Cool to be Kind – St Ninian's Primary School

P6/7 Weekly News

Cool to be kind was the theme of the week and this year’s focus was CHOOSE RESPECT!! Here is how we linked it to our lessons:

Wordboost – We used a powerpoint about ‘Cool to be kind’ to select our BOOST words for the week.

Writing – We were inspired by this poem, ‘If’, to think about friendships and what we would want a friend to do for us. Check out our Twitter page to see our X Factor Poetry Plenary.

Art – We had to represent the word ‘Respect’ visually in any way we chose for an upper area display.

Groupwork – We worked in teams to make posters about what we had learned about the ‘Science of Happiness’. We have been trying out some of the suggestions.

RE – We researched Saints who were great examples of showing kindness and respect to others.

Assembly – The House and Vice Captains from our class were involved in planning, preparing and delivering an assembly about this week’s theme. They did a great job and had a captive audience!

Pupil Voice:

Brooke – I liked doing the poem of friendship as I liked trying to use rhyming words.

Harley – I liked adding and subtracting decimals this week.

Ambra – We did a friendship poem I liked it but it was challenging.

Lauren – In school this week we have been doing Respect pictures and in PE we have been working on our fitness.

Aria – We did some artwork for the word Respect.

Bea – There was a Sumdog competition and our class came 16th out of all the West Lothian classes who had entered. Matt in our class came 9th overall in West Lothian. Well done Matt!

Teacher voice:

A fantastic week for all in P6/7. It was great to meet so many parents this week to discuss the progress of all the children. I am very proud of them all!!

A special mention to all who participated in the Sumdog challenge for homework – great teamwork and dedication to get on the leaderboard. It was great to also have one of our pupils, Matt, in the top 1o!!!!

Another special mention to Ailie who was nominated for Hot Chocolate Friday as she had prepared so well for her JRSO presentation at assembly.

Finally, I received an email this evening to inform me that Bea and Toni have made it into the top 20 in the West Lothian Name a Gritter competition. I have put details of how to vote for them on the school app and I have also emailed everyone in our class. All the teachers have been posting their votes too for them!!! Good luck girls!!!!!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Mrs Roy

Cool to be kind week in P1R

As the title suggests we had a focus on ‘kindness’ this week and as part of this we learned about children’s rights, in particular those of refugees. We learned about the long journeys that some children had to make, often without all of their family members and spoke about how we would feel on those journeys. We then drew pictures of refugee children making their way to a new country. Paul M and Isla drew a family walking across an old train track, Brooke drew a family moving to a new country, James drew refugees on a boat. In our writing lesson we looked at photographs of refugees and discussed what they might need to make them feel safe, Lucy said they needed a comfy bed, Lloyd said they needed love, Dawid said they needed a house. We are going to send some of our work to UNICEF to show them what we have learned.

In phonics we learned two new sounds, d and g, these are both quite tricky to say correctly. We did some formation and blending activities during our carousels.

In maths we continued to learn about addition, we are really confident in making number stories up to 5 now. We persevered with missing number sums and Mrs Roy showed us a strategy using the number line, we all agreed that this was a good way to find the missing number. We enjoyed linking our CLIC sessions to our numeracy carousels this week and learned all about doubles. Join in with the song we used in our warm-up sessions this week.

Miss McGuire did some finger painting with us and we made butterfly doubles for our maths wall to help us remember our doubles facts. Another good game we played was the ‘dice’ game, we all took turns to roll the big dice then had to double the number it landed on and find the answer on our smartpals. We finished our lessons with a ‘Beat the teacher’ challenge game. Mrs Roy challenged us to beat her best score in a doubles game on the smartboard. Well done to Dexter who was the ‘Hit the Button’ champion this week and beat Mrs Roy!!!

Another letter arrived from Santa telling us that to be a good elf we needed to learn about what toys were made from. Miss McGuire led us in these lessons and we had great fun sorting out all the toys from her Christmas Goody Bag. We described the toys as painted plastic(Ephraim), wooden(Nathan) and metal (Bernice). Part of our work was to sort the toys out into these different sets which links in well with maths so we showed that we could make links in our learning.

We also got a surprise on Thursday morning when we saw that Elvis the Elf had been busy setting up Santa’s workshop in our classroom. The design station and writing area opened this week, next week we will be opening the wrapping station too. It’s been great fun using these stations during freeplay and IDL.

Friday was great fun as we did our ‘Toy talks’ and got to sit on the talking chair, everyone took their turn and were good listeners when someone was speaking. We also took part in Crazy PJ day which was an act of kindness towards Children in Need, thanks to those who have kindly donated to this on the Fundraising link.

Have a great weekend and Happy Birthday Ephraim, 5 today!!!

P1M Weekly News

What an exciting week for us all in P1M.

This week in numeracy we have been working on our number bonds to 5. We are now super stars with this and can tell you very quickly number bonds to 5 e.g. 5+0=5; 4+1=5; 3+2=5. We completed a range of different activities this week to help us with this. We jumped out the missing jumps on our number line to get to Pedro the Parrot who was hiding on the number 5, we had to count out how many jumps it would take us. We also matched up ladybirds wings to create 5 spots on each ladybird. Stefan successfully completed his matching numbers worksheet to create 5. Kayla and Jarred were partners in a game because both of their numbers on their back made 5 when added together. Casper was using our ‘number talks’ strategies to talk about how he found the missing number in the addition sentence. Here is one of the games we have been playing this week to help us understand this concept a bit better:

http://www.iboard.co.uk/iwb/Alien-Pairs-to-5-2316

This is another game that we have been using for an ‘exit pass’ task this week. An exit pass means you have to correctly answer a question (pass the test) before you are allowed to exit this classroom.

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button (in this game select ‘number bonds’ then select ‘up to 10: addition within 10’)

We have learned the ‘d’ and ‘g’ sounds this week. The ‘g’ sound is quite a tricky one to write correctly but we have been trying our best. Kaimee and Adam were practising writing this letter in the sand tray. Kerr has been practising writing the letter ‘g’ on a whiteboard. We are continuing to work on blending sounds together to make words. We really enjoying playing ‘race car blending’. In this game, we race the car across a word and blend all the sounds together, if we correctly read the word we get to try blending with a new word. One of our written tasks this week was to listen really carefully to the middle sound in a word. We were learning about how if you change the middle sound in a word, this can change the meaning of a word. Sophie was a successful learner in this task and was very proud with her work.

We love reading in P1M and this week we were given the opportunity to return our books to the library and take out a new book. We know how to return books and take out books from the library. We even managed to squeeze in a quick play in the park on our way back to school.

We have also included a picture here of us showing off our listening skills during our talk from the SSPCA.

Have you heard about our cinema trip this week? I’m sure you have! We all loved the opportunity to go to the cinema with our peers this week and everyone enjoyed the movie – The Good Dinosaur (even the teachers enjoyed their trip!) In our writing lesson this week we decided to put our thoughts and feelings into words and write our favourite part of the film. Here are some examples of our writing this week:

Adam: “I liked when Arlo and Spot tried to kill.”

Kerr: “I liked when Arlo and Spot shared.”

Kyle: “I went to the cinema.”

Casper: “I liked Arlo playing together.”

Ernie the Elf sent us another letter this week to tell us all about a naughty elf who made a mess in Santa’s workshop again! Ernie asked for our help to sort out the toys. The naughty elf had mixed together the toys made from wood, plastic, fabric and metal – we needed to sort them out again. We used 4 different hoops to help us. The blue hoop is for toys made from metal; green for plastic toys; red for toys made from fabric and yellow for wood. We realised that most of the toys we play with are made from plastic. After we tidied up the mess for Ernie we chose one type of toy to play with. Ask your child if they played with the wood toys, the plastic toys, the metal or fabric toys? What was your favourite toy? Trex even joined in the fun! Can you remember what Trex is made of?

This week is ‘cool to be kind’ week. Throughout this week we have been thinking about being kind to our peers. Every day Miss Meechan chooses someone to get a letter home for working hard. However, this week our letter home was for people that had been kind in class. Well done to those who have shown acts of kindness this week: Casper, Kayla, Kerr and Jakub. Who is going to get the letter home tomorrow? We also had our achievements assembly today. During this, Miss Smyth presented an award to someone from each class who has been kind all year. Well done to Jakub from our class to win the award.

During ‘cool to be kind’ week we have been learning about refugees and talking about our rights. We have spoke about what rights we have and how we found feel if our rights were taken away from this. We decided that we would feel sad if we didn’t have our rights. Tomorrow, Mr Slater is going to teach us about refugees and the journeys they make.

WOW! What a busy week. Enjoy your well earned weekend everyone!