We have had a brilliant week in Primary 1D! The highlight of the week was receiving a letter to tell us that Captain Pete Pigeon suspects that there may have been Pirates in the local woods and we had to go on a scavenger hunt to see if they had been in our playground! We found so many clues that would suggest they most definitely have been here! Thankfully we had made our pirate weapons earlier in the week in case we needed them! Kayden our photographer managed to capture some of the magic!

In maths, we have been learning all about 3D shapes! We found some in our classroom, we explored shapes by making different models with them using plastic shapes and creating playdough shapes and we even made shapes from nets! This was really tricky!  Impressive or what! Two of our favourite games was 3D shape bingo and playing shape dominoes with Mrs Simpson!

We are coming on leaps and bounds with our reading! We have been making predictions, hiding the pictures so that we can’t use picture clues to help us and even sequencing pictures to retell the story. We are still trying very hard with our tricky words and making good progress in our weekly tricky word check in with Mrs Gardner.

Have a good weekend!

Miss Diamond and P1D

We are fit to burst in Primary 1D with all of our learning this week! We have been learning about 2D shapes and have loved lots of the activities we have used to help us. Two of our favourites have been using shapes to draw shape pictures and trying to guess the ‘mystery shape’ hidden in a feely bag! This was very tricky!

We are coming on leaps and bounds in PE and are now using the apparatus in gymnastics. We are very sensible but have no fear! We are using lots of different skills and techniques and are supporting one another if someone finds it difficult. We are real team players in our class! Mr McCurdy had to do his forward roll to V-sit twice as he wasn’t happy with his first attempt! We caught him in the act :)!

We love our new story-line approach topic about pirates! This week has been very exciting because we received another letter from Pirate Pete Pigeon! He said we are welcome to join his crew after reading our application forms but we had to build our own Pirate Ship! We have learned about what Pirates do in their spare time and had an afternoon full of activities! Some of them include playing musical instruments, playing cards and building small pirate ships!

Have a great weekend!

Miss Diamond and Primary 1D!

Our learning in Maths this week has seen us continuing to use function machines.  We are now using larger numbers to input and then applying our mental maths skills to help work out the output number from the function machine.  Sometimes we are given just the output number and have to work backwards to find the answer.  This has led us to discuss inverse operations.  Using this web link below you can click on the number to make it go into the machine, but if you click on it again it will go backwards through the machine, therefore showing the inverse operation.

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Flash.aspx?f=FSInverseMachine

We were then challenged to work out the function the machine was performing when given the input and output numbers.  This was quite tricky and we will continue this next week.

In our fruity maths group carousel stations over the last two weeks one station has been focusing on learning how to use the maths strategy of partitioning. This has helped us learn how to multiply a 2 digit number by a one digit number.  We have used the Captain FAB method to record this, can you remember what FAB stands for?  If you do, reply to this blog (it will earn you a dojo point!).  We recorded our learning this week in our class Talking Book, we each created a post it and put it in the book.

This week we linked our writing again to our Social Studies topic of Wallace and Bruce and this time we produced a guide on how to become a good King, or as Kalvin called his “How to be an Awesome King!”, (Mrs Purdie will be pleased as this is one of her favourite words!).  I wonder if anyone will receive a Golden Ticket for this piece of writing, you will find out on Thursday (well done to Aliza for earning a ticket for her application form from last week).  If parents who are reading this want to know more about Golden Tickets just ask your child, as it is something everyone wants to get!

 

We also used our topic of Wallace and Bruce to influence our art work.  Mrs Thomson has worked with the children on producing some Scottish landscapes, they are amazing!  They showcase well the art skills of  sketching and shading.  These pieces will form part of a display in our area, it is currently under construction so I will blog a photograph of the final result next week.

Please remember that your Social Studies take away menu homework is due on Friday 5th February.  I can’t wait to see what you have produced!

Have a lovely weekend. 🙂

Mrs Currie

We started off our exciting week by learning a new sound as part of our phonics: ‘igh’. This was a great task as we used a new vowel house resource to help us with spelling the ‘igh’ soon. We had to find the correct picture and put this sound into the correct place in the vowel house. We were successful learners at this task and Miss Meechan was very impressed with our spelling – some of us even managed to spell the word ‘frightened’ – WOW!

 

This week in our number challenge groups we have been focusing on halving numbers. We are all so good at doubling numbers and we were now looking at the similarities between doubling and halving. We started this task by cutting a plate to half to remind us that when halving an item or number we are splitting it into 2 different groups. With a partner we were given a number of cubes and we had to half the cubes with a partner. We also played ‘hit the button’ on the smart board to help us answer these questions as quick as a ‘CLIC’. Please find the link below to have practise at home too.

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button

   

We are now coming to the end of our subtraction topic in number and we were finishing this off by finding the missing number in subtraction sums. The triangles group were using the number line and our tiger to help find the missing value. We also enjoyed playing a challenging game on the smart board which involved us finding the missing numbers – have a look out for this in next week’s homework. We also played a new game in our number groups called ‘magic cauldron’. Why don’t you ask your child about this game? We all enjoyed playing this game.

  

On Tuesday we were lucky to have a visit from a librarian who read us a story. She showed us three story books and we had to vote which story we would like to listen to. 23 of us voted for ‘Mouse’s First Night at Midnight School’. Have you heard this story before?

Would you believe it that P2 have been learning about coordinates?! Yes… you read correctly! As part of Katie Morag topic we wanted to learn about reading a map. We now know that in some maps you have to use coordinates to find a specific place. We had a map of the ‘Isle of Struay’ and had to find certain coordinates as well as planting objects in other coordinates. We worked with a partner on this task and it was so much fun!

         

We continued our maths topic of measuring on Wednesday. This week we were focusing on measuring weight. Again, we were using our estimating skills and estimated how heavy certain objects would be using non-standard units of measurement (cubes) i.e. how many cubes would it take to balance an object on a set of balance scales. We were also working on the language used in measuring weight (heavy, light, heavier and lighter). Finally, we measured using real measurements – kilograms. We done this through an interactive game on the smart board – here is the link to try it out at home.

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

  

What a fantastic writing lesson we had on Thursday. To start off our instructions writing lesson we made a sandwich. As a class we put the steps involved in this process into the correct order before writing our own instructions. It was so tricky for Miss Meechan to pick a star writer this week.

     

Don’t forget to check out the school facebook page on Friday afternoon for a video of our assembly!

 

We started our week off in P2M by learning about the ‘wh’ sound. This was quite tricky as it was hard to tell between the ‘w’ sound and the ‘wh’ sound. If we hold our hand up to our mouth and make the ‘wh’ sound we will feel a blow of air but you won’t feel that with the ‘w’ sound – this is how we can tell the difference.

We continued with our gymnastics block of learning in PE and this week we focused on partner balances and travelling. Have a look at some of our partner balances. What do you think?

 

We have been really enjoying our maths topic of measuring and this week we were focusing on measuring volume in millilitres. We have been estimating (we know that this means having a guess) the volume of different objects and then testing our estimations by measuring this in a beaker and reading the measurement in millilitres.

 

We have also been practising for our Katie Morag assembly which will take place on Friday. We will be filming our assembly so we can share this learning with all of you. Remember to practise your lines at home and have your costumes/tartan in for Wednesday.

You will never guess what happened to us on Thursday?! When we got to school, we were asked to check the security camera in the playground because Mrs McCabe had found some funny going-ons when she was checking the cameras. We checked and we found that there had been a rocket in our playground! We had a little think about what we thought had happened and then we remembered… Mrs Purdie and Miss Smyth weren’t in school… had they been taken away in the rocket? This called for an investigation! We checked that everyone in our area and the nursery were safe and then asked everyone to help us… if they heard anything about a rocket they had to let us know. When we got back to class we wrote down about what we thought had happened with the rocket.

Katie wrote: “The rocket landed in the playground because it wanted to take Mrs Purdie. A red rocket was going to New York. They were going on holiday. Mrs Purdie was going to a swimming pool.”

Teegan wrote: “Mrs Purdie was in the rocket because a space alien took her. She went to the moon. Miss Smyth was in the rocket.”

We are still enjoying our structured play with our friends in P2B as part of our Katie Morag topic.

We have had a great week in P1D!

We have been learning all about fractions in maths using shapes, pizza, flags and chocolate!

One of the highlights was when we had to cut a mini roll in half trying to make sure they were both equal. We were all very good at it so as a little treat, we got to eat the mini roll!

We have loved learning more about pirates and even know about two famous pirates! We made pirate hats as Captain Pete Pigeon won’t accept us into his crew if we don’t look the part.

We have been making such good progress with reading that we are now answering written questions about what we have read. This was a tricky task but we all enjoyed it.

Have a good weekend!

This week we all applied for the job “King Of Scotland”!  We used our learning from our Social Studies topic Wallace and Bruce and linked it with our Literacy work in which we developed the Life Skill of filling out an application form.  On the application we had to state our reasons why we wanted to be King…

“…it would be an Honour” (by Aiden)

“…I would be free to do whatever I want and care for my people” (by Reece)

“…a brilliant opportunity for me to listen to other people’s ideas.” (by Emily)

We also had to say what qualities we have for this role…

“…I have courage” (by Mia St)

“…I am loyal” (by Alistair)

“…I have strong opinions about my country” (by Neave)

As you can see the children had some amazing ideas and Mrs Docherty and Mr McCann, who worked with the children on this lesson, both commented on how focused and hard working they all were.  Mr McCann gave everyone a Dojo point!

In Maths we have continued to work on our CLIC sessions.  Through these sessions we have been working on counting up in 25s, which we were all very good at, so we uplevelled this to counting in 2.5s.  We all agreed it was “nothing new” and we really enjoyed the satisfaction of being able to do this.  We are continuing to work on our links between division and multiplication. Keep practising those times tables to improve speed of recall.  Here is the link to the TopMarks interactive games which can help with revision.

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/7-11-years/multiplication-and-division

On Thursday the children were introduced to function machines, if you would like to learn more and practise it try this link,

http://www.iboard.co.uk/iwb/Function-Machine-603

If you try either of these web links you can always post a blog reply to say how you got on.

Have a lovely weekend.

Mrs Currie