Collaborative learning – Page 4 – St Ninian's Primary School

Malaga Spanish Immersion Week

Hola!

This week, Mrs Caskie, Miss Ford and Mrs Scott have been on a Spanish Immersion Course in Malaga, Spain. Funded by the British Council and run by LFEE , it has provided the opportunity for any staff to develop their knowledge and understanding of Spanish.

We arrived on Saturday evening and met our tutors as well as the rest of the group from regions across Scotland. Each day, we have attended classes and been ‘pupils’ for a change – taking part in active learning and working together to communicate in Spanish across a wide variety of contexts.

We have also had opportunities to take part in traditional Spanish culture including a visit to a historic village, a Flamenco dance workshop and sampling local Spanish food.

This has proved a fantastic experience for us all and we are looking forward to incorporating the exciting ideas and resources shared on the course.

Tomorrow is our last day and in groups, we will be presenting our learning from the week.

Adios y Hasta Luego!

Mrs Caskie, Miss Ford and Mrs Scott

Nursery News

First of all we would like to thank all the parents who came along to our focus groups as part of our review week. We really appreciated you taking the time to come along and we value your continued support.

We have been continuing with our Space topic this week and the children had the opportunity to make alien headbands and space play dough. The children also made a model of Earth using a football. What a great idea! Lots of rockets continue to be built in the construction area and some children even became human rockets!

In our Outdoor learning we have been looking at Numeracy and Literacy using ten green bottles and using books to look for signs of Spring and nature. The children then recorded their findings on paper. We have continued this indoors using matching games and Space pictures as a stimulus for writing. The children have also helped make a lovely Spring tree and painted some beautiful grass to go under it.

Our focus next week will be Easter. We will be looking at Easter traditions, take part in Easter crafts and of course looking for some hidden Easter eggs!

Just a little reminder that on Wednesday 23rd March the Nursery is joining the school to have Daily Mile with dad or grandad at 10.00am and 2.00pm. If you are free to come along and join in you are more than welcome to . No running required! Also on Thursday 24 March at 10.00am and 2.00pm we are having a Sponsored Bunny Hop where the children will be hopping round the school. Parents and Carers are invited to join us for this. There will be no sponsor forms issued for this but we would welcome any donations which will go towards the buying of new Nursery resources in consultation with the children.

Please note Nursery finishes on Thursday 24th March for the Easter holidays and everyone returns on Monday 11th April.

Have a lovely weekend.

Apologies for no photographs this week as our media space is full on the Blog. They will be added as soon as space becomes available.

The Nursery Team.

Working together to become better learners!

Yet another jam packed week in P1r, it’s been so busy I haven’t had much time to take photographs so I’ll share the few I do have with you!

In IDL we have continued to learn about farming, with a particular focus on animals and how they give us milk, meat and lots more. The children wanted to make a new collage in the classroom so with some sighs we took down one of our pirate displays. Everyone contributed to this display:

“I helped colour in the farmer” said Madison.

“I made some farm animals and wrote some signs” said Ahmad.

“I worked with the blue table to make the barn” said Alice.

In maths we are learning about time and this week focused on days of the week and months of the year. We enjoyed this and used songs and games to help us learn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIvQOab00OQ

A few of us found day before/after tricky so for homework next week I’ve given you some activities to help with this. We have also changed our maths wall to help us remember the days of the week and months of the year.

In literacy we continued learning tricky sounds and words, this week we introduced the rude sound, “th”. The children enjoyed sticking their tongues out at me when making this sound! To help us learn our tricky words we tried 2 new games this week, bean bag toss and the fly swat game. We had to work together in teams and take turns at being the teacher. In our written tasks we had to be a codebreaker and try to break the code, we also had to read ‘th’ words and then draw a picture for each word. Some of us got to build words with the letter cubes, “I was very good at this” said Elenta. Everyone was very focused at the reading table and every week I am amazed at how well they are all reading – I can’t keep up!!

In PE everyone progressed from dribbling with a basketball to a football, it was agreed by all that good control and focus was needed in these lessons. At the end of the lesson we had a team game, everyone was a great sport!

To end our week we took part in a competition organised by our local Hobbycraft store, we had to design a class Easter Bonnet. Voting starts tomorrow so please go into Hobbycraft and vote for St Ninian’s, if we are successful we will win vouchers up to £150 to spend in the store. We are all really excited about this and hope we can be one of the lucky winners!

One final thing, thank you to all the children who donated to our Lenten Appeal today and wore their PJ’s to school, I loved coming to school dressed in my PJ’s too!!

Healthy, happy learners!

Well as you can see from the title Health and Wellbeing has been a focus for us. We have been doing our daily mile most days and yesterday we managed the full mile in the allocated time – go team 1R! Ahmad says, “I’m really fast”! In PE we have now started a new block focusing on travelling with objects, we have been working with a partner and as a team using balls and hoops. Tomorrow sees the launch of our school healthy tuck shop which we posted on our class dojo story page.

In phonics we have been learning about ‘ou’ which is from Vowel House and we are confidently making sentences and reading ‘ou’ words. We enjoyed a new activity this week which was highlighting words in a story, Angelina said ‘ I love this activity’! There was a challenge at the reading station as the children had to make longer sentences which were muddled up, Matthew said, “I’m good at this” and he was!!

In maths we revisited the concept of money but challenged ourselves by now adding combinations of coins to make totals. We played at being the people who work in a bank by counting all the coins, played a game on the smartboard where we had to do the shopping and then work out the change and we played a team game of matching amounts.

We also started a new topic, “Farming”, the children used their talking book to plan the learning experiences for the rest of the term and they came up with some really good ideas – have a look in our book when you’re next in class. They started by building their very own farm which is now proudly standing up in our library corner (if you have any soft toy farm animals to add to our farm we would be really grateful) and worked well in teams to colour all the different parts. In art they used printing to make fantastic farm landscapes, our hands got very messy! They learned about the parts of a plant and new life in Religious Education, watch out for next week’s homework which involves some outdoor learning about this. In music we made a sound story for Old McDonald has a Farm, the children had to select instruments to play for each of the animals, it was good fun but noisy!

Have a lovely weekend!

Bookworms in P1R!

Happy World Book Day! We had great fun today with all our lessons themed around this – paired reading with P6/7, a reading carousel, writing book reports, sharing our favourite stories, reading a story with the nursery children and our Achievements Assembly. Well done to the children for making such an effort with their costumes!

Nursery News

Although a shorter week at Nursery it was by no means quieter. On Wednesday we were all super excited to get a visit from our friends in Primary 1D and 1R who came to show us some learning apps that they use on their iPads in school. We listened really well to our excellent Primary 1 teachers. Thank you so much for coming to visit us Primary 1. Please come back again. Our pre school children are really looking forward to working alongside you when we start our transition.

As it was very frosty and snowy outside this week the children made some lovely sparkly, frosty pictures using salt and glitter. We are planning to put these fantastic pictures up on the wall.

The frost and snow didn’t keep us away from our Outdoor Learning and we got the opportunity to learn about shapes, numbers and even how long our shadows were and what made them! We discovered that the snow had left some interesting patterns and we made some little snowmen. We also explored the school garden looking at ice patterns, the sun dial and how it worked and we were amazed to see some flowers beginning to grow! We thought we looked great in our new all in one suits for outdoors. As we are trying to give the children the opportunity to go outside every day could we please ask that the children come to Nursery with warm clothing and suitable footwear. Thank you very much for your support in this.

To finish off our busy week Mrs Craig took a small group of children out to try our new balance bikes which arrived last week. Mrs Craig has attended a training day for the use of these bikes and our aim is to show the children how to use these bikes properly and also receive basic bike maintenance tips which is a valuable life skill. Pictures of our first balance bike session will be posted on the Nursery Facebook page for you to see.

We look forward to seeing the parents and carers who have signed up for our Curriculum Showcase which is on Thursday 25th February from 6.30 till 8.00. If coming along there will be a welcome from Mrs Purdie first in the main hall of the school at 6.30 after which you will then move onto your first workshop.

Lastly on World Book Day which is on Thursday 3rd March the Nursery is planning on taking on a Pirate theme and the children are welcome to come dressed as pirates that day. Ahoy, me Hearties!

Have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery Team.

We’re going on a ………hunt!

Wow I can’t believe it’s Friday again, what a busy week we’ve had in P1R!

In reading this week we have been focusing on revising all the sounds we have learned and blending sounds together to make CVC words. We have used a variety of approaches and resources to do this, Miss Smyth even paid us a visit and spent the morning observing us as we worked. She was very impressed at how well the children used the apps on the ipad and their classroom displays as a tool for learning.

Maths has been great fun as we continued to learn about shapes, this week we looked at 3D shapes and spent lots of time exploring the shapes using our sense of touch and sight. We played games on the smartboard, went on a shape hunt, played shape bingo and dominoes and even wrote detailed descriptions for each of the shapes in our writing lesson.

In IDL we looked at how pirates defended themselves when at sea and how they used different weapons in battles. Everyone chose a weapon they would like to make using junk or recycled materials. We have put these on display for everyone to look at, hopefully we won’t have to use them too often!! On Wednesday we went outdoors for learning on a pirate scavenger hunt, we had to listen carefully to the clues and then go and look for evidence of pirates in our school grounds. We worked in two teams and chose names and captains for our crew – The Jolly Rodger and The Squeaky Sail. It was lovely to see everyone working together and helping one another in their search. The fun continued on Thursday when Mr Hunter asked us to create our very own sea monsters which were often a feature in pirate stories. We again took the learning outdoors for this and the children created fantastic monsters! Harry loved making the weapons and pirate play, Matthew enjoyed making weapons and Angelina liked finding pirate things in the school garden.

For Catholic Education Week we spent time discussing how we could show mercy to others, the children enjoyed watching the Pope Francis animation and all produced their very own Hands of Mercy for a whole school display.

Finally we finished off the week with an Achievements Assembly and our committees. Oma was awarded a special certificate for being a reflective learner – well done Oma! When asked how she felt she said, ” I felt really good.”

Well as I said at the beginning of the entry, it’s been a busy week! We’re all looking forward to next week when we have Technologies Week as our focus and Lent begins.

Wanted…harrrd sailin’ children…last seen in P1R!!

Ahoy there mateys, good to see ye all!

It’s been a grand ole week in P1R with lots of learning and fun. It all began on Monday when we learned a new sound, ‘ai’, we’re flying through the sounds now and getting better every day at blending. We used letterjoin to practise joining the a and i together to remind us that even though it is two letters it only makes one sound.

In maths we continued the sharing theme but focused on learning all about fractions/halves. Chocolate was aplenty in our lessons, we were given a challenge of working out how to share 1 mini-roll with our partners, we decided to cut them in half meaning each person got 1 piece. On another day we looked at whole chocolate bars and counted all the square pieces, we then had to work out half. We even found out that half of 5 is 2.5!! The best bit was getting to eat our share of the chocolate!

We also had a go at making fraction flags using 2 colours and decorating half a pizza (don’t worry they were pretend pizzas!)

In PE we were trying to combine the skills we had been learning and apply this to the different apparatus.

Famous pirates were the talk of the class this week. We learned all about Blackbeard and Anne Bonny. Ask your child to tell you one of the facts they found out. We made Wanted Posters for our class display, puppets and pirate hats for role play, sang Pirate songs, danced like a pirate, wrote some facts about famous pirates and used the Morfo app to create talking and moving pirates.

Outdoor learning was also part of our week although unfortunately the rain changed this slightly, we brought the outdoors indoors! All the children were set a challenge by Mr Hunter to make a ‘Crow’s Nest’. They had to think about which of our school values would be important, the children thought ‘teamwork’ would be the best way to approach the challenge.

We’re all now looking forward to tomorrow’s skills academies and going along to the dress rehearsal of the ‘Great Scots’ show!

The mysterious goings on in P1R

I can’t believe the week is over, it has been so busy!!

In science this week we were learning all about forces and did some work in our talking books. We had to do an investigation about toys that moved.

We had a visit on Wednesday from Travelling Tuba which was great fun, we got to learn about different instruments and listen to some performances. Kyle was even picked to try out one of the instruments!

In phonics we enjoyed working with our friends in P1D during our carousel activities where we learning all about the ‘ee’ sound. Ask your child to tell you the Vowel House story.

As last week was Anti-bullying week we spent some time on Wednesday afternoon reading a story about Allen the Alien who had moved to planet Earth. We did some role-play with stick puppets, played with the feelings dice and used the Allen adventure app on the ipad to read the rest of the story. We learned a lot about different types of bullying.

Then the unthinkable happened….on Thursday morning we found a large, green egg in our classroom and there was danger tape everywhere. We were all very confused and sent for Mrs Purdie to help us investigate. The children decided to set up a camera overnight to try and work out who the egg belonged to, here is what we found out!!!

Fond farewells and festive fun

This week saw the preparations for the festive season begin with Scottish Dancing in PE in preparation for our Christmas Party and our first full rehearsal for the nativity. The children enjoyed learning the Grand Ole Duke of York and worked well with a partner to practise their moves! On Thursday we joined up with the other children in the P1 and P2 classes to start rehearsals for the big performances in December. We were really proud of our P1 children confidently saying their lines that they had been learning in class and at home – thank you to the parents for assisting with this! I am sure some of you will be singing the songs in your sleep by the time the performances come around!!

In maths we continued learning about subtraction focusing on using a number line. We learned that it was quite easy to jump back, we used Fireman Sam and his ladder, hopscotch, a number mat and games on the smartboard to help us.

Reading was fun this week as all the children read their new stories to one another and played the games that came with their books. Here are some photos of us in action working together in pairs.

We learned more about toys in the past and decided to make our very own set of clay marbles. It was tricky rolling the clay into a shooter and some smaller marbles. Next week we will paint them then give them a glossy shine!

Finally on Friday we had to say a fond farewell to Miss Proudfoot who has been working with us for the last 4 weeks. We have all enjoyed having her in our class and she will be missed – good luck in your next school Miss Proudfoot!!