St Ninian's Primary School

P1M Weekly News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pupil voice. Our favourite parts of the week:

Casper: “I liked getting dojo points.”

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

MacKenzie: “I liked play time.”

Kaitlyn: “I liked handwriting.”

Jakub: “I like saying my prayers.”

Kerr: “I liked playing in the office.”

Kaimee: “I liked playing with Sophie.”

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

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

Oliver: “I liked playing with toys.”

Sophie: “I liked going to assembly.”

Nursery News

First of all we would like to thank everyone who came along to our MacMillan Coffee morning and afternoon. We have raised £135 for this fantastic cause. Thank you.

Both sessions had their first visit to the library this week and they both chose story books about wolves! The children really enjoyed this learning experience and can’t wait till they go back next week. Their chosen story books were then read at Nursery and the children were very good at listening and discussing the storyline.

There was a lovely smell in the Nursery on Wednesday and Thursday when both AM and PM children helped bake lovely cakes for our MacMillan fundraiser. They learned to measure out the ingredients and also talked about why we were baking these cakes. They also developed their cutting skills and were very creative when making invitations too for this.

All areas of the Nursery have been very busy this week in particular the construction area and the house corner . The children have continued to engage in their planning wall putting up their own ideas. Next week our focus for learning is going to be Autumn and we plan to have group time where we can get the childrens’ views and ideas on how to take this forward. If you are out and about at the weekend we would appreciate any signs of Autumn that the children could bring in. We would also love to have any ideas from parents or carers on this topic or if your child discusses any ideas with you which can be added to our planning wall.

Just a little reminder that we are having a Numeracy workshop on Wednesday 5th October one from 6.00 till 6.20 and the second one from 6.30 till 6.50. Both workshops are the same and this will hopefully give those parents and carers who have children in the school an opportunity to come to one.

Have a lovely weekend and thank you all for your continued support in all we do.

The Nursery Team.

Primary 6 Weekly News

This week in PE we have developed our tennis skills even further. We learned the rules to play matches and all took turns of being the Umpire, Line Judge and players. This has led to competitive games and has been very enjoyable.

We’ve been doing carousels in Numeracy to enhance our capabilities of adding and subtracting decimals. We have been finding prices online and adding money to help us improve.

This week in our Teacher Carousel afternoon we worked with all the P6’s and Miss Ford. We were focused on money. We found out about the differences between Debit and Credit cards and worked on strategies to calculate prices in a sale. We even made our own Debit cards!

Our topic is AUSTRALIA!!! Which is so far really REALY FUUUUUN! This week we learned about the Aboriginals and their art and storytelling. We listened to some traditional stories about ‘Dreamtime’ like the rainbow serpent “ hiss hiss.” We then wrote our own stories in a similar style, focusing on a story board of drawings. We all started working on some Aboriginal artwork. We chose an Australian animal and copied their style of ‘Dot Art’ by using cotton buds and paints. The Paintings look great! Also don’t forget the CUDLY KOALAS AND BOXING KANGAROOS! For out Australian animal research we have been working in small groups to focus on one animal. Each expert group will feedback to the rest of the class to share our learning.

By Ali and Reece.

All pupils have had another fantastic week of learning. I was very impressed with the Aboriginal stories and art work. The pupils have shown great improvement in their numeracy, especially with place value when including decimal places. I am very impressed with the improvement in our speedtables challenge, this really shows how much practising at home really helps! Just a reminder for all children to returen their yellow Pupil Profile folders if not already done so.

Have a great weekend,

Miss McCormack

Being active and reflective in P1R

Wow, where has this week gone, it’s been full of fun, learning and reflection.

Monday started with European Day of Languages and we decided to start the day by greeting one another in different languages:

Amber chose to use French and said “Bonjour” to the class.

Dawid and Klaudia taught us how to say hello and good morning in Polish “cześć and dzień dobry”.

Ephraim chose to use Spanish and said “Buenos dias”.

Mrs Roy chose to use Italian and said “Buongiorno”.

This theme continued throughout the day and during Maths Klaudia and Dawid taught us how to count to 10 in Polish, we found it tricky but had good fun trying! Then before hometime we did a fun Spanish fitness song which is Mrs Roy’s favourite. Click on the link and have a go at home!

This week we introduced ‘k’ and ‘ck’ to the class and we quickly realised that they sound the same but are written differently. We spent most of our phonics lessons revising our set 1 sounds and blending sounds to make words. Some of the activities we did were: musical sounds, using our ‘big mouth’ to match the sounds, blending with cubes and the mats and using the ipads to practise forming the letters correctly. Next week we will begin to do some assessments with set 1 sounds so will spend some time consolidating and reflecting on what we have learned so far.It has been lovely to read and hear about what the children have chosen to do at home using our new literacy homework menu. Keep up the good work!

In maths we are almost finished learning about the numbers to 10 and progressed onto ordering and number names. We are all getting better at putting the numbers in the right order and did some super independent work during our carousels to show this. We did a cut and stick ordering task and played some fun ordering games on the smartboard, you can do these at home too using the maths homework menu links. Have a look at our Talking Book when you’re next in our class to see our progress so far – we enjoy looking back and reflecting on our learning.

Trex was at the forefront of our IDL this week as we had to do lots of tasks to help him settle in and find his way around the school and local area. In our writing lesson we wrote him a letter which was tricky as we had to do it all by ourselves by having a go and using our phonics and tricky word walls. Mrs Roy was so proud of us all! We received another letter from Trex and decided to make him some picture maps and routes that he could follow to find places near our school. Next week we are hoping to go for a walk on Wednesday to visit one of these places. The most enjoyable activity was using Google Earth to find out where our school was on the map. We all sat down, put on our seatbelts and enjoyed travelling down from space and landing in our school playground. As an extension of this task many children wanted to visit other places so that’s what we did!

Bernice wanted to go to the beach so we went to ‘Burntisland’. Paul L wanted to go to ‘Bubbles’, James wanted to go to ‘his house’ and Klaudia wanted to go to ‘McDonalds’. Try using Google Earth at home to find your own address, it’s great fun!!

PE was all about teamwork and developing our movement skills. We set up lots of different stations to allow us to practise throwing, catching, balancing, running, travelling, etc. These are all really important skills to develop as later on in PE we will look at some specific sports which use these skills. We worked in trios and had to sometimes wait for our turn to use the equipment, share resources and help one another. This links in with our value of teamwork and friendship which is really important to us in P1R.

P7/6 get into the swing of it!

This week P7/6 had a taster course of golf. As you can see from these photos it was everyone’s cup of tee.

We wood have loved it to be series of lessons as everyone was really enjoying learning these new skills. The children learned how to putt and chip the ball. Jessica said, “we had to try and chip the ball into the basketball hoop”. Even I had a go but I was well below par with my shot. Harburn Golf Club gave out leaflets about further opportunities available to the children during the October Holiday to try and encourage and drive forward this traditional sport.

The P7 children this week attended a local Athletics Festival. Jack said “we did javelin, running as well as other things. We did a relay race and our team won!” Well done P7!

The postman had a busy day at St Ninian’s as he delivered American pen pal letters for everyone in P7/6. Aaron said “we got a letter from an American kid”, Aurora said “we have learned a lot about the USA and we wrote back to a pen friend”. The children were given the task of writing a letter back. The children are noticing the improvement in their letter writing skills due to the series of lessons on this, Oskar received a Dojo acknowledgement message home as a result of his amazing effort this week! Well done, P7/6 letter writing is an important skill for life!

We have continued to use our Maths Glass Wall in class to support our learning.

This week it focused on helping us with finding the perimeter and area of a rectangle. If you would like further explanation of these concepts try this video presentation,

https://www.khanacademy.org/math/geometry/hs-geo-foundations/hs-geo-area/v/perimeter-and-area-basics

Next week we will be continuing with finding the area of composite shapes and triangles. P7 will also look at the order of operations using the BODMAS rule (you can reply back if you know what this stands for…you will get an extra dojo point!) and P6 will be learning more strategies for written and mental multiplication.

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Currie

Teamtastic week in P4!

We have had a great week in Primary 4! We have been busy learning about the Titanic and fulfilling our mission. The Titanic is almost complete! We have been learning about the size and structure of the ship and had to use measure to design our very own display!

In writing, we made posters to advertise our ‘Queen of the Ocean’! Keep your eyes peeled for them when you next visit the school! We used rhetorical questions to capture our audience’s attention. I mean, would you like to go on the Titanic’s Maiden Voyage? Would you like a trip of a lifetime?

In maths, we have been learning how to add 10, 100 and 1000 onto whole numbers! After a little explanation, it was actually much easier than we thought! We enjoyed taking on the role of the teacher and quizzing Miss Diamond!

In Literacy we were punctuation detectives. We learned about the importance of punctuation and how it can change the meaning if it is put in the wrong place. We used magnifying glasses to search our reading books for different punctuation including exclamation marks, question marks, full stops and speech marks! Quiz us at home when we next do reading!

Have a great weekend, P4 and Miss Diamond

Mission complete in Primary 2!

This week we have begun our addition topic. We started off by learning how to add two single digits within 20.

We have recapped our knowledge of how to use a number line as this is something we were finding a bit tricky. We need to remember to only count a jump when we move onto the next number.

We have played some great games this week to support our learning. This game helps us learn our number bonds to 20.
http://www.arcademics.com/games/alien/alien.html

In big maths we have been finding the fact families questions tricky. To help us with working out how to complete fact families we have played this game in pairs at one of our carousel stations. It is importance that we are completing the addition sentences without just knowing where to move the numbers.
Here is the link to the game so that we can practise at home.
http://www.topmarks.co.uk/number-facts/number-fact-families

You will never guess what has happened this week. Miss Boyes was sent a video of Mrs Wassell stuck up in space. We were set a mission to save Mrs Wassell! To do this we wrote letters to Mrs Wassell which included questions about her journey to space and advice on how she could return back to school.

Miss Boyes sent our letters off and we hoped Mrs Wassell would receive them. Our learning intention was to use the correct punctuation in our letter.

On Thursday we quietly walked along to Mrs Wassell’s class to find out if she had returned. SHE HAD!! We were soo excited to see her and we asked her all about her adventure. We will tell you all about it at home.

In topic this week we have been learning about cars from the past. We looked at the film “Cars” and identified an old car and a modern car. We compared Lizzie the model T to Sally the Porsche.

Also for topic this week we listened to the story of Mrs Armitage on Wheels by Quieten Blake. When looking at the pictures we spotted that Mrs Armitage was not wearing a helmet. We know that our theme for Health and Wellbeing is safety so we spoke about staying safe on our own bikes and why we must wear a helmet. We decided to design a helmet for Mrs Armitage. Our designs are bright and colourful so she can be seen on the road.

Here is the clip of the story to watch at home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPQ7dj-_DrU

Our structured play was great! We chose a task to complete and then we reflected on our learning and enjoyment at the station by completing an evaluation sheet.

In music we were learning to play the tambourine along to music. If we did not have the instrument we were clapping along to the beat of the music which Mrs Steel played. We all took turns to play the musical instrument.
Miss Boyes said it sounded lovely!

For European day of Languages we have learnt how to say “hello” in different languages. We found this fun and interesting and enjoyed greeting our friends in the different languages. We also looked at the flags for each country and how they all have different colours. We created our own flags.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend from Miss Boyes and Primary 2!

Primary 6 Weekly News

It has been a short but very busy week for Primary 6.

We have been working hard on our Australia topic, looking at some very different places within Australia. For writing this week we imagined we were on holiday in Australia and writing home about all the great things we were doing. To help us write great descriptions we used photographs of places in Australia to inform our writing.

We watched two “Visit Australia” adverts and discussed the similarities and differences between them. We talked about how they made us want to go there by using particular language or images. We also started to research different Australian animals to create some fact files that we can then share to the rest of the class.

Wednesday was international Peace Day. We learned how Peace Day first started. It was the idea of one man who has worked very hard to have the day recognised all over the world. His work was very inspiring and showed us how much difference one person can really make! Using our school values for inspiration we came up with “World Values”. If everyone agreed to World Values similar to St Ninian’s we all agree that the world would be a much more peaceful place. We also worked on our mindfulness techniques this week, including some breathing exercises and time for meditation after PE. After our daily mile we also created a human Peace sign with Primary 5. It was quite tricky, but great fun!

Father Kenneth came to visit this week. It was lovely to see him around the school and for us to show him all our hard work. We look forward to him coming in again.

We were all very excited to start our new committees this week. The pupils all came back to class very excited to go to their next committee meeting. I look forward to finding out what everyone is planning!

Just a reminder to return the yellow pupil profile folders if you have not already done so.

P2/3 Weekly News

It has been a short but busy week in Primary 2/3!

We celebrated ‘International Day of Peace on Wednesday and looked at international symbols of peace then we chose to create individual ‘Rainbows of Peace’. Our rainbows were used to create a ‘Path of Peace’ to our friends at Dedridge Primary School on Friday morning.

We were so pleased to see Father Kenneth when he dropped into our class on Thursday morning and loved telling him all about our writing on St Ninian last week.

On Thursday we started our Big Writing lesson with a VCOP game where we threw a ‘snowball’ with a mystery word on it to each table. The person who caught the ‘snowball’ had to come up with an interesting sentence which included the mystery word. The sentences were very creative!

In Science this week we investigated weather, finding out about thunder and lightning. Next week we’re investigating rainfall and would really appreciate it if anyone has any empty 2 litre plastic bottles which they could send in.

Today we all went to our new committees – everyone had chosen the committee which they would like to be on. Everyone loved being part of their committee and working with children from all stages across the school.

We’re continuing to improve our fitness with the Daily Mile and getting fitter each week.

Have a lovely weekend!

Mrs Howley, Mrs Keegan and P2/3

P1M Weekly News

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

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

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

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