Buddies – St Ninian's Primary School

A week of fun and laughter in P6/7

Our chosen lead learners this week were James and Isla who did a great job of capturing some of the highlights of the week for us to add to our blog and Talking Books.

Literacy

In spelling we worked as a whole class to discuss spelling strategies and words that are commonly misspelled. Each team had to think of as many strategies as they could and then share them with the class. We then focused on 3 of these: make a song, make a mnemonic and does it look right.

We enjoyed this catchy tune to help us with there, their and they’re.

Can you make a mnemonic for the word ‘people’, post your efforts on our blog post for an extra dojo point?

In literacy we also learned about the work of author’s and how many stages it can take before having a finished piece of writing. We had a go at this and tried to up-level our diary entries from last week by revising, editing and redrafting. This led us nicely into an online meeting with Pamela Butchart, author of many children’s books. We logged onto BBCLive to hear about her work and joined in with the session by making sound effects, answering questions, having a go at illustrating and tweeting, we were delighted when we were mentioned on the BBCLive event and Pamela even tweeted us privately after the event!

Inspirational Maths Week

Wow, where do we begin…This week was all about mathematical mindsets and being creative in maths. We started the week by working in teams to create 2D and 3D shapes with a 7 foot piece of rope in the outdoor space. Lots of laughter, confusion, creativity, frustration and success was had by all! We then examined our own mathematical mindsets and carried out a class questionnaire which led for some interesting discussions. We made some mathematical mindset keys for our tables and maths working wall.

We studied the work of a famous artist/sculptor, Sol Lewitt, and how his work connected to mathematics. The best part was then working in teams to create our very own sculptures using marshmallows and cocktails sticks. Mrs Howley had us learning more about symmetry and did some fun activities connected to this.

Thursday was one of the favourite lessons as we, the pupils, led the lesson by sharing the maths activities we had worked on for homework last week, everyone had made a great effort with these.

Throughout the week we also took part in Numbertalks , the Sumdog contest and Mathanagrams. It was great to see some of the parents getting involved to through dojo. Congratulations to Oskar, Shiv, Mia Stewart and Max for completing the 1000 question Sumdog competition and to Mrs Nicol for winning the parents mathanagram quiz on dojo. A big thank you to the parents who also came along to Ninian’s Natter, it was lovely to see you taking part in some of these activities.

On Tuesday the P7 children accompanied their P1 buddies to mass at St Philip’s. It was a lovely morning and well done to the P7’s for taking their roles so seriously and supporting the younger children.We celebrated St Ninian this week and participated in a beautiful mass on Friday morning. Mrs Purdie awarded us some extra playtime to celebrate the day. The Parent Council also organised a fantastic Scottish afternoon to continue the celebrations. Mrs Roy’s quiz team, the numpties, came 2^nd! Everyone got into the spirit and had a fun afternoon!

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

Primary 6/7 and Mrs Roy

Little rays of sunshine

The sun has been shining outside and P1R have been little rays of sunshine in class this week!

Our buddies came to visit on Tuesday morning to do some paired reading with us, we were all really excited to see them. They read to us using the library books we had chosen last week. We can’t wait to see them again next week.

We didn’t learn any new sounds this week, instead we spent time practising all the ones we have learned already – m,c,p,s,t,n,a,i,ck,k. We are really good at recognising them in colour or when they are all black. It was fun trying to make words using 3 sounds at a time. We’ve learned that if we say them slowly to begin with, then faster, it helps us say the words, eg. m-a-t says mat, t-i-n says tin. Mrs Roy has asked us to keep practising this at school and at home, it’s called oral blending. We enjoyed using playdough to make the shapes of the letters during our carousel.

In maths we had our final week of learning about numbers to 10 making sure we are all confident in counting, writing the numbers and ordering the numbers. We had some new activities at carousels this week, some of our favourites were lollipop ordering and threading beads. Ask us at home about what we did.

We took advantage of the lovely weather this week and took Trex for a walk. The children decided to go to Dedridge Primary School as this was somewhere we had talked about in class. On our walk we stopped at various points when we saw something of interest – Bernice spotted the local shop, Lloyd spotted the Chinese Take-Away, Paul M spotted Dedridge Primary School, Paul L spotted the big bridge. We also chatted about the importance of using the underpass as the road is very busy in Dedridge. Everyone was very well behaved and passers by commented on this, I was a very proud teacher!! When we returned to class we made a lovely collage of all the places we saw, it’s on display in our P1 area, remember to have a look when you’re next in school. We also wrote super stories about walk and Dawid and Rafay were our star writers – well done boys!

Our wellbeing is very important to us and we are trying to create a wellbeing culture in our classroom. Every morning we check in with Mrs Roy and Mrs Stewart and discuss how we are feeling before recording this on our wellbeing chart. We have also enjoyed circle time and circle games allowing us to work together and share our thoughts. In October our GIRFEC focus is Healthy so we are taking time to discuss this and make sure we are looking after ourselves at school. We are now brushing our teeth daily at school and have all been given lovely new toothbrushes. As well as this we have our 2 slots in the gym hall for physical activities and take part in the daily mile.

We ended the week with a learning conversation with Mrs Purdie, James, Lucy and Ephraim chose to go along to Mrs Purdie’s office with our talking book to discuss their learning. They enjoyed this and especially liked meeting with the nursery children to look at their floorbook too!

Have a great weekend!

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?