Literacy Across Learning – Page 2 – St Ninian's Primary School

A short week in P1R

Time continued to be the focus in mathematics and we welcomed some of the AM nursery children into our lessons. We learned about o’clock and the important job the hands on the clock do. We discussed why do we need to learn about time and sang a time song. In carousels we made clocks, played bingo taking turns to be the bingo caller, worked in pairs to match times and lots more.

During topic time we invited the nursery PM gps over to continue our work on The Gruffalo. We listened to the Gruffalo song as a warm up then discussed the characters from the story. We each made a Gruffalo story wheel which we will use later to retell the story in our own words.

On Friday we attended our committee groups,here are some of the highlights:
I learned all about cooking equipment-Bernice
I learned about Marie Curie, we are planning a tea party for charity-Paul M
I was outside and had to think of how we could make our playground more fun-Isla
We made posters about Fairtrade-Ephraim and Dawid
I was talking about my favourite thing this year – Lucy
I went on a litter pick-Amber
I listened to the Rainbow story and worked with Paige- James

Time flies in P1…

As the title suggests we have started learning about time and this week the focus was on days of the week, months and daily routines. We listened to some catchy songs to engage us in our learning before doing some tasks. We did a cut and stick sequencing task, worked with a partner and in groups to discuss daily routines, made a class birthday chart and also tried to use simple timetables. Mrs Purdie popped in while we were making a birthday chart and we asked her when her birthday was, can you remember which month it was? Next week we will progress onto learning about analogue and digital clocks and how to tell o’clock times.

We planned out our new topic, The Gruffalo. We read the story and then came up with lots of ideas about activities we could do in class. We added this to our visible plan and our talking book. The nursery are working alongside us on this and we will have opportunities to share our learning as the topic progresses. One of the first suggestions was to create a collage for our classroom so we got to work in teams using different materials, felt, twigs, paint,crepe paper and feathers. It’s starting to look good on the wall and we add to it as we learn more. In reading we did a picture this activity when from memory we had to draw a detailed picture of the Gruffalo,we did really well with this. Then in writing we wrote a description of the Gruffalo using the drawings we had made. We added some of these to our class display.

Our transition work with the nursery continued and we invited the AM and PM groups over so we could share the Talking Transition Book with them. We told them all about school and answered some of their questions. Next week they will join us for a literacy and mathematics lesson.

Remember we are on holiday on Monday and PE kit (indoor and outdoor) needed for Tuesday.

Outdoor learning

This week we tried to take a lot of our learning outdoors and everyone had great fun.

In literacy we did some spelling work outside using the large chalks then played outdoor Frys word bingo. It got a bit messy but we all agreed that it was a fun way to practise our Frys words. Well done to Paul M for being our bingo winner!

In maths we were learning about positional language and directions. We played lots of fun games to help us, eg. Stand beside the door, sit on top of the table (don’t tell Mrs Purdie we were on top of the tables), sit under the table, stand beside the gate, etc. We also used hoops outside and had to follow more instructions, eg. Jump in the hoop, stand behind the hoop. Then Sahara had a great idea to help us remember left and right, she taught us all how to dab then we had to sing,” dab to the left, dab to the right”. We also used this song:

For our science learning we focused on seasons and went on a spring scavenger hunt. We had to use our senses to see,touch, hear and smell things. We all set to work and recorded our findings on our clipboards.

We then shared this learning with the PM nursery when we all joined together to go for a walk to the Dedridge pond and woods. It was a lovely afternoon and we were super excited to see lots of squirrels, ducks and 2 swans, we think the mummy swan was sitting on her nest guarding some eggs, we will go back in a few weeks to check how she is getting on. We also spotted some bat boxes and different types of flowers and trees.

To finish the week off we decided to stop off at the park for some fun and games. It was lovely to see everyone playing nicely together, seeing lots of smiles and hearing lots of laughter!

Signs of spring

This week we have been continuing to look for signs of Spring or new life during our RE lessons. Many children have spotted some new flowers growing near our school or in their gardens. We decided to do some planting of our own in the classroom. We made lots of links in our learning when doing this:

RE – new life, Lent, preparing

Science – growing seeds, what will we need, what are the best conditions for growing things, seasons, weather

Literacy – sequencing, writing instructions

Numeracy – counting seeds, measuring soil

In phonics we learned about ‘ng’ and ‘wh’, we all agreed that they were quite tricky. Ephraim has been great at spotting ‘ng’ throughout the week in reading books or on the smartboard – well done Ephraim. We tried a new activity at our choice station this week – the ‘wh word hunt’ – we had to use magnifying glasses to spot the tiny wh words hiding in a colourful picture, it was good fun. We have also been using magnetic letters, playdough and written tasks to help us learn these new sounds. Another station was the peer assessment station, one of us read the words and the other person had to spell the words on the whiteboards, we loved taking it in turns to be the teacher! Next week we are moving onto the rude clown sound -Th.

In numeracy we worked on number names to 10 as this was something we chose as a next step after learning about money. We played games to help us do this, eg. Matching names to numbers, spelling number names games on the spelling bug app, number name wordsearches. We are all more confident now in reading number names and are ready to move onto something new next week. Remember to log onto Sumdog to take part in the West Lothian Contest this week. We will also make time at school next week during Smartstart and numeracy to do it too.

In IDL we learned about mapping and made our very own treasure maps for our pirate adventures. We discussed what you would find on a map: symbols, a key, a compass, a route. This will help us during Outdoor Learning Week where we will have a go at following some maps outside.

Pupil voice:

Dexter- I liked playing the sky phonics app on the iPads.

Klaudia-In PE we were playing hockey.

James-I enjoyed learning about Lent.

Amber- I liked learning about subtraction.

Isla- We made a treasure map.

Brooke- I liked our RE work this week.

Ephraim- I liked learning about number names.

Mark- We were planting seeds.

Ship ahoy in P1R

IDL has been really interesting this week as another message in a bottle arrived, Ephraim did a great job of finding it and sharing it with the class. Our task this week was to think about pirate ships and make our very own ship to allow us to join in with Captain Pete Pigeon’s adventures. First, we looked at examples of pirate ships, some big, some small, some fast and some colourful. We also learned about the different features of a ship, ask us to name some of them for you. This led to us building a ship in our classroom for us to play in, we’re almost finished it! In order to join the adventures we also linked our learning to literacy and completed some application forms, we had to choose what job we would like – helmsman, cook, quartermaster, captain, etc. No-one wanted to be the surgeon as we learned that they had the horrible job of cutting pirate’s legs or arms off!!

We love Fridays as we get to share our pirate homework tasks, some examples this week were: Dawid made a treasure chest, Isla made a treasure map, Lucy made a pirate ship, James made a pirate passport and Abigail brought in pirate cakes for the whole class (they looked and tasted great.)

Wednesday was a special day as we celebrated ‘Burns Day’. We had a traditional Burns Supper which began with an ode to an haggis, it was tricky to understand some of the words as they were in Scots language. This is something we would like to look at again and learn some traditional Scots words. Everyone wore a piece of tartan and then we raised a glass(of irn-bru) to toast the haggis. It was great to see everyone having a wee taste of some of the Scottish food – haggis, neeps, tatties, oatcakes and shortbread. Check your child’s online journal for a wee video!

Subtraction continues to be our focus in numeracy and this week we have been learning about words that mean the same as subtraction, ask us to tell you all about it. Our favourite activity was subtraction smash, all you need is 10 balls of play dough and a dice to play. Try it at home, it’s great fun and can get a bit messy! We also used our hopscotch mat to practise jumping back as that’s what we need to do when we subtract – Start at the biggest number and then jump back. Some of us are now realising that using cubes is also a good way of doing subtraction sums, it makes the sums easier to work out.

In phonics we have been working on ai and oa, these are sounds from our Vowel House story. We have sorted pictures, played smartboard spelling games, circled the ai words and made snails for our phonics display. Next week is a revision week so there will be no new sounds in the red jotter. Our reading is improving every week, we are all trying hard to sound out words and use our knowledge of Fry’s words, it’s really important to practise these as much as you can. Check your homework folders on Monday to see if you have any new ones to learn.

We finished the week by going to the P4/5 assembly, they taught us more about World Religions which linked nicely to what we had been doing in class last week for World Religion Day-thank you P4/5. We also completed a task to put in the time capsule we are making to celebrate our 40th Anniversary which is next week, we are all looking forward to the celebrations!

Ahoy there mateys!

What a busy week we’ve had in P1R, we have lots to tell you about.

The focus in phonics this week was our new sounds ‘l’ and ‘r’. We can’t believe how many sounds we have learned so far, our ‘big mouth’ on the wall is running out of space! In carousels we used letter join to practise our letter formation, we all agreed that handwriting is a skill for life and something we should keep practising at school and home. Mrs Scott took time today to organise a learning families event to show families how to use it at home. We also played phonics games on the education city website which is one of our favourite sites and used the letter cubes for blending activities.

Subtraction continued to be the focus in numeracy and we are quickly learning the different mathematical language associated with this, our pirate subtraction song, ‘when you subtract with a pirate’ has helped with this. Carousels were great fun as most of the activities were practical play based activities – ten pin bowling(using plastic cups and a sponge ball), takeaway tower (all you need is 10 pieces of Lego in a tower and a dice), subtraction screening( counters and coloured paper) and interactive smart board games (rabbit take away).

In PE we are really enjoying our gymnastics block where we are exploring how we use our bodies and the space around us. We used a ‘space soundtrack’ in our lessons, eg. Space shapes/jumps, astronauts game, mediation to music. Using the mats and equipment is allowing us to practise turn taking, sharing and teamwork.

IDL has been ‘awesome’ as we continue to learn about the life of pirates who lived over 300 years ago. Ask us what we have learned about Anne Bonny and Blackbeard. We linked our learning using what we had learned to make WANTED posters for our displays, they look great! We also worked in small teams to make and build a pirate ship for our display, we are really proud of our efforts and teamwork. To make us feel like pirates we all made pirate hats, even Mrs Roy, or Ruby Roy as she likes to be known in pirate land! Our motto for structured play this term is ‘Work like a captain, play like a pirate’. We have set up different areas in our classroom: treasure chest maths area, pirate writing table, pirate role play, pirate story corner, pirate puppets and the pirate ship station. It’s been lovely to see each other’s IDL homework tasks, we have been taking photos for our pirates display.

We celebrated World Religion Day on Wednesday and enjoyed learning about Christianity and Islam. We used a smartboard activity to help us learn about the different signs and symbols associated with the religions, we even tweeted about our learning.

The week ended with Committees:

Paul M- we learned about UNICEF’s day for loose change. Every class has to collect loose change in their wee box.

Abigail-we made posters about the dangers of litter.

Ephraim-we learned about Fairtrade food.

Lucy- we thought about how we could show love to others.

James-we learned about Chinese New Year.

Phew, that’s all for this week, remember to try out some of the activities at home if you have a spare minute or two!

P1M Weekly News

Our weekly highlights:

Literacy: we have been building sounds together to make words. We listen to a word, spell it using bricks, copy it down and then draw a picture to show the meaning of the word. Our reading skills are coming on a treat too. We are all working really hard with our tricky words as well. This week we have been working on alternative endings in a story. We listened to a story called ‘Melting Snow’ (from Oxford owl) but we decided we didn’t like the way the story ended so we made up our own endings. Instead of the snowman in the story melting, our snowman went on an adventure. Ask your child what adventure their snowman went on?

Numeracy: This week we have been working on number stories of 6, 7 and 8. We have been finding out how we can make these numbers in different ways. e.g. 5+2=7 and 6+2=8. We are fantastic at doubles now and we can tell you our doubles as quick as a click. This is a great song to help us practise.

Mathematics: Our topics in maths at the moment is measurement, shape and pattern. We have been working on measure, shape and pattern through our ‘play: plan, do review’ sessions. We will be furthering our knowledge on shape more next week.

We are really enjoying practising for our nativity and we can’t wait to show this to you. Please remember to bring in your child’s clothes for the nativity by Monday. We need this for our dress rehersal.

We have been so busy this week that we don’t have much photos! Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan

P1M Weekly News

We have been lending a helping hand this week. Can you remember one of the letters we received from Santa asking us to become honorary elves and help him prepare for Christmas in his workshop. So… meet the P1M elves…

We have been helping Santa through our Play: Plan, Do, Review sessions. Read on to find out about how we have been helping Santa.

Just Play?

Red: (Maths: Measurement and Pattern) Santa has needed us to help him wrap up presents. We have to estimate how much wrapping paper we need to wrap up presents, we have been very good at measuring out the correct amount of paper. Santa doesn’t have much wrapping paper though and he has needed us to design some wrapping paper. He likes his wrapping paper to have a pattern though so we must make sure we create a pattern. We also must remember to write a label on the present after we have wrapped it.

Blue: (Literacy: Writing) We MUST write our letters to Santa! How will Santa know what presents we want if we don’t write him a letter? We know how to format a letter correctly (where the address goes). After we have wrote our letter we need to put it in an envelope. We have also been learning about stamps, if we want our letter to get to Santa really quickly we know to look out for a number 1 on a stamp. It is also very important to write Santa’s name and address on the envelope before we post it in the special Santa’s postbox.

Yellow: (Literacy: Writing) Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a Christmas card! At this station we design, create and write our Christmas cards. We each have a special folder just outside our classroom, if we receive a card, the sender posts the card in our special folder. This is quite tricky as we have to try really hard to read our peers names. We love checking our folders at the end of the day to see if we have been given a card.

Green: (Maths: Patterns) Santa has been so busy that he hasn’t had time to decorate his workshop. He has asked us to make decorations for him – Christmas cracker and baubles for his tree. But remember, Santa loves patterns! We need to make sure our designs follow a pattern. We have been using a range of different materials at this station – foam shapes, pom-poms, stickers, glue, crayon, glitter – it has been a bit messy! I’m sure Santa will love his decorations!

Purple: (Literacy: Listening and Talking; Imaginative Story Telling) We have been pretending to be Santa and his friends. At this station we can make a Christmas themed mask and act out a story with our peers. It is important that we take turns and allow each other to have a turn at talking during story telling. Miss Meechan has been enjoying listening to the different stories we have created.

Orange: (Maths: Data Handling) Santa needs to know all about toys that people want this Christmas. We need to separate the toys into categories for him. We look through toy catalogues and pick out some toys and stick them into the correct category. Kerr was sorting out girls toys and boys toys. Adam and Sophie were sorting out big toys and small toys. We hope this helps Santa get ready for Christmas.

In the Christmas spirit now? This week we have started rehearsing for our nativity show! We have all been working so hard during our performances. We can’t wait to practise on the stage next week! Well done boys and girls, I have been very proud of how hard you have been working rehearsing your songs and lines.

Even with all of this going on we have still squeezed in lots of other learning tasks! We are working extra hard with our addition. This week we have been working on ordering an addition number sentence. We know that the biggest number in an addition sentence always goes at the end (after the equals sign) because when you add two numbers together the total is always more. We played this game on the smart board to help us understand this concept more:

http://www.oswego.org/ocsd-web/games/SumSense/sumadd.html

We have been working on our imaginative writing this week. Our stimulus for our writing lesson this week was this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEpiCEPkX7o

We then had to think about if we were that little girl, where we would like a bubble to take us. Stefan wanted his bubble to take him to see the Mona Lisa! Jakub wanted his bubble to take him to the dessert. Kyle wanted his bubble to take him to the sky. Ask your child where they wanted their bubble to take them?

We enjoy having learning conversations with our teacher. During this time we look at our dreams, check if we have achieved these dreams and set a new one if we need to. We also talk to Miss Meechan about what we enjoy at school and we can tell her if there is anything that is concerning us. One of our focuses for this month has been ‘achieving’. We have been self-assessing how we feel about our achievements, we keep this sheet in our special yellow folder in our classroom. Here are some of the dreams we have set this week:

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan and P1M

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

Here are our highlights of this week in P1M:

We are loving our Play: Plan, Do, Review sessions – this week was our last sessions with a literacy focus. The focus for our play for the next two weeks will be numeracy. We shall update you next week with the different tasks. One of the play sessions this week, Miss Meechan joined in with the puppet theatre group. During this, Stefan and Kerr acted out the vowel house story using puppets.We then showed off our actions for sounds we know. Daniel showed us the ‘c’ and ‘o’ sound actions and Kerr showed us the ‘ee’ sound action. This week, Kerr also built a lego vowel house – great job!

Our sounds for the next week have been ‘f’ and ‘b’. Check out the ‘f’ and ‘b’ jolly phonics songs on youtube – we really like the ‘b’ song. We found that ‘b’ is quite a tricky sound as it very similar to the ‘p’ sound we already know but we all worked really hard and can now easily tell the difference – ‘p’ is a quiet sound and ‘b’ is a loud sound. Below are some pictures of us learning more about the ‘f’ sound. Jarred made the word ‘fan’ with the spelling stones; Rutendo is finding words beginning with ‘f’ on the smart board; Stefan is practising the correct formation for the letter ‘f’ and Romera and Poppy are playing ‘f’ sound bingo.

This week has been our first week using reading books in class. We have loved getting our books and reading them aloud in class. We now have a reading buddy in primary 6 and every Wednesday morning one of the P6 children will join us to read together. We will be reading our reading books, the books we have chosen from the library as well as practising our tricky words. Ask your children who their reading buddy is.

We have started our ‘fitness’ block of learning in PE. We are learning about developing our fitness levels and participating in a range of different activities to help with this. What was your favourite activity this week?

Our writing skills are getting better and better. This week we were shown a picture of a haunted house. We thought that it was an old empty house but we soon spotted that there was a light on in a window in the house. We wondered who might be living in this house? We have some fantastic ideas! Who did you think lives in the house? When we were writing our story Miss Meechan asked us to try to use finger spaces between all of our words. We were given finger spacer helpers to remind us to use spaces between words. Below is a picture of Partryk using a finger spacer; Jarred is showing us his picture of a haunted house he coloured in and he wrote on it ‘beware’ – fantastic! Kerr is also showing off his story writing. His story says: “2 vampires live in the haunted house.”

Did you hear about our special visitor this week? On Thursday Rudolph appeared just outside our classroom! He was holding an envelope and we guessed that it must be a letter for us inside. We thought that the letter might be from Santa – and it was!! The letter asked us to be honorary elves! WOW! Santa is going to need lots of help this year and he needs us to help him. Our first task was to think about ideas for our new topic ‘Santa’s Workshop’ – what can we do to help Santa? Have a look at our ideas?

Our last highlight of this week was our ‘health and wellbeing’ focus. We are constantly working on turn taking, sharing and playing fairly. On Thursday, Miss Meechan set up lots of games in the hall for us to participate in. All of the games involved us sharing and taking turns. We were all really good at this and Miss Meechan heard some beautiful manners from the children when they were playing!

What a busy week! I wonder what job Santa will ask us to do next week…