HWB – Page 2 – St Ninian's Primary School

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.

International week in P1R

This was the theme of the week across the school and the children took part in various learning experiences to explore the word ‘international’ and Global Citizenship. We looked at friendship as an important value for all to have and shared what we thought were good qualities in a friend. Here are some of our suggestions:

Klaudia-someone who plays with you

Lloyd-someone who likes the same things as you

Brooke- someone who is kind

Abigail-someone who loves you

We then asked some of our friends in the classroom to share their culture and mother tongue language with us. Klaudia and Dawid taught us some Polish phrases which we tweeted about! We continued this international theme by looking at children who lived in Malawi as we are linking up with St Margaret’s Academy during Lent to do some work with them on Malawi.

In addition to the above we also continued with our core learning and IDL learning throughout the week.

In phonics we learned all about the ‘ee’ and ‘oo’ sounds who live in Vowel House. We played sorting games, practised writing them and lots more. Did you know they are joining letters but only make one sound? We are really good at joining them and letter join helps us with this.

In writing the focus was to use our imaginations and think about he title ‘If I were a pirate…’ We listened to a song and a poem to inspire us then all had a turn at sharing our thoughts.

Lucy would shoot the cannons.

Dexter would sail the seven seas.

James would steer the ship.

Well done to our 4 star writers this week, check out your dojo messages to see if you were one of these!

Maths was great fun as we learned all about pattern and symmetry. We did lots of practical tasks, sponge pattern painting, smartboard symmetry, pirate symmetry using the smart pals, finish the pattern activities, Pom Pom patterns, peg board patterns. We all agreed that it was easier to stick with 2 colours when making patterns as using 3 got a bit tricky.

PE was exhausting as we have a started a new block of gymnastics, this weeks focus was on balancing and rolling. Ask us about the space shapes we learned and try some of them at home, the squatty alien was the trickiest!

Pirates have taken over the classroom, aarrrr…we’re all enjoying our new topic and have made a start at transforming our classroom and area into pirate territory. We did some fantastic pirate portraits using paint and oil pastels, they are on display on our new Art Gallery wall. We also drew pirates based on the descriptions we were given, they turned out well. We learned about the pirate code and some of the jobs the crew did. Check your letters in future, if you see a black spot it means the pirates are after you!! It has been great to see some of the activities you have been doing at home too-keep up the good work!

Finally we had something sad to think about on Friday, we had to say goodbye, Adios, Au Revoir to Miss Smyth. We have really enjoyed her visits to our classroom and playground and will miss her smile and laughter. Thank you for all your help and we wish you luck on your next adventure!

School-Home Learning: Here are some apps, websites and videos we have used to support our learning in class this week.

http://www.ictgames.com/dinosaurEggs_phonics/index.html

http://resources.hwb.wales.gov.uk/VTC/simple_patterns/eng/Introduction/StarterActivity.htm

http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/math/games/preschool-kindergarten/pattern-matcher/

http://resources.hwb.wales.gov.uk/VTC/simple_patterns/eng/Introduction/MainSession.htm

http://www.abcya.com/shape_patterns.htm

iPad app: spelling bug

iPad app: doodle app (use this to practise writing the sounds you know – make sure you use the correct colour)

Videos:

Primary 2/3 News

Thank you to everyone who came along to Parents’ Night. It was lovely to have so many positive conversations about the children’s learning.

It has been another really productive week in Primary 2/3.

The class has set an ambitious dojo challenge! Ask your child what is going to happen when we reach 2000 points. Everyone is very excited and working together to reach our target.

We have been working hard to tell the time to o’clock and half past (Primary 2) and quarter to and quarter past (Primary 3). There are some great activities to consolidate these skills at Doorway Online .

In Spanish we have been trying hard to count up to 20 – there are some tricky numbers! We really liked playing the Magician game to help us learn the numbers. If you’d like to try it at home click here .

This week we tried our hand at playing Hoopla as part of our Funfair topic then we produced some fabulous instructions in our Big Writing lesson, explaining how to play Hoopla.

We also investigated how dodgems work. We found out about forces then did an investigation in groups and wrote up science reports. Everyone loved making the dodgems crash into each other!

In Numeracy we’ve been developing our addition skills to 20 (Primary 2) and to 100 (Primary 3). We’ve all used Sumdog to consolidate our learning, with lots of expert help from our Sumdog experts in Primary 6.

In Health and Well-being we thought about our November theme of ‘Achieving’ and told each other how we achieve both inside and outside school and our friends reported back to the class. What a talented class we have!

Have a great weekend!

Mrs Howley, Mrs Keegan and Primary 2/3

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!

Being active and reflective in P1R

Wow, where has this week gone, it’s been full of fun, learning and reflection.

Monday started with European Day of Languages and we decided to start the day by greeting one another in different languages:

Amber chose to use French and said “Bonjour” to the class.

Dawid and Klaudia taught us how to say hello and good morning in Polish “cześć and dzień dobry”.

Ephraim chose to use Spanish and said “Buenos dias”.

Mrs Roy chose to use Italian and said “Buongiorno”.

This theme continued throughout the day and during Maths Klaudia and Dawid taught us how to count to 10 in Polish, we found it tricky but had good fun trying! Then before hometime we did a fun Spanish fitness song which is Mrs Roy’s favourite. Click on the link and have a go at home!

This week we introduced ‘k’ and ‘ck’ to the class and we quickly realised that they sound the same but are written differently. We spent most of our phonics lessons revising our set 1 sounds and blending sounds to make words. Some of the activities we did were: musical sounds, using our ‘big mouth’ to match the sounds, blending with cubes and the mats and using the ipads to practise forming the letters correctly. Next week we will begin to do some assessments with set 1 sounds so will spend some time consolidating and reflecting on what we have learned so far.It has been lovely to read and hear about what the children have chosen to do at home using our new literacy homework menu. Keep up the good work!

In maths we are almost finished learning about the numbers to 10 and progressed onto ordering and number names. We are all getting better at putting the numbers in the right order and did some super independent work during our carousels to show this. We did a cut and stick ordering task and played some fun ordering games on the smartboard, you can do these at home too using the maths homework menu links. Have a look at our Talking Book when you’re next in our class to see our progress so far – we enjoy looking back and reflecting on our learning.

Trex was at the forefront of our IDL this week as we had to do lots of tasks to help him settle in and find his way around the school and local area. In our writing lesson we wrote him a letter which was tricky as we had to do it all by ourselves by having a go and using our phonics and tricky word walls. Mrs Roy was so proud of us all! We received another letter from Trex and decided to make him some picture maps and routes that he could follow to find places near our school. Next week we are hoping to go for a walk on Wednesday to visit one of these places. The most enjoyable activity was using Google Earth to find out where our school was on the map. We all sat down, put on our seatbelts and enjoyed travelling down from space and landing in our school playground. As an extension of this task many children wanted to visit other places so that’s what we did!

Bernice wanted to go to the beach so we went to ‘Burntisland’. Paul L wanted to go to ‘Bubbles’, James wanted to go to ‘his house’ and Klaudia wanted to go to ‘McDonalds’. Try using Google Earth at home to find your own address, it’s great fun!!

PE was all about teamwork and developing our movement skills. We set up lots of different stations to allow us to practise throwing, catching, balancing, running, travelling, etc. These are all really important skills to develop as later on in PE we will look at some specific sports which use these skills. We worked in trios and had to sometimes wait for our turn to use the equipment, share resources and help one another. This links in with our value of teamwork and friendship which is really important to us in P1R.

Full timers in P1R

As the title says, P1R were in full days this week and lasted well, the children had bags of enthusiasm and energy for learning across the week. They enjoyed having lunch in the hall with the other classes.

Our phonics focus was ‘m’ and ‘c’ and the children learned about where in their mouth the sounds came from and how to form the letters correctly. They went on a sounds walk around the school looking for objects beginning with ‘m’ and ‘c’ taking it in turns to photograph what they found. Ask your child what colour the sounds are and I’m sure they’ll be able to tell you. They also enjoyed the carousel activities where they were able to use the smartboard and ipads, playdough, strawberry jam and lots more!

using strawberry jam to make the ‘mmm’sound

In maths we continued to practise our counting through games and songs. What great movers we have in P1R! We also used our book study topic in maths and spoke about the size of dinosaurs using mathematical language – tall, short, long, big, small. We had a great idea to then measure our dinosaur drawings from a previous lesson using cubes, I thought this was a good suggestion! We have put our findings on our classroom displays for you to have a look at.

In IDL we also went on a tour of the school as we have some children who went to different nurseries and were keen to have a look around. Mrs Purdie let us all go into her office, it was a bit of a squeeze but we managed to all fit in. Thanks Mrs Purdie! We also made our very own school ties.

The children designed some really nice book covers for Harry and the Dinosaurs and they learned about some of the important features of books – when you’re reading at home see if you can find some of these features.

We wrote our very first stories about our favourite things in big school with a little bit of help from the grown ups, it was great to see all of the children having a go at emergent writing.

PE and the Daily mile was good fun, we only managed half a mile this week but some of us chose to include this in our goal for the term. We played lots of teambuilding games and got used to the big hall. Well done to everyone for remembering their gym kit.

We finished the week with a whole school assembly and then set our personal goals for the term. Come along to Ninian’s Natter and discuss this goal with your child.

We’re all looking forward to next week!

Strength and determination to succeed!

I can’t believe that our time in P1R is almost ending, we’ve been using the time we have left to consolidate our learning and prepare ourselves for next session.

Monday started off with a fun filled judo session with our friends in P1D where we got to show off our moves. We worked with a partner using our strength and determination to try to defeat one another. I can’t believe how strong everyone is!!

In literacy we have been focusing on the alphabet – revising all the letter sounds/names, putting the alphabet in order. We were very creative with this and made letter shapes using pipecleaners, used the drawing apps and small whiteboards on the ipads to write the alphabet, played alphabetical order games on the smartboard.

Our friends from P6/7 visited us on Thursday morning for some paired reading which we always look forward to, the older children were amazed at how well we are all reading now, some of can even read with expression!

Maths this week has been about addition and subtraction as it has been a little while since we worked on this. Everyone remembered the strategies to use, eg. counting on or back, using the numberline, using our fingers. I tried to trick the children by giving them challenging missing number sums but as always they rose to the challenge and completed them successfully. As the children are so clever they took it in turns to be the teacher at addition bingo, they did a better job than me!!

We ended the week with Ninian’s Natter and our class bake sale. Thank you to everyone who supported this event, the total raised was £172 which will be shared with the nursery as they also donated cakes. The children will decide how best to spend this money next week.

Have a lovely weekend!

Fun and friendship

I can’t believe how quickly the weeks are flying by, not long to go now!

In our literacy this week we have continued to learn about ar/or/ir/er words. Everyone is getting really good at identifying which pattern they hear in the words even though they sound very similar. We enjoyed playing the Aar Pirate game with a partner and competed against one another to get four in a row. We also wrote sentences in our jotters keeping our writing neat in preparation for P2, used the magnetic letters to make words and played some games on the smartboard.

In maths we have been skip counting in 2’s and learning about odd and even numbers, we did this through songs, games, written tasks and practical tasks. We also had a visitor to the class, Mrs Gallagher, from the WL Numeracy team who did some fun counting on activities with us using counters, numicon and dot patterns, she was really impressed at how well the children were doing in their maths work!

In our PE lessons we got the chance to go outside and use the running tracks. We did the 200m and 400m races, everyone raced in heats before we then had a boys and girls final. It was lovely to see the children supporting and encouraging one another to the finish line. The 3 winners in each final will now earn points for their houses – well done!

In IDL and HWB we focused on friendship and everyone pointed out that this is one of our school values. We learned about friendly/unfriendly behaviour and we all agreed that we preferred the good friend traits. We were all given a challenge to try and make at least one new friend in school or at home and each day the children excitedly told us about their new friends – well done everyone! In our writing we wrote friendship recipes using lots of WOW words – “a sprinkle of happiness”, “100 grams of love”, ” a pinch of fun” and ” 3 cups of kindness”. We also worked with our friends in P1D to make friendship bracelets out in the school garden, this was tricky but good fun! To finish off our friendship week we decided to have Goldentime with P1D at the park, everyone played together nicely showing what good friends they all were, what a lovely way to end the week!

P1R weekly news

Although it’s been a short week we’ve managed to cram it full of learning!

In maths we have been ordering numbers within 20 and identifying largest/smallest numbers. We worked independently, with partners or as part of a team.

In our CLIC lessons we have been doing lots of counting. Here is the link for our favourite song, give it a go over the weekend!

In literacy things have got pretty tricky as we are now learning initial blends focusing on ‘s’ blends this week, eg. sm, st, sw, etc. The children quickly picked this up and could guess what the word was going to be from its initial sounds. We also got some time to do a Fry’s word spelling test and some us can now spell 32 words independently – good job everyone! Try this game which helps you learn blends. Here is a picture of Ana playing it in class.

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

In IDL and RE this week we have been discussing our families and how they are all different. It was lovely hearing the children talk so lovingly about their families. We made some lovely family trees using collage materials and different coloured handprints for every family member.

Last week the children made some ‘Me’ bags as part of their IDL homework, we presented these to one another this week and had fun looking at all the things that made the children happy, eg. photographs of memories, sweets, toys, jewellery, etc. Well done to all the children that made these, you earned extra dojo points!

We continued our inter house championship in PE and learned about sprinting this week. We all had a go at racing one another making sure we were using our arms and legs properly. Next week we hope to go outside and try sprinting on the new tracks on the upper field.

To finish off the week Miss Meechan brought some surprise visitors to our class, Jinky and Joey, her pet guinea pigs. Some of us had a cuddle with them. Thanks Miss Meechan!

I hope you are all outside enjoying the warmer weather, hope to see some of you tomorrow at our Summer Fayre 10-12pm!

Sailing on the seven seas…

What a hardworking crew we have in P1R, it’s been another busy week!

At the beginning of the week we had a visit from our local librarian, Mrs Campbell to read us a story, we all had to vote for a book which she then read to us. We’re hoping to visit the library shortly to have a look at all the other books they have.

In maths we started a new topic learning all about shapes, we spent lots of time exploring 2D shapes. We used the feely bag to try and feel the shapes then describe them to our partners. We sorted shapes using the smartboard and flashcards, Mrs Roy was amazed at how quickly we could sort them! Our challenge of the week was to think of other 2D shapes and where we might see them in the environment.

We received another letter from Captain Pete this week who was delighted with the applications we had completed for homework to join his crew. He asked us to build our very own ship to use on our Pirate Adventure which we were really excited about. We had to learn about the different parts of a ship and try to recreate this in our design. Our crew have had great fun using the ship for pirate play. We also learned about Pirate life and spent an afternoon trying out some activities which pirates would do in their spare time – playing music, dancing, making things out of wood, playing cards, reading, etc.

The Olympics are beckoning for some of our budding gymnasts, we were are getting really good now at using the large apparatus. This week we focused on being responsible, leadership and core strength.

We ended the week with Ninian’s Natter where every child had a learning conversation to discuss their goals and progress. I will send a photograph to the parents who were unable to make it today of your child with their goal. You can use this as a tool for discussion at home.