What a lovely sunny week we’ve just had although it’s not as bright today!
This week has been another busy one. In Religious Education we have been learning all about Mary and have been saying a Hail Mary every morning before we start our lessons. We watched a short Bible clip and then coloured in a stain glass window for our learning journals.
In maths we have continued to focus on ordering of numbers within 20 as some of us found this tricky last week, we’ve all got much better at it now. We enjoyed playing the loop card game and working in teams to order the numbers quickly before the timer ran out. The boys were victorious beating the girls 2 games to 1! We also played number bingo and a dice game to help us find the number more or less than. As a reward for everyone’s hard work we went outside to play ‘What’s the time Mr Wolf?’, we all remembered our o’clock times.
In literacy we continued to challenge ourselves by reading and spelling s blend words, everyone did really well with this. Our spelling and reading continues to get better each day and we love to beat our highest scores in our tricky words.
IDL has been fun this week as we have been learning about the parts of the body and the skeleton. We all made moving people, cotton bud skeletons and labelled the body parts correctly. Have a look at our class display when you’re here for Parent’s Evening. We also listened to some stories and songs about skeletons.
Preparations have begun for our class assembly which is in 2 weeks time. All the children have been issued with a speaking part to learn as part of their homework – well done to the children who know this by heart already! We will try to find some time next week to get the microphones out and practise using these. Congratulations to our friends in P1D who did their assembly today – you were awesome!
Next week as you know will be our annual Health Week, a letter has been issued today and there is further information on our class story on dojo. I will update this daily with the next day’s activities to ensure everyone comes prepared. Get lots of rest over the weekend as we’ll be really busy next week, hopefully the sun keeps shining!!
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.
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!
Another busy and exciting week in Nursery. Our transition programme is well underway with the Talking Books making their way round the children. Our AM children visited Primary 1D in their groups to take part in a Literacy carousel. They all did extremely well and looked so grown up. A big thank you to Miss Diamond and her super class. Our PM children will have their visits in the week beginning 9th May. All details of our transition programme are contained in the transition booklet which was given out last week. If you have any questions on any of the activities please ask any member of the Nursery team.
In our consultative planning with the children the topic of Fairy Tales came out as the firm favourite. Our AM children chose The Gingerbread Man as their first story. This week they have listened to the story, drawn pictures of the gingerbread man, made headbands with their favourite character from the story on them. They also got the opportunity to smell real ginger and even made some gingerbread men biscuits which they then decorated and ate! They were yummy.
Our PM children chose Hansel and Gretel as their favourite story. They also listened to the story, made the cottage covered in sweets and managed to decorate it without eating the sweets! They also made puppets of the characters in the story and they plan to use these next week to retell the story in our puppet theatre. We can’t wait to see that! They also listened to a song about the story and sang along to it.
Just a little reminder that Nursery is on holiday on Monday and Tuesday. We look forward to welcoming all the children back on Wednesday.
Have a lovely holiday weekend. Hope the weather improves!
In literacy the children have been learning the ng sound. They have been playing sound bingo, reading sentences with ng words and playing games on the smartboard. They are really confident at recognising Fry’s words and punctuation as you can see from these pictures.
In maths we have been counting objects up to 20 and have enjoyed some noisy warm ups with our counting songs.
Feelings have been the theme in IDL and we’ve had some great discussions. We listened to some music and had to guess what emotion it sounded like then drew feelings faces. We then made a feelings wheel using lines and colours for different emotions. These are now on our class display.
The competition continued in PE and this week we learned how to throw a javelin. Ask your child the rhyme which helps them remember how to do this. Kyle and Filip were very good at this and threw their javelins the furthest.
I was very proud of all of the children this morning when they led mass at St Philip’s. They all showed how responsible they could be and the parishioners commented on this. WELL DONE BOYS AND GIRLS!
It’s been a busy week in P1R with lots of learning and fun!
In maths we have continued to develop our understanding of numbers and have been using songs and games to help us achieve this. One of our favourite games has been paint splat, working out numbers before, after and between. Try it out for yourself on our maths resources blog.
We also enjoyed looking for dot patterns and explaining to the rest of the class how we worked out the answer. Here’s what some of the boys and girls said about this pattern:
“I counted the dots one by one”
“I just knew it was 5”
“I counted the 4 on the outside, then added the 1 in the middle”
Look at this dot pattern and tell someone how many dots there are and explain how you worked out the answer. Leave us a comment below.
In IDL we planned our new topic, “All about me”, the children came up with some really good ideas which we’ll keep you posted about in our weekly blog posts. This week the focus was on ‘We are all different’, the children took part in discussions, listened to songs, wrote personal descriptions, made a torn paper portrait and did an eye colour survey. I think you’ll agree that they managed to cover a lot of subject areas using their IDL theme.
We also started our inter-house championship in PE, this week’s event was high jump. Everyone tried their best to master the scissor jump and the children loved when the bar got higher and higher! Well done to Oma, Alice and Dominic who were our house winners this week for the event.
Next week we will be trying out the new route for our daily mile, watch this space for an update on how we get on. Some of the route will now be on grass so try to remember trainers for next week.
Well done to all the children for participating in Ninian’s Natter this week, all the children have now had a learning conversation with myself to review last term’s goals and set new ones. If you didn’t make Ninian’s Natter ask them about their goals, we will continue to review these as the term progresses.
Last thing to mention is today’s Achievement Assembly, our class winner was Harry who was chosen for showing creativity in his work – well done!
See you all next week, remember our class mass is on Thursday 28th April at 9.30am in St Philip’s (wee chapel), it would be nice to see some parents/families there to support the children.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry we can’t post photographs this week but there is no media space on the blog, hopefully I can add these later.
As you may have guessed from the title we started a new topic in maths – time. The children have been learning about daily routines, clocks and recognising o’clock times. They have enjoyed taking part in a variety of activities this week to help them learn, eg. making a clock, playing time apps, using small clocks to make times, being teachers and checking others clocks, time bingo and using the time playdough mats. It has been great to see everyone making links in their learning and the children are now using the class clock with ease, especially to remind me when it is lunchtime!!
A game which we used for our plenary sessions was Stop the Clock, Oma is the current class champion with 18 seconds to beat. Try playing this at home and see how quickly you can match the times.
In phonics we were learning about ‘sh’ and ‘ch’, these are not easy yet the children were confidently reading and spelling words with these sounds very quickly. Some of the activities which helped us were glitter tray writing, sounds bingo, interactive games on the smartboard and much more! Here is a game to try out which practises sh,ch and th.
In IDL this week the focus was on Scottish produce – we had a great afternoon on Wednesday tasting lots of different Scottish produced food – salmon, tablet, porridge, raspberries, shortbread, oatcakes to name a few! Everyone had to choose their favourite which we then wrote about in Thursday’s writing lesson. It was interesting to see so many different foods being chosen, shortbread was very popular! My favourite was the tablet, delicious!!
PE was good fun as we continued to learn about travelling with objects, we introduced some new equipment this week and we are now using basketballs, footballs and tennis bats/balls. Some of the boys were showing off their dribbling skills they have learned at their out of school football clubs.
We ended the week with some outdoor learning, Mr McCurdy joined us on an environmental walk in our local area. We were able to spot many signs of spring and at the same time increase our fitness levels by walking 2 miles, yes that’s right, 2 miles! We used a map and followed the signs as we walked. It was only fair that the children were rewarded with some time at the playpark on the way back to school.
Thank you also to P7 for teaching us about the Stations of the Cross on Friday, we learned a lot about the Easter story. We will continue to learn about Easter next week.
Have you heard all about the game we played in PE this week? It was called dice dash. This game incorporates a range of skills from social interactions to speed and stamina. Ask your child about this game.
We are continuing with our number topic of multiplication and everyone is working really hard with this topic… Miss Meechan is really impressed! Our learning this week focused on ‘switcher’ sums. Sophie ‘switched’ the sum ‘2 x 4 – 2 groups of 4’ around because we can’t count in 4’s. She switched this sum to ‘4 x 2 – 4 groups of 2 because we can count in 2’s’. Great work, Sophie.
We have also been learning about ‘arrays’ to help us with multiplication. Last week we learned about arrays and this week we consolidated that knowledge through a range of activities. One of our activities was a competitive game with a trio or partner. In this picture you can see Robbie, Ethan and Imogen using the array flashcards to create and practise ‘times’ sums. Well done!
We are continuing to practise counting in steps of to help us with our multiplication knowledge of skip counting to count quickly in groups. We really enjoy playing the ‘pass the ball game’ to help us count in steps of. Did you enjoy the homework task this week? I loved reading your comments on the blog about what numbers you counted to… great work! We listened to and sang along with a new ‘counting in 2’s’ song this week. Have a listen and sing along at home too.
We finished off our maths topic of money this week. We completed a money assessment to show off how much we had learned over this 5 week topic. As well as completing this assessment we played 2 games to showcase the skills we have learned. One of these games was an ‘Orchard Toys’ board game called ‘Pop to the Shops’. Do you have this game at home? This is a fantastic game which requires children to recognise coins, count coins, pay for things with the exact amount and give change too. If you have this game at home I would love to see some photographs of you playing. You could post them in the comments section or bring them to school. As well as playing a board game we played a game on the ipads using an app called ‘Moca GPB’. Why don’t you download this app on a device at home and have a go. Let me know how you get on playing this game.
I’m sure you have heard all about our topic of ‘Transport’. All children have shown such enthusiasm with this topic and have loved learning about a range of different modes of transport from old to new. This week we watched a video of the first moon landing. Here is the video we watched:
After watching this video we wanted to make our own rockets. We had to work with a partner to create a design, develop that design into a model and think of a name for our rocket. We then took our rockets outside and launched them using our very own rocket launcher… we even remembered to do the countdown just like we watched in the video. Check out the school facebook page for some of our rocket launching videos.
Lots of the children have been interested in cars as part of our topic. We know that the roads around our school can be very busy with lots of cars… vans and lorries too. Therefore, it was important that we learned about road safety. We crossed a road outside of our school gates and remembered the important points when crossing… don’t stand too close to the kerb, look and listen for vehicles before you cross and when it is safe to cross the road remember to keep looking and listening for cars.
We had a look at the main road outside the school and spotted some ‘islands’ in the middle of the road. We know that these can help us cross one part of the road at a time. But do you know we don’t even need to use these islands? Some of us knew about the underpasses around Dedridge. These go underneath the roads which make getting to the other side of a road even safer. We also learned about ‘crossing patrol – lollipop man or lady’ and we learned how these people could help us when crossing a road. Sophie was playing a spelling game on the iPads and found this picture of a lollipop man and managed to spell the word ‘stop’. This game is called ‘spelling bug’ if you want to download this at home.
When we got back to the classroom we created posters with all of our knowledge about road safety and we even received a certificate to show that we know how to safely cross a road.
Our posters were so good that we decided we would like to share our learning with some other children in the school. We showed the nursery, P1D and even P4 our posters and gave them some tips and advice about road safety.
What a busy week. I look forward to seeing you all again on Monday for more exciting learning experiences.
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