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!
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:
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:
This week was cool to be kind week. We have been learning about children’s rights, with a focus on child refugees. We looked at pictures of children who flee their homes to go to safe countries. We discussed the journeys that they make and how they might feel on their journey.
In class we drew a picture of our own journeys and discussed how we felt on our journey. We learned that the child refugees are not always protected and safe so drew and labelled pictures of things that would help to keep them safe. Here are a few of the things which we included.
Lilly- “Food”.
Ryan- “A house for shelter.”
Madison- “Medicine in case they get sick.”
Wojciech- “A blanket to keep them warm.”
Marcus- “Clean drinking water.”
Afterwards we made Our rights Posters.
The rights which we included on our rights posters were:
“The right to food and clean water.” Leo and Ana
“ The right to play.” Marcus
“The right to learn.” Aaron
“The right to see a doctor.” Lilly
“We have the right to a name.” Alice
After talking about our rights, we also sang the “I’ve got Rights” song.
Also for Cool to Be Kind week we wrote a kind comment about 1 of our peers. We all wrote lovely comments about one another.
This week we have been learning how to differentiate between measurements using the language “more than and less than”. We measured water into the jugs and had to look closely to decide which had more or less of an amount.
In writing we wrote interview questions that we would ask the boy from the Polar Express. Our learning intention was to put question marks in the correct place. When we finished our writing, we read it aloud in class and Miss Boyes recorded us.
We came up with great questions
Josephine- “Have you seen Santa at the North Pole?”
Wojciech- “Have you built an igloo? Is it melting?”
Elenta- “I love the Polar Express, do you?”
To practise our spelling words, we have been completing different activities.
Poppy- “We made our spelling words with the pipe cleaners.”
Ana- “We have been writing our spelling words on the iPads.”
Angelina- “We have been finding our words on the word searches.”
We have enjoyed all of the activities and Miss Boyes will be checking our spelling test scores on today.
We loved dressing up in our pyjamas today with our crazy hair and face paints all for a great cause! Running in our pyjamas made the daily mile extra fun!
Have a lovely weekend from Miss Boyes and P2
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!!!
This has been Cool to be Kind week in both school and nursery. In Nursery we had two special visitors arrive to help us think about how we could be kind. They were called the Kindness Elves and they had even sent us a letter! The letter said that they would be setting us challenges and looking to see all the kind things we could do in the nursery and we can also write them letters too! We all had a discussion about what rules we could have in our Nursery Charter and wrote some ideas in our talking book. The Kindness Elves are going to help us next week to decide which rules we will put up on our charter which is next to where the elves are going to be staying as they liked being in our nursery so much. There is a picture of the elves on our Facebook page and you are also more than welcome to come and see them in their little house. The children would be delighted to show you😊
As part of this special week’s focus we had an achievement assembly on Thursday and Miss Smyth got a surprise in her office when a letter appeared from the Kindness Elves with the names of the children who had tried really hard this week to be kind and they had even left special certificates for them.
Our AM children were Seren and Isabelle and our PM children were Mark D and Jiya.Well done for being our stars of the week.
We have also started practising this week for our Nursery Nativity which is on Tuesday 6th December at 10 am and 2pm save the date for what will be a very special event😊
To finish off our week we celebrated Children in Need by wearing spots or pyjamas. We made spotty headbands and pictures and danced to Pudsey music. We collected 80 pounds which was fantastic. Thank you to everyone for their kind donations.
We have also been continuing in PE with improving our fitness and have been working with both Mr McCurdy and Primary 7 to go round different fitness stations. It was great fun but hard work!
This week it is the turn of our PM children to share their learning.
Milena, Hanna and Jiya ” We love playing with the magnets”
Emilie M ” I like drawing pictures”
Mark D and Kayla ” We like building with the big bricks”
Syzmon” I like the sand”
Emalie ” I like doing jigsaws”
Some events coming up soon. This Tuesday 22nd November both AM and PM will be recording Christmas songs which will be put onto a Christmas C.D which will be available to buy at our Christmas Fun Day in school on 2nd December. Every class in the school will also be singing a song for this C.D. On Thursday 24th November will be family and individual photographs. For parents of new Primary 1 children coming to school next August there will be an information evening on Thursday 1st December at 6p.m.
We are always looking for ways of improving our Nursery and we really appreciate your ideas and feedback. In the entrance of the Nursery we have put up pink and green pieces of paper along with post it notes of the same colour. Pink for things you think we are doing well and green for any ideas you may have for us to take forward. Please write up your thoughts on the post its the Nursery team would love to hear your feedback.
If you have any questions regarding any of the above information please ask any member of the Nursery team who will be happy to help you.
This week our learning has focused on the Rights of the Child, especially the rights of refugee children. The pupils have worked very hard this week ending with our class assembly today. Thank you to everyone who came along to our assembly, it was lovely to see so many of you. The pupils were all fantastic – well done every one!
Here are some pupil comments from this week:
Leon-we have all worked hard for this assembly and finally we have put together all our learning and showed the school
Declan-this week we had CRAZY PJ DAY a day were we all came in in our PJ’s.
Nicola-we have been learning about a refugee called Malak and how she was in a boat with her mum and different people going to Greece from Syria.
Erin-this week in French we were working on our French video for the competition. If we get through we go to Edinburgh to visit the French institute.
Erwin-this week in numeracy we have been working on decimals and fractions.
Ben-We have been learning about the rights of the child and we put all of our learning together to make a class assembly on the rights of the child.
Emma-Today we had our p6 assembly and it was amazing, it went very well and we were in our pjs. It was really very funny!!!
Ciara-this week in class we made little box cards. Inside it has a picture of the stable where Jesus was born or the three kings. We can use them as Christmas cards.
Kieran-In literacy we’ve been busy doing reading, punctuation sheets and our books: Stig of the Dump, Millions and Goodnight Mr. Tom.
We completed our daily mile in our PJ’s today, have a look at some of our photos.
Finally our popcorn challenge total is now 474!! The pupils have reached the first stage of their prize; let’s see if we can reach 800 over the next 4 weeks.
Crazy PJs/Children In Need – Well done to all the children for dressing down today for charity. So much effort has been put into taking part and thank you for all your donations.
Roots of Empathy
Last week, we had a lovely visit from baby Kelsey with her mummy and daddy. We couldn’t believe how much Kelsey has changed.
Daniel – ‘She is moving her legs and arms more.’
Sophie YM – ‘If a toy is spinning, Kelsey can grab on to it now.’
Ola – ‘Kelsey is teething now and she is chewing on anything she can!”
Alexis – ‘Kelsey’s hair has grown and it looks much darker.”
Katie – ‘She can roll onto her back as well.’
This week, Mrs Brutin visited us and P3 talked about their achievements and drew pictures of lots of proud moments.
Emma – ‘I moved up a level in my dance class.’
Orla – ‘My first Brownie badge.’
Emily – ‘I went down a big, scary water slide and it was fun!’
Sophie R – ‘Riding my bike without stabilisers.’
Kate – ‘When I got Star Writer!’
Cool To Be Kind Week
As part of the UNICEF Outright Campaign, P3 have been learning about some refugees and their stories of how they have had to move away from their Syrian homes. We have had lots of discussions about how these children must feel moving to a strange place and how the new children they meet can make them feel welcome.
Maliha – ‘Teba had to move house six times because of the war in Syria.’
Sophie D – ‘We had to read about Malak who had to leave her home in Syria and travel by boat to Greece. She was scared on the boat. Then we answered questions.’
Niamh – ‘We also learned about a refugee called Bashir who lived in a refugee camp in Jordan. In writing we had to compare Bashir’s life with ours and write what was the same and what was different.’
In RE, we have been preparing for our Class Mass on 24 November. Part of homework next week, will be to practise singing our entrance and exit hymns. The hymn words will come home on Monday but here are two weblinks to the instrumental versions of our hymns ‘Here I am Lord’ and ‘Bind Us Together’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knUvfN0GIKs
P3 have been learning about the life of Saint Margaret as it was her feast day this week.
Richard – ‘St Margaret cared a lot for the poor people. She washed their feet and took food to them by herself even though she was a Queen.’
Robbie – ‘She was a very kind person.’
In Number, P3 continued to develop their recognition of Odds and Evens through sorting activities. We are really getting used to Number Talks and like the chance to talk about our own strategies as well as listen to the strategies that others have.
We have finished our work on Time for the moment but we will continue to use our class clock to develop our understanding every day.
Michael – ‘We were matching quarter past and quarter to the hour with digital times.’
Jack – ‘We worked with a partner to make our own matching quarter past and quarter to game.’
Emily – ‘We were using our applying and creating skills to make the game.’
We have also finished learning about Skeletons. We recorded our learning in our Talking Book and checked that we had answered all the questions we had in the beginning!
Christmas CD – P3 will be recording their class Christmas song next week for our whole school Christmas CD. The weblink below is the instrumental version of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town with lyrics. Please encourage your child to practise this at home!
P3 said goodbye to Miss Ross today as it was her last day. We have loved having her in our class as she has been a huge help to us. We have made her promise to come back and visit so we can show her how much we are learning! Thank you and good luck, Miss Ross!
Have a lovely weekend from Mrs Scott and Primary 3.
We started our week with a very energetic fitness circuit where we were working on developing our upper and lower body and core strength.
We then had a visit from a special visitor from the SSPCA called Loui. He shared some interesting stories and knowledge about wild animals and how to help them. We played games and answered quiz questions! Aleksander was the winner in our class. Some of us had the opportunity to act like various animals! Ryan B done a super impression of a pig oinking and rolling in the mud.
We have been learning about electricity and now know the main components of an electric circuit and can explain how it works. We are looking forward to building our own next week and experimenting with different materials.
As part of our ‘cool to be kind’ week. We made a friendship kite where we all had to write 3 nice things about a member of our class. It would appear that we are all kind and caring in P4.
In writing, we used our imaginations to write a story about a trip to space where we had to help an alien in need. Before we could write our own, we had to help Sid, Miss Diamond’s imaginary friend, ‘s who had made lot’s of mistakes in his story. We were very good at highlighting the problem words and missing punctuation. Mark’s alien had a bleeding knee, Haseeb’s alien was feeling sick Jay’s alien lost his family in meteor shower and he had to help him find them.
We had our achievements assembly where Ambra was selected to be our kindness queen as she is always very thoughtful and caring towards others. Jan passed his guitar exam and was presented with his certificate during the assembly.
We ended our week with a cosy pyjama day to support Children in Need. We enjoyed running the daily mile in our jammies to support the great cause. Ailie and Brooke took great pleasure in giving Miss Diamond crazy hair for the occasion!
We hope you have a great weekend, see you next week for the next weekly update!
This week we had Cool to be Kind Week. The main focus was Rights and Refugees.
Chi Chi: In class we got a small piece of paper and on it we had to write something kind about someone else in our class or school. We then joined all of the pieces of paper across the school together and made a big Kindness Paper chain which we shared at assembly.
Taylor: Beth, Vanessa and I made a video all about the rights of the refugees.
Chloe: In Science you’ll never believe what we did! We created Carbon Dioxide by using yeast, warm water and sugar. This then blew up a balloon!! It was great Science experiment.
Beth: On Tuesday we went to the library and we learned all about different kinds of books and the library layout. We all got to choose a book to take back to school.
Ethan: As part of our carousel afternoons we made Christmas decorations and we also got art this week with Mrs Thomson.
Cole: We had an achievements assembly celebrating Cool to be Kind week.
Rachel: I won the kindness award for P5. I felt amazing.
Toni: In writing with Mrs Docherty we were writing a Science report. We learned lots of new scientific language. We learned the abbreviation CO2, all about variables, hypothesis and constants.
Wow what a busy week we have had. Have a lovely weekend everyone.
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!
