Primary 1 – Page 38 – St Ninian's Primary School

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

Hard at work in P1R

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

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…

Visitors at work in P1R

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…

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

STEM week

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.

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

Final week fun in Primary one!

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!

Lloyd was really proud of himself at writing the Fry’s words

Our favourite activity for phonics – using the squeezy paint bags and cotton buds to practise the letter shapes

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.

Lucy achieved her goal and has set a new one

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!

Little rays of sunshine

The sun has been shining outside and P1R have been little rays of sunshine in class this week!

Our buddies came to visit on Tuesday morning to do some paired reading with us, we were all really excited to see them. They read to us using the library books we had chosen last week. We can’t wait to see them again next week.

We didn’t learn any new sounds this week, instead we spent time practising all the ones we have learned already – m,c,p,s,t,n,a,i,ck,k. We are really good at recognising them in colour or when they are all black. It was fun trying to make words using 3 sounds at a time. We’ve learned that if we say them slowly to begin with, then faster, it helps us say the words, eg. m-a-t says mat, t-i-n says tin. Mrs Roy has asked us to keep practising this at school and at home, it’s called oral blending. We enjoyed using playdough to make the shapes of the letters during our carousel.

In maths we had our final week of learning about numbers to 10 making sure we are all confident in counting, writing the numbers and ordering the numbers. We had some new activities at carousels this week, some of our favourites were lollipop ordering and threading beads. Ask us at home about what we did.

We took advantage of the lovely weather this week and took Trex for a walk. The children decided to go to Dedridge Primary School as this was somewhere we had talked about in class. On our walk we stopped at various points when we saw something of interest – Bernice spotted the local shop, Lloyd spotted the Chinese Take-Away, Paul M spotted Dedridge Primary School, Paul L spotted the big bridge. We also chatted about the importance of using the underpass as the road is very busy in Dedridge. Everyone was very well behaved and passers by commented on this, I was a very proud teacher!! When we returned to class we made a lovely collage of all the places we saw, it’s on display in our P1 area, remember to have a look when you’re next in school. We also wrote super stories about walk and Dawid and Rafay were our star writers – well done boys!

Our wellbeing is very important to us and we are trying to create a wellbeing culture in our classroom. Every morning we check in with Mrs Roy and Mrs Stewart and discuss how we are feeling before recording this on our wellbeing chart. We have also enjoyed circle time and circle games allowing us to work together and share our thoughts. In October our GIRFEC focus is Healthy so we are taking time to discuss this and make sure we are looking after ourselves at school. We are now brushing our teeth daily at school and have all been given lovely new toothbrushes. As well as this we have our 2 slots in the gym hall for physical activities and take part in the daily mile.

We ended the week with a learning conversation with Mrs Purdie, James, Lucy and Ephraim chose to go along to Mrs Purdie’s office with our talking book to discuss their learning. They enjoyed this and especially liked meeting with the nursery children to look at their floorbook too!

Have a great weekend!

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