St Ninian's Primary School

Skipping our way through the week in Primary 2!

This week we have been identifying 3D shapes. One of our activities involved us matching the picture of the 3D shape to the name. We also went on a 3D shape hunt around school and we used the ipads to record our findings.

In numeracy we have been learning mathematical language. When learning the language of before and after we worked in small groups to identify the correct number. We had numbers cards laid out in order and each person took a turn at being the teacher. The teacher called out
“Find the number before 25?”
We had to used the hand swatters to identify the number.

We have also been learning the language for greater than and less than. We have learnt that the mouth of the crocodile eats the big number and we have been trying to read the mathematical sentences. We have been drawing our symbols to show our understanding. Here you can see us laying out our number cards in the correct place.

We have been counting to 100 in class and we love this big number song.

At the beginning of the week we had been identifying rhyming words from a poem. We know that the words have the same sound at the end. To show our understanding we highlighted the rhyming words.

In RE we have been learning all about St. Ninian of Galloway. We know that St. Ninian used to visit a cave near Whithorn where he came to pray. We drew our own St. Ninian’s badges as we know St. Ninian is the Patron of our school.

During the month of September we will be learning about safety. This week we went on a visit to the school kitchen to hear about how the kitchen staff stay safe. We learnt lots of important rules about how to stay safe in the kitchen and we will be very aware of any hazards in the future.

Our new topic is “Transport”. We have created a topic plan so that Miss Boyes knows what we would like to learn about. We are super excited to learn about transport throughout time.

In art with Mrs Thomson we have been creating penny farthing pictures by using the technique of printing.

In PE we have continued with our stations to practise our skills with the basketballs, rugby balls and footballs. However we have changed one of our stations this week to a skipping station. We were very enthusiastic about this and loved skipping with the ropes and the hula hoops.

We would like to introduce Paolo our class Parrot. Paolo likes to check that we have learnt lots at the end of our lessons and he encourages us to reflect by using his plenary wheel. We loved spinning the button!

Have a lovely long weekend!
From Miss Boyes and P2.

Exciting times in Primary 4!

We have had a very exciting week in Primary 4! We have received a letter inviting us on a secret mission! This is top secret at the moment so we can’t share anything with you at this time. Keep an eye on our blog posts for further information.

We have been learning about Saint Ninian and celebrated his feast day with a whole school mass today. We made our very own stained glass window for this special day.

In maths we have been learning about numbers to 10,000. We have learned about place value, ordering and sequencing.

We hope yoou have a great holiday weekend, Miss Diamond and P4!

Thank You Message from Fr. Paul

Just a wee note to say how touched I was with the events surrounding my final day in the school. Thanks for the Gift Card, and in particular thanks for the Book of Memories. It brought a tear to my eye when sifting through it.

I wish you, the staff and the kids at the school every grace and blessing for the future.

In Christ,

Fr Paul.

Taking shape in P2!

This week in P2 we have been showing our understanding of the properties of 2D shapes. As part of our activity sheet we had to use different 2D shapes to create an animal. After completing our animal pictures, we used the ipads to record each other discussing the shapes we used. We then watched the recording back in our groups.

At another station we had to guess the shape. We put our hands in the box and had to think about the properties of the shapes. Our peers asked us questions such as “How many sides does it have?” How many corners does it have?”

We wrote acrostic poems this week in writing. Our acrostic poems were jungle themed and we had to write either a word or a sentence across from each letter.

Here are examples from Josephine and Ana.

In topic we have been categorising animal habitats. We completed a venn diagram to show which animals we think live in the jungle and which animals we think live in homes or both. Also this week in topic we have researched facts about the jungle by using the netbooks, smartboard and non-fiction books. We then had a class discussion and Miss Boyes helped us record the information.

We really enjoyed PE this week. Miss Boyes set up the gym hall into 4 different sections. Each section had different types of balls (rugby balls, footballs, basket balls and softballs). We had the opportunity to practise our skills at each station. We practised dribbling, throwing, catching and bouncing.

Have a lovely weekend!
Miss Boyes and P2!

P7/6 working hard

It has been a busy week. P7/6 welcome Miss Ross to our class. She is a final year student teacher and will be in our class for the next few weeks delivering many aspects of the curriculum.

We continued with our focus of rugby and hockey during our PE lessons on Tuesday, the children are all really enjoying these sessions as well as getting the chance to work with children from the P7 class. Our PE lessons on a Thursday with Mrs Currie have changed their focus to football. We have looked to develop skills and then try to use these in a competitive game. Check out one of the three skills we learned this week and practise it again at home before next week’s lesson so you can dribble the ball confidently. Click on the link below and choose the video of Ball Mastery – Inside and outside of the same foot. Good luck, remember to let me know if you try this at home by posting a reply to tell me how you got on.

http://www.scottishfa.co.uk/scottishfootball.cfm?page=2590

We had a music session on Friday from Voice Rocks. The children were given a short taster session of this project which runs at Howden Park Centre. I was amazed at some of the high notes the children could reach and I loved the final song “Love Runs Out”…some of the dancing was pretty good too (Jack!). Flyers are available in school for those interested.

We completed our piece of writing this week about an elderly man’s memories and how he looked through a squint and saw back into his past memories. We used a video stimulus to help us, click the link below and choose The Piano to see the story of the gentleman we wrote about,

http://www.literacyshed.com/the-inspiration-shed.html

Here are some snippets from the children’s writing,

“Carefully the old man pressed his eye to the small window and suddenly his life came to a halt. Everything he knew and loved came to a stop. Memories from everywhere came flying towards him.” (Freya)

“When he looked through he could see his wife dying. It was just like a nightmare, he felt a cold breath on the side of his cheek. He loved his wife…and he missed her so much.” (Broady)

“He could see a war. He watched his friend get shot and he could not save him. He was terrified…he felt helpless” (Rachel)

“The old man then felt happy as he reminded himself about the time he was given a box. Inside the box was a hobby horse, it use to be his grandad’s…he felt ecstatic and speechless and quite emotional.” (Billie)

“He woke up next to his piano, he was playing his favourite song with his grandson and he realised that all the sad moments in his life ended in a happy ending.” (Mikolt)

I am sure you will agree they have used some very mature and emotional language. Both Mrs Docherty and myself had a lump in our throats at times reading the amazing pieces of work. Thank you everyone for your great efforts and keep up the super work.

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Currie

P1M Weekly News

What a fantastic week for P1M again. We have all settled in to school life so well and we are all engaging in the learning opportunities we are provided with. It has been a very busy week for us but we would like to share our highlights with you.

The sounds we have been working on this week are ‘s’ and ‘p’. We have really enjoyed the songs that go along with these sounds. Check these out on youtube by searing ‘s jolly phonics song’ and ‘p jolly phonics song’. One of the tasks we really enjoyed this week was forming the ‘s’ sound with pipe cleaners and wool – we used the colour blue for this because ‘s’ is a blue sound. Can you tell someone at home why it is a blue sound? Can you remember what colour of sound ‘p’ is? Why is it that colour?

We have continued our number topic of counting and number formation. We have now learned about the formation of numbers 0-8. We will be doing some work on 9 next week. We have also been working on counting through a range of different activities and games. We used our number formation booklets to practise our number formation. We also practised forming numbers in sand trays. We played games on the ipads and smartboard to help us with out counting and we loved playing hop-scotch too where we explored numbers to 20! Here are some pictures of our learning experiences in number work this week.

We are coming to the end of our ‘Harry and the Dinosaurs’ topic. This week we created our own dinosaur masks. We all picked a different mask to colour in and then we used lots of different materials to decorate them. We can’t wait for our masks to dry so we can pretend to be dinosaurs – keep an eye out for our pictures of this next week!

We loved our technologies lesson this week. We used coloured clay to create our own dinosaurs. After creating our dinosaurs we used the ipads to film short video clips of our classmates telling a short story using their dinosaur. Some of us were very creative and even use clay shaped rain to use in their video too. Miss Meechan and Miss Burns loved watching all of the videos!

Remember that on Monday we are getting our photographs taken for the courier so remember to bring your smiles and full school uniform!

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan and P1M

Learning lots in Primary 6

We have been practising our place value this week in numeracy and we are all getting really good! During numeracy we were working at different stations to help us with our understanding of place value. We were working together to research house prices, populations and the cost of footballers to compare and order numbers. We also made numbers using cards and whiteboards and recorded our answers with our class iPads.

We have continued with our class novel this week and it is getting very interesting. Lots of our literacy work this week has been based on ‘Skellig’ including writing a letter as the character of Michael to show our understanding of the novel so far. We included lots of description in our letter, with some very impressive similes, so that the reader could imagine what the house, garage and man in the garage looked like. We used our portraits from last week to help with our descriptive writing. Have a look at two of our class drawings.

One of the characters in our novel is home schooled. We have discussed this as class and have started gathering lists of positive and negative factors of being educated at home. We will continue to work on this next week and start a debate.

We were very luck to attend a Voice Rocks workshop! We played some singing games and Jennifer helped us with our signing techniques! Miss McCormack was impressed with the singing talent in our class! The pupils have been given flyers for free Voice Rocks workshops in the area.

Finally we held a vote for our class topic and the winning topic was… Australia!! We are all looking forward to learning lots of new things about Australia in the coming weeks.

Primary 6 and Miss McCormack

Learning through play

What a busy week we’ve all had in P1R!

In literacy we introduced ‘s’ and ‘p’ – the children are quickly picking up the sounds and looking forward to introducing our first vowel sound next week. They had fun in the glitter tray finding the hidden sounds, playing literacy games on the ipad and smartboard, sorting out the toys by their beginning sound and lots more.

Our story writing lesson, linked to our topic work, was really productive and everyone had a go at drawing a dinosaur and then describing it using their own words. We chose Nathan and Amber as our star writers this week as they had managed to sound out some of the words in their story. Their work will go on display in our classroom for everyone to see.

In maths we have been working on our counting skills through play based activities. We enjoyed playing hopscotch, tracing number shapes in flour and counting stickers in a matching game. We even had a go at Mrs Roy’s fitness challenge – we had to exercise and count at the same time.

IDL has been great fun as we have continued to work on the theme of dinosaurs. We made dinosaur masks to use in our drama and structured play, made playdough dinosaur models which we then used to film our very own mini-movies using the ipads.

Play was again at the heart of our Goldentime activities where the children chose an activity as a reward for gaining lots of dojo points. Here are some action shots.

I can’t wait to see what we’ll all get up to next week. Remember to bring your biggest smile for the Courier photographer on Monday.

A fabulous week for P4

We have been busy all week in Primary 4!

Our favourite part of this week’s learning was creating our very own dream jars using water, food colouring and glitter! This was all fun and games until it ended with a splash!

“I made a nightmare!” – Mark

“My dream is a good dream!” – Haseeb

“I made a happy dream!” – Aoife

In writing, Miss Diamond and Mrs Purdie tricked us into believing our playtime was being cut from 15 minutes to 5 minutes! We wrote letters to Mrs Purdie expressing our thoughts and feelings about this change! Thankfully, it was just a joke!

We worked in teams when learning about sentence structure and had a race to see which group could unjumble the sentences first!

In maths we have been learning all about multiplying and dividing by 10 and 100! We were all very good at it. We really enjoyed making our own maths games!

“It was awesome!” – Lauren

“I was so close to getting a full score!” – Joshua

Have a nice weekend, Miss Diamond and P4!

Primary 5 RE Homework Challenge

‘Saint’ Mother Teresa

What have you found out about Mother Teresa?