St Ninian's Primary School

Primary 2 celebrating St. Ninian’s 40th Anniversary!

This week in numeracy we have been learning about communicative pairs.

Leo- “We know that 2×3 is the same as 3×2”

Aaron- “Another example would be 2×5 is the same as 5×2”

To help us learn about communicative pairs and to help us understand that the total would be the same we have been using cubes.

We have also been playing a game to refresh our memory of equal groups. The link to the game is included below
http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Flash.aspx?f=multiplication

We have been choosing the option to show the answer.

To help us with our instant recall of the two times table we have been playing this super fun beatbox game, you can choose your own instruments to be played along with the times table.

We also have been listening to the two times table songs for practise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=850t1vjTZGg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUIB-dZRCiA

We have continued to learn how to lay out different amounts of money. We have been using the coins in class for help. We have also been using the ten frames to add different numbers together within 20.

An example would be layout 4 coins that could make 15p or layout 5 coins to make 20p.

In writing this week we have been using adjectives to describe stormy weather.

To begin the lesson we watched a clip from The little Mermaid were a storm hits the boat. This gave us lots of ideas for what a storm looks like, what it sounds like and how we might feel during a storm.

Here are a few examples of our descriptions,

Lilly “In the storm I felt sea sick.”

Josephine “The storm is windy and lightening is flashing.”

Kayden “The weather was dark and stormy.”

Also this week we have been practising forming out letters in handwriting. We firstly trace the letters and then we try to write them independently.

Primary 2 had a special visit from Mr Keggie this week. Mr Keggie is a postman and he came to tell us all about his job.

He told us lots of interesting information about the sorting offices, the post boxes, the uniform and the positives and negatives of the job. Mr Keggie loves being a postman and he was even able to tell us all about how the mail gets to the Isle of Coll because he has been to the Island. Mr Keggie also takes mail to the airport and he showed us a special pass to get in and out of the airport.

This week we have begun celebrating the 40^th anniversary of the school. On Wednesday Archbishop Leo Cushley came to celebrate mass with us. This was a very special day for the school.

On Thursday we had a day of Fun. We completed superhero arts and crafts in the morning and had a fun party with cake and watched a superhero movie.

Have a lovely weekend from Primary 2 and Miss Boyes.

P1M Weekly News

This week P1M have been working very hard as well as enjoying all of the 40th anniversary celebrations for our school. We started off our week be refreshing our knowledge of the sounds we have been learning recently – l, r, ee, oo, ai and oa. We were given a challenge to sort out sentences. The sentences were all out of order and we had to fix them. This was a tricky task but we remembered to look for clues – capital letters fro the start of a sentence and a full stop for the end. This left 2 more cards to be put in the correct place, we had to read these cards to check which order would make sense. This is something you could do at home too – write sentences on paper, cut them up and put them in the correct order.

We love reading in our class. We had been working hard on our reading books in class. Please note, we won’t be given reading books as homework next week but we will be practising our reading skills in class. We also really enjoy e-books in our class. Have you used the oxford owl website at home to listen to and/or read books? Miss Meechan sent the login details home a few months ago. We also love listening to e-books on the ipads. This week, Kyle was listening to ‘toy story’ on the ipads. He really enjoyed it because the characters move about.

We are also continuing to work on our spelling. We complete some spelling tasks with a partner this week. One person had to spell a word using cubes and the other person had to try to read the word. We checked if we had spelt the word correctly by looking at the picture on the card. Sophie and Casper completed this task very well together.

We have also being playing fun games on the smart board. Check out some links below for the games.

In maths this week we were working on subtraction word problems and addition number stories. We refreshed our memory of how a subtraction sums looks and acted out this subtraction sum on a number line – remembering that when we subtract the numbers get smaller. We also played ‘dice subtraction game’ with our partner. In a pair, both people rolled a dice e.g. 4 and 6. We then had to make a subtraction sum with both these numbers. This task taught us how to set out a subtraction sum – when you take away the biggest number is at the start of a sum. E.g. 6 – 4 = 2. This another task that you could do at home. We also used play-doh and play-doh mats to read and solve subtraction and addition word problems. Again, below are a list of apps and games we used to support our learning this week.

Finally, happy 4oth anniversary St. Ninians. We had a fun filled week to celebrate St Ninians turning 40. On Wednesday, we celebrated mass with Archbishop Leo Cushley. Before mass, Miss Meechan has showing us pictures on the Archbishop and we had lots of questions to ask about his special hat! On Thursday, we had a superhero fun day! We were given the opportunity to dress up as a superhero. In the morning, we completed some art and craft activities. Before lunch time we had a party in our classroom and we had some of St. Ninians anniversary cake. Finally, in the afternoon we watched ‘The Incredibles’ movie in the big hall. What a fun day. Today we were treated to a sneak preview of the P3-7 Show “Movies Through the Decades” – we were so impressed with the talent of the older children in our school.

Games:

http://www.literactive.com/Download/live.asp?swf=story_files/hanging_monkeys_US.swf

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

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

http://www.iboard.co.uk/activity/Simple-Addition-Stories-721#maths-year1numstrategy_yearreception

Apps:

e-books – toy story, alien adventure

Addition!

Next week, we will begin to prepare for our class mass. Here are the hymns we will be singing. Can you please practise these at home too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYZZsoVzZ-k

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan

Celebrating our 40th Anniversary

Primary 2/3 have had a really special week, celebrating the 40th Anniversary of our school. Archbishop Cushley celebrated mass with us on Wednesday which was really lovely. All the children received a beautiful prayer card with a picture of St Ninian and a prayer to St Ninian on the back.

Everyone had a great time on Pupil Fun Day with cake, a party, arts and crafts and movie time. What a day to remember!

We have been busy with final preparations for our school show next week. Everyone has been perfecting their fabulous singing and amazing dance moves. The dress rehearsal today went really well and we’re looking forward to sharing our work with our families next week.

We have also been in touch with our friends in Spain, at Colegio Público María Inmaculada. It is in the town of Cabeza la Vaca. We were excited to send them drawings and Spanish writing from International Week.

Some of our highlights from this week are:

Levente – I enjoyed rehearsing for the show.

Annayah – I enjoyed making superhero posters with Chloe on Fun Day.

Maeve and Carly – I liked Fun Day when we watched a movie in the hall.

Kuba – I liked rehearsing for the show. Levente’s hair is really good.

Chloe and Angel – I liked painting superheroes on Fun Day.

Matthew, Brooke and Oma – I liked improving my maths skills on Sumdog.

Andrew – I liked our class party on Fun Day.

Aaron – I would like to do more Sumdog next week.

Zuzanna – I enjoyed singing at our Anniversary Mass.

Alishba – I liked listening to the Brass Band at our Anniversary Mass. They were fantastic.

Pawel – I liked making my mask for the show.

Maya – I enjoyed making Egyptian bracelets.

Have a lovely weekend from Mrs Howley, Mrs Keegan and Primary 2/3

P7/6 News

We have turned the big 40 this week! Our Mass on Wednesday was so special and every member of our class were an absolute credit to the school. On Thursday we had a Fun Day which was also a huge success especially the afternoon when we split into our houses and had a chance to go to four different activities. It really has been a special week with a lot of life long memories forged.

The fun doesn’t stop there, next week is our concert. We have now had our dress rehearsal and it was a huge success. All the classes have worked hard and Mrs Purdie has put some sneak peek photos on Dojo to give you a small taste as to what is in store! It is such a hugely beneficial experience to put on a show, we are able to produce so many links to life long skills through this type of event. In particular we have all been involved in arranging the choreography for the performances and been able to give our opinion on what we should wear. Performing for an audience helps us to develop our confidence and allows us to challenge ourselves through song and dance to become an effective contributor to our school community.

As well as the school anniversary this week in class we have also been using the link to the theme of our Fun Day, which was Super Heros, to stimulate our learning. We have used our creative skills and developed our own super hero logo and super power. We have written about how we could use the super power and then turned this into a comic strip (Marvel eat your heart out!). Some great results! Here is photograph of our super hero tops, we have displayed them on a washing line in class, I hope we always remember to put them in a colours wash cycle as they are very bright!

To further develop our critical thinking skills about super heros we watched the video to the song “Titanium” by David Guetta. We then had a class discussion about what was happening in the video (we paused it after 1minute, discussed what we thought was going on and then watched the remainder of it and discussed it again and realised that a lot of us had changed our minds as to what we thought was happening). Have a watch and if any parents want to stop it after a minute they can reply what their initial thinking is and then again after having watched it all.

http://www.literacyshed.com/the-music-video-shed.html

Have a lovely weekend and I can’t wait for the performances next week, remember to rest your voices!

Nursery News

In Nursery this week we had lots of Chinese New Year celebrations! On Tuesday Miss Pan a Mandarin teacher from the Confucius Hub in James Young High school visited both sessions. She told us all about China and taught us some Chinese phrases and explained about the twelve special animals in Chinese culture. We found out that this is the year of the Rooster, red is the colour of good fortune and giving a mandarin orange is a symbol of a strong friendship. We were lucky enough to get a chocolate coin in a special red envelope and an orange to take home.

We also listened to traditional Chinese music and joined in by dancing using ribbons and musical instruments. In our creative area we made huge Chinese dragons which we were able to carry round the Nursery and use percussion instruments to create our own dragon dance. We also had the opportunity to make dancing dragons.

For snack we were given the chance to try Chinese noodles with soy or spicy chilli sauce which we tried to eat with chopsticks.

Our bird watching area has continued to be popular and Miss Brien one of our students made some bird cakes with us. We are planning on hanging these outside in our garden next week and then hopefully we will see more birds arriving!

As part of the 40th Birthday celebrations for the school we were asked if we would contribute to the time capsule. We discussed our favourite songs, films and hobbies.

We finished off the week by having our Wellie walks. Both sessions were lucky with the weather and we all looked for signs of nature and listened for the birds. Thank you all so much for your generous donations. We made £170 which is fantastic and we will discuss with the children the resources they would like to buy with this money.

Just a little reminder that we have our February break next week. Nursery will be closed on Friday 10th February and we look forward to welcoming children back to nursery on Wednesday 15th February.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery Team😊

Celebrating our 40th Anniversary

This has been a really special week as we celebrated our 40th Anniversary on Wednesday. Archbishop Cushley celebrated mass with us which was really lovely. We all felt very special and joined in with the singing and mass responses. The celebrations continued onThursday when it was our Superhero funday. We did arts and crafts, had a special Goldentime, had a piece of anniversary cake and then finished the day with a superhero movie! Thank you to all the P3-P7 children who invited us to their dress rehearsal on Friday, we all thought you were awesome!

In literacy the focus was still on ai and oa. Having a second week on these sounds has helped us become more confident in word building and reading. We really liked the ai board game activity,we worked with an elbow partner to take it in turns to roll the dice and read the ai words. We really impressed Mrs Roy at the muddled sentences station,we worked with a partner to read the words and put them in the right order. We used our knowledge of punctuation to help us. We have added some new phonics apps to our iPads and had great fun trying them out.

Subtraction has been our focus in numeracy and we introduced the number line for taking away. We also remembered last week’s rule when writing subtraction stories, start with the biggest number first. Everyone enjoys using the interactive dice on the smartboard to help us choose numbers for our subtraction sums.

Our pirate adventure is in full flow as we on have our own pirate ship and lots of work on display. Mrs Thomson helped us make our own cutlasses which look amazing! We learned about what pirates like to do in their spare time as this was something we had wrote on our learning wall at the beginning of the topic. Then we had an afternoon of being a pirate and trying out some of their favourite hobbies – playing card games, singing, dancing, telling pirate stories, making own our music with recorders.

In PE we have been trying really hard to perfect our balances, jumps and rolls in gymnastics. We have been peer assessing one another by watching each other and then thinking of 2 stars and a wish to say about their performance. We also learned how to link our movements to make a sequence.

P6 weekly news

What another great week in Primary 6. Here are some of our comments.

Jennifer-Because it was our 40^th anniversary we had celebrations. On Wednesday we had a special mass with the Arch Bishop and different people like old head teachers and people from the council. On Thursday we had a practise for the school show then we watched a movie called THE INCREDIBLES. After the movie we did a carousel with our houses: sumdog, quiet zones, art and puzzles.

Aliza- This week has been AMAZING! On Wednesday we had our schools 40^th birthday mass, I’m sure everyone already knows about that! On Thursday we had a fun carousel in the afternoon and we all had some really yummy, homemade birthday cake (made by the amazing Mrs McCabe). We have also been working VER VERY VERY hard for our school show which hopefully you will all see on Monday or Tuesday!

Emily- this week we had our mass for the 40^th anniversary. We had a lot of guests also our past head teachers came along so did the Arch Bishop.

Neave- This week in P.E we played capture the flag sadly the opposite team from my team won, we also still have been doing the daily mile and I think it has made me more fit and faster.

Do you see any changes in your child’s fitness and health?

Also the hero costumes for primary 1-2 were AMAZING !!

Rugare- Our 40^th anniversary has been fun so far, Mrs Purdie decided to celebrate for a whole month!

Emma-This Wednesday we had our school mass for the 40^th anniversary there was a lot of guests and Miss Smyth was there and the Arch Bishop so it was very exciting. Yesterday was a dress down day so we watched the INCREDIBLES!

Ciara-today we had a dress rehearsal for the show.

Kieran- This week in literacy we watched the music video for the song Titanium by David Guetta FT Sia. It was all about a boy with special powers. We used this to help us write newspaper articles.

Have a great weekend!

P4 Weekly Update!

This has been a very eventful week as we have been celebrating our School’s 40^th Birthday.

We have been learning about the history of our school, rehearsing for our school concert, enjoyed a fun day where we got to watch a movie, dress down and participate in fun activities in the afternoon. Mark enjoyed the ‘chill out zone’, Aleksander enjoyed using the ipads and netbooks and chose to play sumdog, Batshewa enjoyed making her very own superhero and Aoife enjoyed playing golden time games with her friends. Finally and most importantly we participated in a school mass with Archbishop Cushley and Fr Tony.

We continued to revise multiplication in maths where we are multiplying two digit numbers by single digit numbers. We enjoyed playing different games to help us learn including bingo, jenga and hit the button.

In our topic lessons we have been learning about how Vikings travel and where they travelled to. We made our very own longboats from paper. Adrin said ‘It was fascinating’!

We have a busy week ahead with our concert performances but we are really looking forward to it. We hop to see you there :)!

Have a great weekend, Primary 4, Miss Diamond and Miss Crookston.

Busy week in Primary 2!

In Numeracy this week we have continued to work on our Multiplication. We have been working on repeated addition and how this links with the written calculation for multiplication. We can now recognise the multiplication symbol in written calculations.

To show our understanding we have been matching the repeated addition calculation with the multiplication calculation and finding the correct answer.

We have been enjoying playing the “Hit the Button” Game on the iPads and netbook. http://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button

In Maths we have been enjoying learning more about money. This week we have been practising laying out different amounts of money to show our understanding we have been writing down the different amounts of coins.

In groups we have been taking turns to be the teacher, showing our peers a money card with a total amount. Our goal was to lay out the correct coins to match the card. “The teacher” would then count to see if we had the correct amount of coins. We had to think about adding coins together to make the total amount and we found this a bit tricky so will continue to work on it in class.

On the netbooks we have been playing this fun money game http://www.topmarks.co.uk/money/toy-shop-money.
We have mostly been working on the 1p and 2p categories.

To support our writing this week we visited the Isle of Coll website, exploring the website we found out lots of information about the island. We know the Isle of Struay is a fictional island but it has lots of similarities to the Isle of Coll. We wondered how many people new about the Isle of Coll and how many people visit the island so we decided to make leaflets to encourage people to visit.

Our leaflets were fantastic and you will find them on display in the corridor. We had to use appropriate vocabulary in our leaflets and make sure that our writing made sense for our readers. Our leaflets are full of fantastic information about how to get to the island, what the weather is like and things to do. We are becoming more independent in writing and Miss Boyes was impressed to see us remembering to use our full stops and capital letters this week.

We’re sure that after reading our leaflets you will be booking a holiday to the Isle of Coll very soon.

On Wednesday it was Burns Day, Miss Boyes told us all about Robert Burns and how he was a famous Scottish poet. To keep with the Scottish theme we decided to learn how to make Porridge. Grannie Island always makes Katie Morag Porridge and her famous cookies “Porridges”.

We had to read the recipe to check that we had all of the ingredients and then we followed the instructions.

To make the porridge you have to measure out the Porridge Oats into a pot. Then you measure the milk into a jug and add the milk into the pot.

This activity also linked to literacy and maths because we had to use our reading and measuring skills to make the porridge. We were also able to discuss how we would stay safe in the kitchen when cooking our porridge.

Lots of children told Miss Boyes the next day that they had Porridge for their breakfast and Wojciech even sent a picture of himself eating his porridge on class dojo. Thank you Wojciech!

We had a challenge to design Katie Morag a new skirt this week. We were learning how to plan and design an arrangement to make our own tartan pattern.

To begin the lesson, we looked at lots of different tartan patterns and noticed that they have lots of different colours. We also spoke about the lines which run through the tartan. We have learned that the lines going down the way are called “Vertical” lines and the lines going across the way are called “Horizontal” lines.

We then used the online tartan weaver to make a class tartan design. For our own designs, we had to use three different colours in our tartan. We had to think about the length and width of our strips and how we would arrange them onto the paper.

We love learning through our structured play in lots of different curricular areas. Here we are at the Isle of Struay post office. We have been writing letters to post, selling stamps and weighing parcels. Also in structure play we have been collecting data and creating pie charts. We went to P2 and P2/3 this week to ask them what their favourite Katie Morag story book was. We needed help to record our tally marks and colour in the pie chart but we really enjoyed collecting the data and we could explain which book was the most and least popular.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend from Miss Boyes and P2!

P1M Weekly News

Another busy week for P1M. In literacy this week we have been learning more about the ‘oa’ and ‘ai’ sounds. These sounds come from the vowel house. As part of our literacy activities this week we have been sorting out pictures of ‘oa’ and ‘ai’ sounds. This was quite a tricky task as we had to decide what the picture was and then listen carefully for an ‘oa’ or ‘ai’ sound in the word. We have been doing lots of spelling activities using these sounds too. This week we were using the letter cubes to make words. Do you have letters at home that you could use to spell ‘oa’ or ‘ai’ words?

We are continuing with our numeracy topic of subtraction this week. We have a very solid knowledge of subtraction so far and we will be continuing this topic for a while yet. We have been really enjoying the different activities in our numeracy lessons and a favourite has to be subtraction bowling. Have you had the opportunity to play this at home yet? This week we were solving word problems subtraction style as well as ‘acting out’ a subtraction story on the number line. Miss Meechan was very impressed with us during this task as we all remembered that when we subtract the number gets smaller and we had to jump backwards on the number line. Well done everyone!

We started our new Play: Plan, Do, Review session this week – pirate theme. All of the 6 groups are literacy and numeracy based. Here is a sneak peak and what we have been doing this week during play:

Red – Pirate ship design challenge. We use 2D shapes to build a pirate ship and then count how many of each shape we used. We also make addition sums using the information we have gathered.

Blue – Letters to a pirate. At this group we can write letters to a pirate or draw a picture of a pirate. We have a special treasure chest to put in our letters and drawings.

Yellow – Pirate books – at this table we can make pirate books, either literacy or numeracy based. There are maths themed pirate books made up which we can complete and there are also blank books for us to create and write our own pirate stories.

Orange – At this group we build our very own pirate ship. It is important to listen to what others what to do to the pirate ship as well as talking to our friends about what we think would be good on the ship – have a look at the photos below, we’re making great progress already!

Purple – Role play station. At this station we act out pirate stories. We have small pirate puppets to do this or we can dress up as pirates ourselves. We can even make our own pirate masks and then act out the story. There are also the ipads at this station to record our stories too.

Green – Pirate jewellery. At this group we can make our own pirate treasure – bracelets, necklaces, rings! Pirates like their jewellery to be in a pattern so we must make sure we use patterns when creating the jewellery.

As part of our RE this week we listened to the story of Samuel listening to God. We have been learning about how God always listens to us but that it is also important for us to listen for God. We created these listening ears to remind us of this. There is a link for the video we watched below.