The first week of November!! Children have had a great time outdoors in the cooler temperatures as Autumn sets in. The groups walked to the library on Tuesday and had the experience of storytelling from the librarian.
No welly Wednesday this week, but lots of outdoor opportunities were had in the garden. Thank you to all our parents who attended our first parent consultations of this session. It’s a great opportunity to get to chat about your child’s’ progression in nursery and share their experiences with us.
Emotions were discussed on Thursday, we are concentrating on 4 emotions; Happy, Sad, Fear and Anger. We will be concentrating on one a week. The first being happy. We would love it if you could take the time to talk at home about these emotions. How they feel, how they look and what would make them feel that way. Please share the learning with us in the nursery.
Have a fantastic weekend everyone !! from the Nursery Team xx
NEXT WEEK IN NURSERY
MONDAY – GROUP PHOTOS IN THE NURSERY AM and PM
TUESDAY –
WEDNESDAY – WELLY WEDNESDAY, PLEASE ENSURE YOUR CHILD IS DRESSED FOR THE WEATHER CONDITIONS.
THURSDAY – CHILDREN IN NEED, COME TO NURSERY IN YOUR PYJAMAS TO RAISE AWARENESS FOR A WORTHY CAUSE.
We are fast approaching the October break, but it hasn’t slowed the learning pace down!
This week we observed an abundance of fine motor development in Nursery. Children have opportunities to write using different media. Here we can see a child using a stick of chunky chalk to experiment with on a slate. Another child practices her cutting skills as she creates a beautiful border around her house she had drawn.
Mrs Beattie and Mrs Audsley introduced musical instruments on Tuesday. The children were developing listening skills and how to keep a beat to the music. All the children had a ball !!
It was our first Welly Wednesday of the session. The children loved running up and down the leaf covered hill and looked for signs of Autumn , we also had a look at the tree,s naming the parts of it with some help. They all listened to instructions and kept themselves safe on the walk there and back.
NEXT WEEK IN NURSERY
MONDAY- COME BACK AND COUNT
TUESDAY – COME BACK AND COUNT
WEDNESDAY- INDIVIDUAL PHOTOS
THURSDAY – COME BACK AND COUNT
FRIDAY – PEEPS 3
ALL FINISH FOR THE OCTOBER BREAK AND ALL RESUME MONDAY 21/10/19
This week in nursery we have met our buddies, gone on a bug hunt and looked for signs of Spring. Thursday was windy ! The weather is certainly colder! The children have been using our outdoor literacy to decide what the weather is like in the garden.
Amelie was so excited to meet her buddy on Monday and show her around the nursery.
Sophie celebrated her birthday on Monday, Mrs Mushet was happy!!
On Tuesday we visited the library and brought back a book about a scared spider.
This gave us an idea to look for bugs on our welly walk this week.
We found spiders, slugs and a centipede. There were signs of Spring in woods, we saw flowers beginning to grow and will check next week to see if they have flowered.
The afternoon children decided to make signs on the path “so we know which way to come back” They used chalk to draw signs on the path and then discovered that they could make patterns in the mud with their wellies too.
We celebrated Mahnoor’s birthday on Thursday in the nursery.
and Friday?? fun fun fun and PEEPs to end off the week xx
Have a lovely weekend everybody. Snow is forecast so wrap up warm !!
From the nursery team xx
NEXT WEEK
MONDAY – RED GROUP TOP1 FOR TRANSITION.
TUESDAY- BLUE GROUP TO P1 FOR TRANSISTION
WEDNESDAY- WELLY WEDNESDAY, please come dressed in waterproof clothing
As part of our Nursery-P1 transition programme, we begin to build children’s awareness of some initial sounds. A ‘sound’ is how we describe learning letters of the alphabet, with a focus on how the sound is made, as opposed to the capital letter name. Over the coming weeks, we will have a fortnightly ‘sound’ focus to expose children to the building blocks of reading and literacy development.
This video, until around 1m 30s, explains ‘phonics’ and gives an insight into how children can be taught to read;
Children show awareness of and interest in sounds and letters from various ages, some children keen to find letters in their name, some begin to form letters when drawing. All children make sounds when they speak, some finding it easier than others. When we speak about ‘sounds’ we are talking about the sound the letter makes; the letter ‘M’ makes the ‘mmmmmmm’ sound, but is called ‘EM’. Some children can name capital letter names, but are unaware of the ‘sound’ a letter makes; we focus on sounds to aid children in the beginning stages of reading.
The below video illustrates the importance of not adding an ‘uh’ to the end of the sounds; although we don’t use this resource to teach phonics, it is interesting to hear how the pure sounds are made…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYx1CyDMZSc
The purpose of our focus on initial sounds in nursery is not to ‘teach’ children about them ,but to offer them exposure to this exciting learning context and allow them to begin to hear and understand the language of literacy learning. Over the coming weeks we will look at the following sounds;
18/04/18 M
02/05/18 C
16/05/18 P
30/05/18 S
The reason we choose these sounds to begin with is that each sound is made with a different part of the mouth. When you make the ‘sound’ you will feel that you use different parts of your mouth, we will begin to show the children that these sounds are made in different ways. Making the sound and hearing the sound in nursery will help to focus children on the formal learning of initial sounds when they enter P1 in August, where these sounds will be recapped in various active learning environments.
How can you support your child at home?
Answer questions they have.. ask a member of the nursery team if you are unsure about anything, we are happy to support in any way we can.
Play games with them.. I Spy is a great one for initial sounds, or even asking the question ‘Can you find something that starts with mmmmmmm?’
Draw, read, talk – expose your child to sounds in the environment, do they know what letters are in their name? Do they know a ‘s’ looks like a snake? Can they make the sounds with the right part of their mouth?
Children all learn at different paces and in different ways, look at where your child is in their acknowledgement and engagement with initial sounds and join them there 🙂
Our chosen lead learners this week were James and Isla who did a great job of capturing some of the highlights of the week for us to add to our blog and Talking Books.
Literacy
In spelling we worked as a whole class to discuss spelling strategies and words that are commonly misspelled. Each team had to think of as many strategies as they could and then share them with the class. We then focused on 3 of these: make a song, make a mnemonic and does it look right.
We enjoyed this catchy tune to help us with there, their and they’re.
Can you make a mnemonic for the word ‘people’, post your efforts on our blog post for an extra dojo point?
In literacy we also learned about the work of author’s and how many stages it can take before having a finished piece of writing. We had a go at this and tried to up-level our diary entries from last week by revising, editing and redrafting. This led us nicely into an online meeting with Pamela Butchart, author of many children’s books. We logged onto BBCLive to hear about her work and joined in with the session by making sound effects, answering questions, having a go at illustrating and tweeting, we were delighted when we were mentioned on the BBCLive event and Pamela even tweeted us privately after the event!
Inspirational Maths Week
Wow, where do we begin…This week was all about mathematical mindsets and being creative in maths. We started the week by working in teams to create 2D and 3D shapes with a 7 foot piece of rope in the outdoor space. Lots of laughter, confusion, creativity, frustration and success was had by all! We then examined our own mathematical mindsets and carried out a class questionnaire which led for some interesting discussions. We made some mathematical mindset keys for our tables and maths working wall.
We studied the work of a famous artist/sculptor, Sol Lewitt, and how his work connected to mathematics. The best part was then working in teams to create our very own sculptures using marshmallows and cocktails sticks. Mrs Howley had us learning more about symmetry and did some fun activities connected to this.
Thursday was one of the favourite lessons as we, the pupils, led the lesson by sharing the maths activities we had worked on for homework last week, everyone had made a great effort with these.
Throughout the week we also took part in Numbertalks , the Sumdog contest and Mathanagrams. It was great to see some of the parents getting involved to through dojo. Congratulations to Oskar, Shiv, Mia Stewart and Max for completing the 1000 question Sumdog competition and to Mrs Nicol for winning the parents mathanagram quiz on dojo. A big thank you to the parents who also came along to Ninian’s Natter, it was lovely to see you taking part in some of these activities.
RE
On Tuesday the P7 children accompanied their P1 buddies to mass at St Philip’s. It was a lovely morning and well done to the P7’s for taking their roles so seriously and supporting the younger children.We celebrated St Ninian this week and participated in a beautiful mass on Friday morning. Mrs Purdie awarded us some extra playtime to celebrate the day. The Parent Council also organised a fantastic Scottish afternoon to continue the celebrations. Mrs Roy’s quiz team, the numpties, came 2nd! Everyone got into the spirit and had a fun afternoon!
Have a lovely long weekend, see you all on Wednesday.
In literacy we wrote a diary entry as if we were the main character in the story. We focused on chapter 3 this week, at the end there was a bit of a cliffhanger as Michael went overboard. We can’t wait until next week to find out what happens next… Some of us were brave enough to read our diary starters to the class to help motivate and inspire others. We even put a tweet on Twitter, Chi-Chi is famous!! Remember to follow our class @mrsroy16 as we regularly Tweet throughout the week. We also worked in teams to do some comprehension work, that was good fun!
We have been playing maths games to help us develop our understanding of place and value, eg. maths pacman, roll the dice, roll and stick game and close to the target. Some of us also did a maths population task using the http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ website. It was really interesting as it was a live website and people were being born every second! Cole and Max also made a place value poster for the maths working wall.
Don’t forget the Sumdog Maths Contest is now live until next Thursday, points means prizes!
In PE we were doing some more rugby skills. We had the ‘ Scoop Pass’ competition, James, Nicholas, Leon and Shiv were the scooping champions this week. This game involved concentration, speed and co-odrination. We progressed onto some rugby skills focussing on the ‘back pass’, this took a few attempts to master, Leon was hilarious at this activity as he kept getting confused about when to run and when to pass.
Chi-Chi and Krzysztof were our first Lead Learners and did a great job taking responsibility for the Talking Books this week – well done guys!
Our classroom is taking shape now and there is some fabby work on display for you to see when you next visit us. Remember Ninian’s Natter is on Thursday 14th September 6-7pm if you want to drop in for a blether and some Inspirational Maths activities.
Some pupil highlights:
Cole enjoyed the maths work this week.
Chi-Chi enjoyed using the population site.
Rachel W enjoyed doing the homework challenge.
Remember next week is Inspirational Maths week so come prepared as we may be taking the learning outdoors at times. We are hoping to also start using AAL – Anytime, Anywhere Learning for those who have returned their contracts. Please load the Class Dojo and Sumdog apps onto your device if possible, both are free apps.
James gave us the title of our blog this week as we discussed how quickly the week had gone.
It all started on Monday where we did some focused vocabulary work linked to our class novel, everyone agreed that it was a pretty tricky task as we had to guess what the word meant by using the text surrounding it then look up it’s actual definition in the dictionary. Do you know what these words mean – reproached and suppurating? Place value is our focus in numeracy this week and we did some paired, independent and group tasks on Monday morning using resources like dominoes and flashcards to play different games to develop our confidence in reading different numbers. The afternoon saw us being introduced to Emotion Works, a whole school HWB resource. Again we linked this to our novel and used the emotion cogs to unpick each of the characters feelings in chapter 1 whilst working in teams.
On Tuesday we were very excited to start our rugby block with Mr McCurdy and everyone came well prepared for the outdoors! We had our first numbertalks session and showed Mrs Roy our explanation skills and mathematical thinking. In our novel study we read chapter 2 and were introduced to our Blooms Superheroes which will help us develop our reading comprehension skills this year. We all chose which questions we would like to tackle and tried to match these up to the superheroes. The afternoon continued with a novel theme and we started some ‘Hokusai’ inspired pictures, we used pastels to try and recreate the famous ‘Great Waves’ painting. Mrs Roy was in awe of our artistic skills!
Writing was a focus on Thursday morning and we used a previous talk lesson linked to our novel to write a balanced argument with the title: Sailing around the world. Everyone gave it their best shot and tried to use persuasive language. In numeracy we began to split numbers and partition them, as the numbers got bigger this became more difficult. We will continue to focus on this next week.
Friday ended the week nicely as we finished our earlier art work and got to do our first Big Maths Beat that challenge. We also went outside with Mrs Roy for a fun rugby session where we learned how to play banana tig with a rugby ball and practised our passing in small teams. The sun stayed out and we didn’t get wet, so that was a bonus.
This week we also welcomed Mr Turner to our class, a 3rd year student training to be a teacher, he will continue to work alongside Mrs Roy each week to support us in our learning.
And finally, the UN Ambassador’s came round all the classes this morning to announce that we had successfully achieved the Level 2 Award for RRS. We were all really pleased especially as some of the people in our class were in that committee last year. Well done everyone!!
Pupil voice:
Louise – We played rugby and it was lots of fun.
Isla – We did Big Maths on Friday.
Amera – Rugby was fun and wet!
Isabel – Our Kensuke’s Kingdom collage is now up on display and looks good.
Rachel H – We all dressed down today to raise money for charity.
Well what a great start to the year it has been, everyone has been really enthusiastic and raring to get started!
The week began with some creativity and we worked in small teams to create a class song/rap and wordle. We used the mindmaps we had made on our moving up day in June to help us. It was lovely to see the confidence in many as they stood up in front of a new class to perform. Follow us on Twitter @mrsroy16 to see some of the videos we took.
Our Wordle is now at the heart of our new class charter which has taken the theme of ‘Animals’ as voted by the class. Everyone came up with suggestions as to the content of our charter and this is now on display for all to see.
We have enjoyed taking part in the ‘Door Challenge’ this week and made an emoji themed door display. We discussed what emoji represented each of our personalities and then made mini emojis for display. They look great!
We started our class novel ‘Kensuke’s Kingdom’ by Michael Murpurgo. We have listened to an audio of chapter 1 whilst following the text in our shared books. There has been lots of scope for discussion and one of the first debates we had was about sailing around the world, are you for or against? We came up with our arguments and then presented these to another group using persuasive and emotive language. Everyone thought it was great that they got to argue with one another!! We have also started creating a class collage which is coming along nicely.
Pupil Voice:
Shiv: We did face portraits with Mrs Howley.
Nicola: We did our own animals for our class charter.
Mia Sok.: This was a fun week.
Rachel W: It was a good week.
Isla: At PE with Mrs Roy we went out and played rounders.
Chi-Chi: We made emojis that represent us and put it on our door display.
Amera: I liked PE because we played rounders.
James: I enjoyed the self-portrait task because I usually don’t do that.
Nicholas: I liked drawing the animals.
Leon: This week was fun.
Isabel: An amazing start to the school year.
Rachel Mc: This week was amazing. We were making a boat and sea for display on our class novel.
Louise: We did today’s number of the day and we did it on whiteboards.
Mia St: We got to stick tissue paper to a wave outline for our display.
Have a great weekend everyone, see you next week!!
It has been another fantastic, busy week in Primary 2/3.
The children would like to share some of their highlights:
Angel and James – I liked looking at our Local Area. We thought about how land is used in our local area and made maps. We used Google Maps to help us.
Alishba and Aaron – I liked Big Writing because we wrote about how milk comes from cows. We made posters in groups too.
Andrew and Jakub – I liked PE because we played a game with the parachute. It was really fun! We played another game called Sharks and Lifeguards too. When you’re a shark you have to pull someone under the parachute and they become a shark. Then the lifeguard has to save you.
Harry and Matthew – I liked playing dodgeball in PE.
Zuzanna – I liked creating a character in literacy. I named my character Teresa.
Maeve – I liked making a character description. I called mine Yana.
Brooke – I liked the assembly when we found out the results of the elections for house captains.
Chloe – I liked the P1R assembly because it had Spanish songs.
Levente, Annayah and Pawel – I liked learning about Global Goal #6. We learnt about a school in Kenya where they didn’t have clean water and we listened to a song about clean water too.
Oma and Calvin – I liked doing Sumdog because I got more coins and a pet and I completed in the West Lothian contest.
Carly – I liked Spanish because we were learning high numbers up to 30!!
What a great week we’ve had in P1R this week, where shall we begin…
In literacy we have now learned all our P1 Sounds so have been focusing on revising the ones we found tricky, eg. Digraphs and oa/oi. Some of us even learned about alternative spellings of the vowel sound ai/ay. We played games in pairs, used letter join on the iPads, did some cut and stick word tasks, did a team task in our Talking Book and practised spelling in our journals. Lucy and Isla wanted to share this funny video with everyone:
In reading we are all progressing well and are quickly getting through different books. We enjoy our paired reading on a Tuesday with P7 and Mrs Docherty is now joining us for reading too which has been lovely!
Maths has been good fun as we continued to learn about time using little clocks, matching digital to analogue times, Stop the Clock (Dexter was our champion) on the smartboard and time bingo. We are all reminding Mrs Roy about lunchtime-12 o’clock and hometime-3 o’clock! You can download the Stop the Clock app onto your tablet or iPads at home if you want to try and beat your fastest time!
The Gruffalo continues to be our topic and we worked with the nursery to share our favourite characters, we all drew a picture and labelled it for our display while listening to the Gruffalo song. During Art we got out the paints and then created paintings of our favourite characters for our Art Gallery. We also finished our Gruffalo collage, we can’t wait to share it with you at Parent’s Night.
In writing we wrote a recount of our trip to the woods,congratulations to James and Klaudia who were our star writers.
As the sun was shining we took some learning outdoors for PE and Structured Play. We are all enjoying Athletics and are preparing well for Sports Day.
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