Expressive Arts – Page 2 – St Ninian's Primary School

Nursery News

Although a shorter week at Nursery it has been as busy as usual. We have continued with our Fairy tales topic with the children leading on the planning and learning experiences.

Our AM children have been busy in the construction area building lots of exciting models including the Gingerbread house. They have been writing about the characters in the story and drawing them too. We also had some special visitors on Wednesday. Four teachers from Panama were visiting the school and nursery. They were very impressed when we greeted them in Spanish and loved our bright and nurturing environment.They took lots of photographs to take back to their school.

Our PM children have been loving the puppet theatre and have been retelling the story of Hansel and Gretel using the puppets they made themselves. The audience have been very impressed by the shows! They have also been busy in the construction area with lots of fantastic models being made.

We have also been outdoors and continued with our construction ideas using our natural materials. We are hoping for lovely warm weather soon,

Our transition programme continues next week with our PM children who are going to school in August visiting P1R to rake part in some carousel activities. They are looking forward to having this exciting experience. We also have some special visitors on Monday and Tuesday. Watch this space next week for details!

Hope you all have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery Team.

Nursery News

It was lovely to welcome back all the children on Monday and we are looking forward to a very busy but exciting last term. As part of Creative Industries week the children had a visit from Andrew a musician who worked with the boys and girls on their favourite Nursery rhymes. They all did a fantastic job with their singing and dancing.

Nursery rhymes was also the focus in our transition programme as the children had to pick their favourite rhyme and perform it for the Primary 1 children who in turn showed us their fantastic work and learning in their rhymes. We carried on this learning in our water tray when the children decided to put a long tube round the top of the tray and see how the water moved up and down it just like Incy Wincy Spider moved up and down the water spout!

AM children decided on Humpty Dumpty and PM children chose Incy Wincy Spider as their favourite rhymes. As well as singing their rhymes the children also made props and puppets. They all did an amazing job! A big thank you goes to Mrs Roy , Miss Diamond and all the Primary 1 children for working with us on this project. There will be lots of further opportunities to work with Primary 1 as part of our transition programme. A booklet explaining all the planned activities will be issued to parents next week.

Wednesday was a very busy day for baking birthday cakes as Leon in AM and Klaudia in PM celebrated their birthdays. They both did a great job of making delicious cakes.

Also next week as part of our consultative planning we will be asking the children for their ideas on what they would like their next topic to be. Watch this space!

Next Thursday Nursery Natter takes place at 2.00 pm for our PM children and on Friday between 10.30 and 11.00 for our AM children. This gives you an opportunity to come along and read your child’s Learner Journey and discusss with them all they are learning at Nursery.

Also on Thursday during the Natter there will be a Bake Sale . This will be the first time Nursery has been involved with this. Our PM children along with P1D and P2B are asked to bake some cakes which can then be bought during the natter. Half of the money made at the sale will be split between the three classes and the other half goes to the Parent Council. The children can then decide what they would like to buy for Nursery with their share. We would really appreciate any donations of home baking which can be handed in at the beginning of the PM Nursery session on Thursday. The AM children will be involved in a Bake Sale later on in the term.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery Team.

Creativity in P1R

As the title suggests this week the focus has been on ‘being creative’. P1R have been working on a joint project with the nursery as part of the transition programme this year. Our chosen theme was ‘Rhyme Time’ and we linked the learning in literacy and the expressive arts subjects.

We chose Dingle Dangle Scarecrow as the song we would perform for the nursery.

On Monday we had to identify the rhyming words in the song using highlighters and we played rhyming games on the smartboard. We also used the wooden spoons we had brought in from home to make scarecrow puppets. Then on Tuesday in our reading lesson we had to visualise a scarecrow from the descriptive poem we heard. On Wednesday we played rhyming bingo and washing line rhymes on the netbooks. Thursday was a bit trickier as we had a go at writing acrostic poems about a scarecrow and then did some watercolour collage paintings. Friday was our big performance where we dressed up and sang our song to the nursery children then we went over to the nursery to hear their performance. We all enjoyed ‘Rhyme Time’ and look forward to welcoming the nursery children to our carousel activities over the coming weeks.

In maths this week we have progressed onto developing our knowledge of numbers within 20, this has involved counting forwards/backwards, sequencing and ordering. The children enjoyed using the number flowers to play games, the favourite was when they got to steal flowers from the garden and the other children had to guess what flowers were missing!

Our PE block this term will be athletics focusing on running, throwing and jumping. We will be practising these skills every week in the lead up to Sports Day in June where we will take part in the inter-house championship.

In RE we have started to prepare for our class mass which will be on Thursday 28th April in St Philip’s. Next week the children will bring home a copy of the hymns we are learning and some children will be selected to read the bidding prayers or be a part of the offertory procession. I would be grateful if you could assist your child in these preparations.

Next week we look forward to starting our new IDL topic which will focus on Health and Wellbeing.

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!

Nursery News

This week in Nursery we have been learning about Chinese New Year which is celebrated on Monday 8th February. We listened to a story about how the years are named after different animals and had the opportunity to make Chinese drums. Our Chinese restaurant has also been busy with lots of cooking and writing down food orders. More exciting things are planned for Monday so watch this space.

In our Outdoor learning we have been using our new gardening tools to dig up the soil and see what we can discover. No treasure yet unfortunately! We are planning on buying all in one suits for the children to enable them to go outside regularly to experience all the benefits of learning outdoors.

Some of our AM children used their artistic skills to paint or colour in self portraits. Our responsive planning took on rockets too this week when some children decided they wanted to make their own rockets and then continued on to construct a super big one so they could travel to the moon wearing their moon boots and masks. They then watched a clip of Tim Peake on the Smartboard. Perhaps we may have a future astronaut in our Nursery!

We had a special treat at story time on Thursday afternoon when the children listened to the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff in both English and Polish read by our Polish student Miss Suszko. The children loved this experience and we plan to read this to our morning children next week.

Today at our Achievement assembly Kerr got a special certificate for being a reflective learner as he was excellent this week at talking about how we are Active in Nursery which is one of our GIRFEC indicators. Well done Kerr. We will be continuing to discuss each of the indicators in the GiRFEC wheel with the children and make a children’s display of this. We will post pictures of these as we complete them. We have also been recording the childrens’ views in our Talking Book.

Next week is Technology week across the school and Nursery and we are planning on working with Primary 1 classes on apps that can be used on the iPads as well as building some exciting things!

Our Breakfast Blether is on Tuesday 9th February at 845 all parents and carers are welcome to come along for an informal chat with some of the Nursery Team. If you are free to come along please add your name to the sign up sheet in the Nursery. Thank you to everyone who has put their name down so far. Remember breakfast is included! We look forward to seeing as many as possible at this event.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery Team.

Ahoy me hearties!!!

It’s been all systems go this week in P1R as we continued our Pirate Adventure. The children enjoyed learning about the different jobs pirates did when they were on their ship, made pirate portraits using oil pastels, sang pirate songs, did some pirate dancing, started our pirate displays with P1D and chose facts to write about and illustrate. In reading they heard about the adventures of Captain Pugwash and had fun finding examples of VCOP in the story. Ask your child to tell you all about Punctuation Parrot, he has been helping us recognise different punctuation marks in stories. In writing they had to complete the sentence, “If I were a pirate…”, there were some super ideas:

Ahmad – I would have a battle with other ships and shoot the cannon.

Matthew – I would have a ship race.

Elenta – I would fight the pirates and push them in the water.

Ryan – I would drink rum (I think Mrs Gardner liked this answer the best)!

Why don’t you ask the children to teach you this song, they even made up some actions for it!

In phonics we learned all about ‘l’ and ‘r’ having a go at blending the sounds to make words, writing the sounds using letterjoin, finding objects that began with the sounds and lots more!

Sharing continued to be the focus in maths and the children have picked this concept up really quickly, we all had fun sharing out the pasta and toys and playing interactive sharing games on the smartboard. We also met some pirates who needed to share out the treasure they had captured!

Try some of the games they’re good fun! Here are the links:

http://pbskids.org/curiousgeorge/busyday/dogs/

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Flash.aspx?f=sharingv2

In PE we developed our gymnastics skills and started transferring last week’s floor work to apparatus. The children were amazed when Mrs Roy was able to demonstrate a forward roll to the class (I amazed myself!!!!) Well done to all the children who were finding this difficult to begin with, they persevered and by the end of the week everyone could do a forward roll!

In RE we learned about the importance of speaking to God, we revised how to make the sign of the cross properly and learned how to say the ‘Our Father’. We were asking children of other religions how they prayed and next week Ahmad is going to teach us a new prayer which we are all looking forward to.

We also got some good news on Friday, congratulations goes to Matthew who was a winner in the road safety competition organised by the JRSO, we were all really proud of him! This week we took part in a Robert Burns colouring in competition for Morrisons, fingers crossed we do well!

Next Friday we will be starting our Skills Academy, all the children selected a skill they would like to develop, the choices were amazing, we’ll tell you more next week.

Primary 1/2 Nativity – A Miracle in Town

Nursery News

Firstly we would like to thank everyone who came along to our Art Gallery this week. We made the fantastic amount of 200 pounds which is all going to Yorkhill Children’s Hospital Christmas appeal which is going towards a new heart scanner. This appeal is special to the St Ninians family this year. We really appreciated your generosity and the children were so proud to show their amazing Art work. They were all superstars.

On Wednesday morning we were very lucky to have a special visitor. Marcus’ dad who is a postman came in to talk to the children about his job and how busy he is just now getting ready for all the letters to Santa. A big thank you goes out to him especially as he had been working all night. All the children were very focused and asked lots of relevant questions.

Some of our PM children have been busy making salt dough decorations and they plan to finish these next week. In both sessions next week also we plan to bake our Christmas cakes after discussing all the ingredients.

In our new heuristic area the children have been using their curiosity and creativity to make binoculars and games from the natural resources on our Treasure table.

As well as making things for our Art gallery this week the children have started practising for the Nursery Nativity. Next week will be very busy with lots of rehearsals.

Just a small reminder that the Nursery Nativity is on Tuesday 8th December at 10am and 2pm. Tickets costing 1 pound each can be purchased from any of the Nursery team. It is also our school Fayre tomorrow between 10 and 12.

Lastly we love to get your feedback on our Blog so please feel free to comment. Thank you for your continued support.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery Team.

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!!