. Can you remember one of the letters we received from Santa asking us to become honorary elves and help him prepare for Christmas in his workshop. So… meet the P1M elves…

We have been helping Santa through our Play: Plan, Do, Review sessions. Read on to find out about how we have been helping Santa.

Just Play?

Red: (Maths: Measurement and Pattern) Santa has needed us to help him wrap up presents. We have to estimate how much wrapping paper we need to wrap up presents, we have been very good at measuring out the correct amount of paper. Santa doesn’t have much wrapping paper though and he has needed us to design some wrapping paper. He likes his wrapping paper to have a pattern though so we must make sure we create a pattern. We also must remember to write a label on the present after we have wrapped it.

Blue: (Literacy: Writing) We MUST write our letters to Santa! How will Santa know what presents we want if we don’t write him a letter? We know how to format a letter correctly (where the address goes). After we have wrote our letter we need to put it in an envelope. We have also been learning about stamps, if we want our letter to get to Santa really quickly we know to look out for a number 1 on a stamp. It is also very important to write Santa’s name and address on the envelope before we post it in the special Santa’s postbox.

Yellow: (Literacy: Writing) Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a Christmas card! At this station we design, create and write our Christmas cards. We each have a special folder just outside our classroom, if we receive a card, the sender posts the card in our special folder. This is quite tricky as we have to try really hard to read our peers names. We love checking our folders at the end of the day to see if we have been given a card.

Green: (Maths: Patterns) Santa has been so busy that he hasn’t had time to decorate his workshop. He has asked us to make decorations for him – Christmas cracker and baubles for his tree. But remember, Santa loves patterns! We need to make sure our designs follow a pattern. We have been using a range of different materials at this station – foam shapes, pom-poms, stickers, glue, crayon, glitter – it has been a bit messy! I’m sure Santa will love his decorations!

Purple: (Literacy: Listening and Talking; Imaginative Story Telling) We have been pretending to be Santa and his friends. At this station we can make a Christmas themed mask and act out a story with our peers. It is important that we take turns and allow each other to have a turn at talking during story telling. Miss Meechan has been enjoying listening to the different stories we have created.

Orange: (Maths: Data Handling) Santa needs to know all about toys that people want this Christmas. We need to separate the toys into categories for him. We look through toy catalogues and pick out some toys and stick them into the correct category. Kerr was sorting out girls toys and boys toys. Adam and Sophie were sorting out big toys and small toys. We hope this helps Santa get ready for Christmas.

In the Christmas spirit now? This week we have started rehearsing for our nativity show! We have all been working so hard during our performances. We can’t wait to practise on the stage next week! Well done boys and girls, I have been very proud of how hard you have been working rehearsing your songs and lines.

Even with all of this going on we have still squeezed in lots of other learning tasks! We are working extra hard with our addition. This week we have been working on ordering an addition number sentence. We know that the biggest number in an addition sentence always goes at the end (after the equals sign) because when you add two numbers together the total is always more. We played this game on the smart board to help us understand this concept more:

http://www.oswego.org/ocsd-web/games/SumSense/sumadd.html

We have been working on our imaginative writing this week. Our stimulus for our writing lesson this week was this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEpiCEPkX7o

We then had to think about if we were that little girl, where we would like a bubble to take us. Stefan wanted his bubble to take him to see the Mona Lisa! Jakub wanted his bubble to take him to the dessert. Kyle wanted his bubble to take him to the sky. Ask your child where they wanted their bubble to take them?

We enjoy having learning conversations with our teacher. During this time we look at our dreams, check if we have achieved these dreams and set a new one if we need to. We also talk to Miss Meechan about what we enjoy at school and we can tell her if there is anything that is concerning us. One of our focuses for this month has been ‘achieving’. We have been self-assessing how we feel about our achievements, we keep this sheet in our special yellow folder in our classroom. Here are some of the dreams we have set this week:

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan and P1M

Cool to be kind week in P1R

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!!!

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!