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

Saving the Planet in P2!

It has been another busy week in P2!
In maths we have been understanding the language of about when measuring.

Vanessa- We have been measuring with cubes.

Lennon- “We measured a book, a ruler, a cereal box and a pencil.

Aaron- The longest was the cereal box.
We have enjoyed using the cubes to measure the different objects this week and discussing the differences in lengths.

In writing we have wrote instructions on how to build an igloo. To stimulate our ideas for writing we watched a video clip of a man building an igloo.

We had to use our listening skills to take note of the steps. Our aim was to use different sentence openers.
Wojciech- “I used the the sentence opener next.”
Zoe “The word last is a good sentence opener.”
For topic this week we learnt about Global warming and how it impacts the Polar bears.

We watched a video clip that explained Global warming and it told us all of the ways we can help to stop the ice melting.

Wojciech- “I have learnt different ways we can stop global warming and help the Polar Bears.”

Angelina- “It is important to remember to turn off the electricity when you do not need it. Turn off your lights and tv.”

Lilly- “Remember you can cycle instead of driving everywhere. Turn off the car engine!”

Ava- “Remember to recycle. Put your waste in the right bin. We use green, black, blue and red bins in school.”

After watching the video we made our own poster to share this information. Our posters are on our North Pole display wall, hopefully people will read our posters and help save the Polar bears too!

In art with Mrs Thomson we have been creating our very own Train Conductor masks. To make the mask we painted the different parts and then placed them all together. We sneaked back into the classroom after art with our masks over our face to surprise Miss Boyes.
Our masks are displayed on the wall for everyone to see! Miss Boyes thought that instead of the children returning from art lots of little train conductors had came to visit her because the masks look so realistic.

In PE we have shown that we can commit to be fit! We have continued to work hard at our circuit training. This week we enjoyed using the hurdles and ladders.

Wishing everyone a lovely weekend,

From Miss Boyes and P2!

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

P7/6 News

Here is the news from our class,

Danielle – “This week in maths we learned about co ordinates and decimals.”

Jessica- “This week in writing we have completed a report on a science carousel we did on Wednesday.”

Darryn- This week we did writing on our science carousel. We did four activities so we had to write four sub headings in our report.”

Aurora – “This Friday I went to hot chocolate Friday because I was good and I am proud of my self . Good good job me.”

Billie- “This week we have been learning how to turn fractions into decimals. It was very fun and hard.”

Thank you to these children for volunteering to share their highlight of the week on the blog post.

As was mentioned we completed a four station Science carousel lesson on Wednesday afternoon. The learning intention was to find out about electrical safety and how to build a circuit.

Station 1 – Building a simple circuit. The children used the electricity kits in school to build a simple circuit with a battery, bulb, wires and a switch. When the switch was closed the bulb would light. Then we took the switch out of the circuit and they had to use a variety of different items (metal spoon, plastic spoon, peg, paper clip, balloon) to put into the circuit to see if the bulb would light. The children learned the vocabulary conductor and insulator.

Station 2 – Matching game. The children had to match photographs of different circuits to circuit diagrams. To be able to complete this they had to learn the electrical symbol for the various components.

Station 3 – The Electric Detective. This is a short film showing the dangers that electricity can pose when not used correctly. If you want to have a watch click on the link below.

Station 4 – Switched On Kids Website. The children used this website to learn about electrical safety as well as other facts and information about electricity, such as how it is made?, how do we get it into our homes?

http://www.switchedonkids.org.uk/

As you can see there was a lot of learning going on and the children were developing their collaboration, team work and problem solving skills, which are are all part of our focus from the Skills Framework for this term.

In Maths we have been converting decimals to fractions and looking at the second decimal place (hundredths). We have been working using pictorial guides and locating these on a number line. Our interactive Maths wall focused on strategies used in our Number Talks mental addition calculations. Some of us used partitioning, tower calculations, friendly numbers and so on. Next week the Number Talks focus will be subtraction. Have a go at this one and for an extra Dojo point post a response of the strategy you used.

91 – 19

Have a lovely weekend

Mrs Currie

P4 Weekly Update

We have had a brilliant week in P4! We have continued with our subtracting with borrowing and introduced addition and subtraction word problems. Mrs Gardner was very good at presenting the problems. We have enjoyed using sumdog as part of our carousel and are all keen to play/ compete with one another.

We have introduced our new science topic this week which we shared our current knowledge about and planned what we would like to learn as a class. We have been learning about electricity and where it comes from and about mains and battery powered appliances.

In writing we wrote interesting acrostic poems about fireworks. We worked in groups to think of similes, adjectives, onomatopoeia and alliteration and used these in our writing to make them super interesting. Shannon described the noises her fireworks were making as ‘sizzling, ka-boom and bang’. Batshewa described the colours as being ‘like a rainbow in the dark night sky’. We used oil pastels to create beautiful firework displays with reflections in the water.

We have enjoyed doing circuits in PE where we are continuously improving our fitness levels. We have had some very pink cheeks when we return to class! Clearly shows we have been working hard.

Have a great weekend!

ALL ABOARD in P2!!!

In Numeracy this week we have continued to learn about subtraction. We have been learning how to take 1 single digit away from a teen number.

To help us learn about take-away sums we have been taking part in roleplay to find how much change we should receive in the P2 shop. We will continue to practise this and gradually increase the amount of money we use at the shop.

We have really enjoyed working out how much change we should get from our money when buying things at the shop.

We took our spelling outside this week and wrote our words with chalk on the ground. This has helped us learn our spelling patterns for the week.

Marcus- “This was fun because it was good for our learning.”

We also found our spelling words in the sand pit, we read the words and wrote them out on our whiteboards.

Our writing lesson started off with an exciting stimulus.
Mrs Gardner brought us a letter from the school office at the start of our writing lesson. The letter was addressed to Primary 2 and it was from the Train Conductor of the Polar Express. He has asked if we can learn about the North Pole (Arctic) and he would like to learn with us. So we will keep him up to date with what we learn each week.
The train conductor also asked how we would feel if we ever had the opportunity to climb aboard the Polar Express. After watching a video clip from “The Polar Express” film we then wrote a letter in reply to the Train conductor. We had to make sure that we formed our letter correctly.

We sat at our tables which Miss Boyes had turned into little steam trains with a sign at the front.

On our topic plan we have shared that we would like to learn about the weather in the Arctic. So, this week we took a thermometer outside with us to record the temperature. We have learnt that you have to read the numbers up the side to find out the temperature and that the numbers on each side mean something different (degrees and fahrenheit). We took turns to read the temperature and found out that it had dropped quite a bit from leaving the classroom. We will be comparing the temperature of Scotland to the Arctic and looking at how the weather affects the Arctic (Climate change).

In PE we have continued our fitness block, we have been training and exercising our muscles at different stations. This will allow us to work on different muscles in our body. We have really enjoyed the different stations, here we are doing some step ups.

Wishing everyone a lovely weekend from Miss Boyes and Primary 2!

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…

Nursery News

First of all we would like to say a big thank you to all the parents and carers who came along to our Stay and Play or Come back and Play sessions over the past two weeks. The children loved being able to share their learning experiences with you and show you round our nursery .

On Monday there was a spooky atmosphere in nursery as we had our Halloween parties. We all had a great time dooking for apples, trying to eat doughnuts and listening to a spooky story. We even managed to visit the library and pick some spooky stories to bring back with us.

We have been making firework pictures this week using paint, glitter and cardboard tubes. They look fantastic. We have also been discussing what we like and don’t like about fireworks and putting our ideas into our talking books. These books are on display and you are welcome to have a look at them at any time. We have also been having great fun in our leaves sensory box where we can walk on the leaves and listen to the sound we are making and look at the patterns in the leaves.

This week it is our PM children who will share their learning with us.

Mark, Riley and Luke ” We liked painting the Firework pictures”

Robert ” I liked playing in the sand.”

Courtney ” I liked playing in the water with the spiders! ”

Kayla ” I liked playing with the trains.”

Emileigh Rose and Lilly ” We liked playing in the kitchen and house corner ”

Emilie M and Jiya ” We love building things with the magnets ”

Szymon ” I love snack.”

Next week is National Nursery Rhyme week. We will be looking at a different nursery rhyme each day and there is a quiz which you can take home and try with your child. These will be given out on Monday. Good luck.

Parental appointment times have now been given out for either Wednesday 9 th November or Thursday 10th November. If you have not received a time and would like to talk to your child’s key worker please just ask any member of the nursery team who will be happy to help you.

We are also wanting to update our Nursery Behaviour Policy and we would really appreciate your thoughts and ideas. Please join Mrs Purdie and some of the Nursery team on Tuesday 8th November for Breakfast Blether at 10.30 or Afternoon tea at 2.15 to have a chat regarding this. We will also be asking for the children’s ideas and we have some exciting small visitors who will be coming to our Nursery to help us. Watch this space!

As you know the children also experience outdoor learning at Nursery and we are looking to build on the resources we already have to enrich further learning opportunities. If you have any of the following items to spare we would really appreciate it if you could hand them in to any member of the team.

Nuts and bolts, nails and screws, bricks, small hammers, saws and screwdrivers, pieces of wood, curtain hooks or rings, jars with lids and pieces of material. Thank you.

Have a lovely weekend and stay safe with Firework and Bonfire night.

The Nursery Team.

P7/6 News (Channel)

I would like to start this blog post off by saying a huge well done to all the children for their amazing assembly that they put on this morning. I was so proud of the effort from everyone. If you did not get a chance to come along and see it our assembly was based around the main idea of a News Channel. We had two presenters in the studio (Freya and Luke) and then different segments in the programme. These segments included,

a wonderful weather report from Billie, Broady and Isabella where they described how to make a tornado in a bottle which was linked with our learning about the USA
a sports round up from Tristan and Jack, which showcased some of the football skills we have learned during our PE block
an entertainment review from Danielle and Sophia, of the novel “The Squint” by Leslie Howarth which had been our focus for the first six weeks of this session
a roving reporter, Mark, and his interviewees, Jessica, Oskar, Mikolt and Aurora who all described life in P7/6 (and Aurora revealed the identity of the Friday Hot Chocolate thief!!!)
a Foreign Affairs report from Kornelia and Rachel who described how we have been learning Spanish in class
a look forward into the future from Ross and Aaron, explaining our focus for this term
and that’s not all folks, a presentation to Miss Ross who will be leaving our class today to go and work with one of our infant classes (there was a tear in her eye!) from Colin and Moiz

And then back to the studio! As you can see we packed a lot in and every child participated at a level they were comfortable with. This type of event really allows the children to develop their skills of being effective contributors and confident individuals. Well done!

Apart from rehearsing for our assembly this week we have also been busy with other areas of our learning too. In our writing we used the theme of Fireworks to write some poetry. We chose to complete a shape poem and within our piece the challenge was to use as many interesting and amazing adjectives as possible! All jotters have gone home this weekend in preparation for parents meetings next week, make sure to look out for this piece of work.

In Maths we are continuing to look at decimals and fractions. Our work this week for the P7 children were to add and subtract two numbers with up to two decimal places mentally. There was a fabulous board game, matching game and connect four game to deepen their skills in this area. P6 were focusing on converting a mixed number (wholes and tenths) into a decimal number and they used various resources such as the online resource Education City as well as cut and stick exercises to learn this skill. I have included a link to the BBC bitesize teaching site which has a section all about fractions, it covers some of the aspects we have looked at but also goes on to look at finding equivalent fractions so that fractions can be ordered from smallest to largest. These are all concepts which will be covered over the next few weeks so you can get a head start by having a look at this.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks2/maths/number/fractions/read/6/

As part of the homework set this week everyone was asked to log onto the SumDog online resource. This looks like it will be a fabulous resource to help boost mental agility in Maths. Passwords are glued into the back of the homework jotter. If for any reason you cannot get onto SumDog at home there is a class only homework club every Tuesday at lunchtime where the i-pads will be available specifically for those children who are not able to access it at home, so please come along.

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Currie

Primary 6 news

This week we started lots of new things.

We have started paired reading with primary 1M, we met our partners and listen to them read. We will do this every Wednesday morning. We also started thinking about our new topic. This term we will be focusing on fossil fuels and renewable energy. The class have provided lots of excellent ideas for their learning this term; it will be a great topic! We have been working on decimals this week, using our existing knowledge of the four number processes to complete calculations and games.

Here are some class comments from this week:

Leon – I hope we learn lots of new facts about our new science topic.

Amera – In class we learned about SCIAF and MISSIO. It was good to look at what other countries look like and comparing then to our country. We created posters for our RE wall.

Rugare – We wrote a spooky story in class.

Kieran – We have been working on decimals in textbooks, netbooks and worksheets.

Declan – We also have a new thing called popcorn challenge. All of the tables try to get at least 400 pom-poms to get a movie in the afternoon and 800 pom-poms for a full day of fun.

Mia- This week we have been writing scary stories and we made firework pictures with salt, glue and paint.

It has been another week full of hard work for Primary 6. The class total for out popcorn challenge is currently 259!! Fantastic team work so far, keep it up! All pupils have their jotters home with them this weekend. Please try to take some time to look through them together and discuss their learning so far in primary 6.