St Ninian's Primary School

Peace and unity in P1R

As the title suggests the theme for this short week has been ‘peace’ as we celebrated International Day of Peace on Wednesday.

We began our day by taking part in some yoga to relax our bodies and minds in preparation for the day ahead. The children enjoyed this smartstart and have asked that we continue this next week. Everyone agreed that we all felt ‘peaceful’ when it was finished, even the adults in the room joined in too! We enjoyed learning a song about peace and decided to add some of our own actions to accompany it. The children suggested that we make a video of our singing so that’s what we did! It was fun watching it back in class on the ‘big screen’. In Art we made our very own peace pictures by doing some handprinting and drawing. They all looked lovely and everyone tried really hard to make their doves. These were then used to make a path of peace to our friends in Dedridge Primary School on Friday morning. We were really proud of James and Paul who represented our class and helped to lay the path of peace. Check out our school facebook page for photographs of the community event.

Here is the link to the song we have been learning. Ask your child to sing along and show you the actions.

In literacy we managed to learn 2 more sounds – ‘i’ and ‘n’. We tried out some new carousel activities and two of the favourites were the ‘butterbean sounds’ and the ‘n’ craft activity. Now that we have learned another vowel sound we are quickly realising that we can make more words.

On Thursday we attended our first Achievements Assembly led by Mrs Purdie. It was nice hearing about all the achievements children are having outside of school. Amber shared her success with the whole school and brought in something to show us all.

Finally on Friday we got to take part in ‘Committees’ – all the children were asked to select a committee they would like to be a part of for the school year. Everyone was really looking forward to this as they would get to work with children in other classes and with other members of staff. These will run throughout the school session and many of the children will be involved in projects and events. Ask your child which committee they have joined and what they liked about the morning.

News Flash from Primary 2!

In primary 2 we wrote fantastic news reports this week. Miss Boyes told us about a new car which is being invented. After hearing about the new car we had to write a news report about our own car which we had invented. We all thought of super cool ideas for our own car inventions. We had to describe the car and what it would be able to do. It was very important that we remembered our punctuation and finger spaces.

Here are some of our fantastic news reports.

Previously we refreshed our understanding of “before” and “after”, following on from this we have now shown our understanding of the word “between”. We completed the fun “Park the Pods” game which we love but this time Hutch the Alien asked us to park the pods between two different numbers. Follow the link below to play the game at home.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/starship/maths/games/park_the_pods/big_sound/full.shtml
We have also been practising how to count back from 100 and 50.
We really like this clip and we have been using it to practise counting back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COuedSha1Dk

On Wednesday it was International Day of Peace. In class we have been learning the meaning behind the word peace.
We discussed times when we have felt at peace and the importance of having peace in the world among the people. We completed a picture to reflect what we learnt and we included a dove as we thought this was a special symbol of peace.

In PE we have been practising our throwing and catching skills by throwing and catching bean bags and balls within our small groups. After practising throwing and catching to one another we then practised our aiming skills. We took turns of throwing the bean bags and balls into the hoops. We discussed what type of throw we used, the size of the hoops and also the object which we were throwing to find out if this impacted on whether or not we hit the target.

Finding our inner zen through yoga this week we have been showing off our different yoga poses. These fun yoga activities can also been done at home.

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

Primary 4 News Round!

We have had a short but busy week in Primary 4!

We have been celebrating International day of Peace as a whole school this week. We made pointillism dove paintings and had a minute of silence to think about those who are not experiencing peace in their lives at the moment.

We have received another brown envelope this week! Aidan had his eye on the ball and as soon as Mrs Black entered the classroom with the mail he recognised straight away that it was linked to or mission! The envelope had the next part of our mission enclosed. We have been asked to ‘raise the Titanic from her watery grave’! We can’t wait to get involved in our mission! Keep your eyes peeled for the next part of our mission!

We have created a class newspaper with ‘Breaking News’ about the Unsinkable ship! Feel free to have a read the next time you visit our classroom.

We have been much more enthusiastic this week during our daily mile after we decided to set ourselves a time challenge!

Thank you for reading our blog post. Have a lovely weekend, Primary 4 and Miss Diamond!

Amazing P3

Seamus and Teegan have really enjoyed learning to read the time this week, well done, a great skill to have.

Bartosz has learned new maths learn its this week during Beat That Big Maths.

Sophie Young Murray has really seen an improvement in her handwriting this week, good job Sophie.

Last week we recorded ourselves using a measuring tape, we watched these this week and were so impressed with everyones skills at measuring.

Primary 3 have been writing surprise letters to Mrs McMullen, I cannot wait to read them and find out what they are about!

We had a lovely visit from Father Kenneth this week. Cameron was really interested to find out if he feels welcome at St. Ninians and Orla wanted to know how he feels being here. Luckily, he feels so welcome and very happy to be part of St Ninians.

Also, today we had our first committee meeting in our new groups. Everyone is very happy in their committees and looking forward to learning lots from them.

Have a great weekend from Primary 3, Mrs McMullen and Mrs Scott. 🙂

Nursery News

First of all we would like to thank all the parents and carers who came along last night to our Ninians Natter. It was lovely to see you all and we hope you found it helpful and informative. Don’t worry if you didn’t manage along please ask any member of the Nursery Team and they will be happy to share what we discussed.

This week it is the turn of our PM children to share what they have enjoyed doing in Nursery.

Mark ” I learned about making things. I made a house in the construction area.”

Kayla ” We made a stage so we could all sing and play instruments.”

Liam” We have made rainbow fish for the wall”

Riley and Emilie ” We like playing in the sand”

Jiya ” I like the play dough”

Robert ” I like building things”

A little update from our AM children they have been very busy in all areas of the Nursery and have even been writing their own plans for our new Planning wall which is fantastic.

We continue to welcome new children to our St Ninian’s family and we are very proud of our older children who have made them so welcome and looked after them. You are all superstars.

In P.E. with Mr McCurdy the children were learning how to use all areas of the hall and developing their coordination skills using hoops. Even the teachers had a go!

Just to let you know that paper copies of the Nursery calendar for the year are now available in the Nursery. However if you receive our weekly Nursery update via email on a Monday you will receive an electronic one plus the Nursery handbook in the next few weeks.

A little reminder that Nursery is closed on Monday and Tuesday. We look forward to welcoming the children back on Wednesday 21st.

Have a lovely holiday weekend.

The Nursery Team.

Trex joins P1M

What an exciting week we have had in P1M and the highlight for all the children has been the arrival of Trex. On Tuesday we found a letter in our classroom. The letter told us about a new visitor that would be joining our class. This person is from a land far away and wants us to show them about our local area. The letter told us that the person is very tall, with a long tail and 3 claws on each foot, they also have green skin. We listened carefully to these instructions and drew a picture of what we thought they would like. We decided that it was going to be a dinosaur that was joining our class! Thankfully, the letter told us that it wasn’t a scary dinosaur and in fact he is very shy and nervous. Finally, after a long wait, on Thursday Trex appeared in our classroom – he was hiding on Adam’s chair! We took Trex a tour of the school (we loved visiting P4/5 and Mrs Wassell) and we even took him on the daily mile. We have decided that we want to teach Trex all of our sounds and numbers that we now know – he even has is own dojo account too!

In PE we have been developing our gross and fine motor skills. Our PE lessons with Mr McCurdy and Miss Meechan follow the same pattern where we make our way around 9/10 circuit stations with a partner. Each station helps us build and improve our gross or fine motor skills. Each week we add a few new stations to explore.

Have you heard about Pablo our Spanish parrot? This week Pablo was teaching us how to say our name in Spanish. Me llamo Pablo (my name is Pablo) – pronounced: mee yamo. Pablo has already taught us how to say hello (ola), adios (goodbye) buenos dias (good morning) buenas tardes (good afternoon) and buenos noches (good night). What a clever parrot he is! Here is Kaimee and Poppy telling Pablo their names in Spanish. Have you practised your Spanish at home?

We are continuing to work on our 1:1 correspondence and number formation in our number lessons. This week we took part in lots of fun activities to help us with this. Did you see our paper plate and pom-pom activity on display on our maths wall last night at Ninians Natter? We have also made different shapes and towers with cubes. We had to count out the correct number of cubes and make a tower with them. We played a new game on the smart board this week. Here is the link for it if you wish to play it at home too:

http://www.ictgames.com/newduckshoot.html

In the photographs you can see 2 photos of us participating in a counting exercise song. Why don’t you try this at home too?

This week we learned the ‘a’ and ‘t’ sound. The ‘a’ sound is a very special vowel sound. It is a black sound because to make the sound it comes through a big black tunnel in our mouths, at the back of the tunnel is a special house where all the vowel sounds live. Check out the ‘a jolly phonics’ video on youtube for our song for this sound. The ‘t’ sound is a blue sound as it comes from our tongue. Have you listened to this song on youtube too? This week as part of our literacy activities we played phonics hop-scotch, i-spy and bingo. We also used black play-dough to form the ‘a’ sound and blue paint for the ‘t’ sound. We have even started to stretch our sounds together to make some words – cat, map, cap etc. What a busy week!

Our writing lesson was very exciting this week. Last week, we created our own dinosaur character. This week, we had to imagine that our dinosaur came alive and jumped out of our jotters. He walked about the classroom for a little while and then decided he wanted to go somewhere. Some dinosaurs wanted to go to the park, some wanted to go swimming and some even wanted to go camping! We are beginning to share our ideas with our peers before we begin our writing and Miss Meechan is so impressed how much our listening and talking skills are improving through these tasks. Before or after we complete our story writing we can participate in a range of different literacy based activities. Below are some pictures of Patryk reading a book in the story; Sophie is watching a puppet show that Romera and Rutendo were putting on; Daniel is playing a phonics game on the smart board; Jarred and Esmee and drawing and colouring in pictures and Kaimee is writing her story. We are all really enjoying our writing lessons.

Have a lovely long weekend everyone, see you on Wednesday.

Miss Meechan and P1M

P7/6

The children were asked to pick the main areas that we should blog about this week. Here is what they have chosen.

Maths – we have been looking at rounding numbers to 10, 100, 1000 and decimal places. We used a variety of resources to help us with this and some produced short PowerPoint presentations with voice recordings, of themselves explaining how to round, embedded in their presentation (very technical!) or video recordings showing rounding. We also launched our Maths Learning Glass Wall , this allows us to record our learning over the course of the week which will then be photographed and stored in our talking book as evidence of our learning and progress. Everyone loved having a turn to WRITE on the WALL. Here is our photograph this week to share,

Topic – we have chosen the focus for our country study for the next four weeks…USA. The children took a vote and the USA came out on top. As part of our learning wall the children have their Pupil Voice which allows them to help shape what we are learning, this week the question they were asked was “What do you want to learn about the USA?” There are some super responses and it looks like it is going to be a great topic!

Literacy – As part of our novel study we have been learning about Medieval Times and this has led us to learn about King Arthur, focusing on the story of the Sword In The Stone and how the young boy Arthur became King! We wrote our newspaper reports about this and we are really pleased with our efforts. Here are a few of the Headlines or Orientation sentences,

“The Sword Has Spoken!” (Moiz)

“The true King has arrived, pulling the sword from the stone.” (Mark)

“A new King has been throned after pulling out the sword Excalibur at St Paul’s Cathedral” (Darryn)

“The New King” (Aaron)

“Arthur Is Adopted” (Kornelia)

“Yes, there is a new King, he has pulled the sword from the stone.” (Ross)

Next week the children are on holiday on Monday and Tuesday therefore homework will only consist of reading. Our writing next week will be a letter to President Obama, telling information we have learned about the White house and asking him some questions about what he will miss about being President. To prepare for this lesson try to find out one fact about the White House and post a reply.

Next week on Wednesday it is International Day of Peace. We will be marking this in class with a minute silence at 12 noon. This silence is marked around the world at 12 noon creating a wave of silence due to the different time zones.

I hope everyone enjoys their long weekend.

Mrs Currie

A new addition to P1R

The children are all looking forward to their holiday weekend as a reward for all their hard work and effort in class this week.

Our literacy work got interesting this week as we introduced our first vowel sound ‘a’. The children were excited to slide sounds together to make words and were very proud of themselves when they could read CVC words. Next week we’ll introduce another vowel sound. In writing we used the heading ‘my pet dinosaur’ and I introduced the children to my friend ‘Dino’. We all enjoyed giving Dino a cuddle and then talking about what we would do if we had a pet dinosaur. This then prepared us for writing our stories. Ask your child what they wrote about, there were some super stories.

In maths we continued to work on our counting skills enjoying a variety of tasks to help us with this. We joined in with some counting songs, drew numbers, used pom poms to count, used the number fans for number recognition. One of our favourite activities was ‘subitising’ – this is where we had to count the dot patterns as quickly as we could looking for patterns to help us.

IDL took a twist this week when the boys and girls received a letter from Trex. They were given some tasks to do in preparation for Trex joining the class on Thursday. They had to listen to a description of him and draw a picture, they had to tidy the classroom and lots more. As he was a little shy we had to go hunting to find him and James found him hiding behind the puppet theatre. We’re all excited at the new arrival and can’t wait to teach Trex about our school and local area. We took him on our daily mile on Thursday. Have a look at our topic plan on display in our P1 area.

We decided to do our structured play in the lunch hall this week and set up lots of games. We chose values to focus on and picked teamwork and friendship. It was a lovely afternoon where the children worked in teams and played together.

We rounded off the week with our feast day celebrations. We learned all about our school saint and attended our first school mass. It was a lovely way to end the week.

Enjoy the holiday weekend!!

P2/3 Superheroes

Its been another busy week in Primary 2/3.

We found out that our new topic was ‘Planet Earth, Moon and Sun’ and we all had lots of great ideas about what we’d like to learn in our topic.

Rachel – ‘What is the earth made of?’
Alishba – ‘What’s inside the earth?’
Harry – ‘Why do we get day and night?’
Hasan – ‘What do animals do at day and night?’
Chloe, Carly and Annayah – ‘What is the moon made of?’
Matthew ‘What is the earth’s surface made of?’
James ‘What is the sun made of?’
Aaron ‘Is there ice inside the earth?’

Some other highlights from our week are:

Calvin We wrote a story about St Ninian’s cave. We read our stories carefully to make sure that they made sense.

Alishba In maths we’ve been focusing on a number of the day as a maths starter. Our skills are getting better every day.

Jakub We used felt tip pens to make the sun and the moon then we displayed them on our classroom windows.

Matthew We learnt about nocturnal animals. They have big eyes to help them see in the dark.

Kasia We learnt about day and night by making earth by holding hands in a circle and Mrs Keegan held the torch to show us the sun.

We also used the globe and a torch to help us learn about day and night.

Rachel We saw a video which shows us how the earth moves around to make day and night.

Hasan We learned about St Ninian and where his cave is in Whithorn. We decorated pebbles from St Ninian’s beach.

Have a lovely long weekend.

Mrs Howley and Mrs Keegan

An Exciting Week in Primary 6

It has been a week packed with learning for primary 6. We all enjoyed our first teacher carousel afternoon. All the primary 6 pupils came together and worked with Mrs Currie on a science topic. We continued working on place value in numeracy and began to work on different addition and subtraction methods.
We also continued reading our class novel, it is getting very exciting! We worked as a class to discuss the positive and negative factors of being educated and home, or being educated at school. After a lengthy class discussion we came to a conclusion as a class that we all favour being educated at school! The only negative we gave was the early mornings!
Our writing lessons this week have focused on descriptive writing. All pupils worked very hard on descriptions of Skellig and some settings from the novel. Some pieces of writing were particularly impressive, when reading them I felt like I was really there! I could imagine exactly what Skellig is like.

Here is what some pupils have to say about their learning this week:

Aliza: “I enjoyed the science lesson during the teacher carousel because we got to go outside and experiment with forces and air resistance. We used pieces of card to test this.”

Krzysztof: “I also enjoyed the science lessons, especially learning about ‘Bloodhound’ the fastest vehicle. We then made our own paper models to test air resistance”

Declan: “It has been fun and exciting learning all about place value this week, we have gone beyond millions!”

Mia St.: “I enjoyed listening to more of our class novel, I particularly enjoyed when we found out that Skellig has wings”

Erwin: “We used our reading books and class novels to go on a vocabulary hunt to add to our VCOP wall. We found interesting words that we can add to our own descriptive writing”

Neave: “In our descriptive writing this week we used similes, metaphors and personification to describe Skellig and other characters from the novel.”

Nicholas: “Today is St. Ninain’s feast day. We celebrated by having a special Mass and in class we have been learning about his life and how he was the first known Christian in Scotland. We looked at Mrs Howley’s pictures from her trip to Whithorn to visit St Ninian’s Cave.”

Thank you to all the parents and pupils who came along to Ninian’s Natter last night. Pupils who did not attend last night have taken their learning profiles home. Their learning profiles should contain an ‘all about me’ page, ‘school community’ page and their 3 current personal learning goals. Please discuss your learning profile at home and remember to add in any personal achievements or proud moments.

Enjoy your long weekend, I’ll see you all on Wednesday!

Miss McCormack