Literacy Across Learning – Page 3 – St Ninian's Primary School

P1M Weekly News

We all came back from our October break refreshed and eager to learn more! It was a fantastic start back and all children have continued to show their love for learning this week.

This week we met Mr Slater who is going to be working with us for 5 weeks. We have really enjoyed showing Mr Slater our classroom and learning and we look forward to working with him over the next few weeks.

We are continuing our addition work in numeracy and a mysterious machine had appeared in our class this week – an addition machine! This machine helps us with our addition work. We enjoyed using it so much in our numeracy lessons that there was a big queue to play with it at golden time! Kayla, Esmee and Rutendo were using the machine at golden time and knew that 100 add 1 would make one hundred and one… great job girls! We are really enjoying learning big numbers and we love the big numbers song on youtube – have you listened to this at home? Kerr was even able to write the number 100 on the board this week too! WOW!

We learned the ‘e’ and ‘o’ sounds this week. These sounds (along with all other vowel sounds) live in a special vowel house. Ask your child to tell you about the vowel house story? It is quite a long story but can you remember 3 parts of the story? Next week our sounds are going to be ‘f’ and ‘b’ – can you think of any words that begin with the sounds ‘f’ or ‘b’. All new sounds will be added to the sounds jotter on Monday for homework.

We started a new initiative this week called ‘Play: Plan, Do, Review’. We love playing in P1 and it is not ‘Just Play’. One of our favourite ways to learn is through play. We have been focusing on literacy through play for 6 sessions. We have 6 stations to explore during these stations:

Puppet theatre – children use their talking and listening skills through play. They are also required to share and take turns. When some make up and showcase their own story using the puppets others are required to listen to the story.
Story corner – children choose a soft toy and a story book. They are then asked to read their story to a soft boy. Miss Meechan enjoys joining in with the play at this station and reading a story to us too. We also enjoy finding words and sounds that we know in the books.
The office – this station encourages children to use their phonics knowledge and write out notes for each other, taking phonecalls and in general writing for enjoyment. Whilst at this station this week, Jarred drew his own representation of the vowel house – Miss Meechan was very impressed with this!
iPads – we are constantly developing our technology skills and we have been playing literacy games on the ipads. Our favourite one is the ABC app. Have you played this at home?
Story telling – a favourite so far has been the blue table. At the blue table there are lots of character toys for us to play with. Some characters which we can recognise – fireman sam, iggle piggle – and others which we make up characters for. This week, Adam created a story “iggle piggle was driving the giraffe through the jungle and a bad guy chased him but fell off the giraffe”. Adam also drew a picture of this in his play diary.
Letter formation – at the yellow table this week there has been a range of materials to use to practise our letter formation – paint bags, chunky pens, sand tray, cubes, play-doh. We love using the paint bags to write our names and letter shapes.

Below are some picture of our ‘Play: Plan, Do, Review’ highlights:

This week was STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) week. We took part in a range of different activities to begin to develop our knowledge of STEM. We all participated in 3 activities. Firstly, we were looked water and absorption. In pairs we were exploring what would happen when we put a sponge into water. We used lots of different scientific language during this group: “soaking, floating, sinking, changing” – it was very wet but very fun play! Secondly, we watched the three little pigs story. We were then given pipecleaners, lollipop sticks, lego bricks and animal figures and we acted out this story – what house was the strongest? What house was the weakest? And finally, we completed a session which looked at forces. We were racing toy cars down a ramp and we predicted how far the car would travel by looking at the number line. We found out that if the ramp for the car was higher or steeper the car would got faster and further. We have loved STEM week this year!

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan

P1M Weekly News

What a fantastic first term we have all had in P1M. We have all settled in to school life so well and everyone has such fantastic attitudes towards learning. Well done P1M!

Our numeracy focuses for this week have been counting and recognising numbers and addition. We are working really hard in these areas and our mental addition is improving every day. One of our activities this week was quite tricky but so much fun. Miss Meechan showed us some counters and then covered them up with a piece of paper. She then showed us some counters which she added underneath the paper and we had to say how many counters were under the paper now. This is something that you could try at home too. Here are a few games that we have played this week for you to try at home too:

http://www.iboard.co.uk/iwb/Adding-Two-Dice-716

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/learning-to-count/ladybird-spots

Can you spot Trex doing his addition work?! Trex even earned some dojo points this week too!

We have been working so hard on our writing these past few weeks. We are all trying so hard with our spelling and we are listening carefully for all of the sounds that we know to help us spell correctly. This week we even used some of our tricky words in our writing – great work everyone! For our writing lesson this week we were asked to recall and write about our trip to the park. Miss Meechan gave us some photographs of us playing at the park. We showed our partner our photographs and used our talking and listening skills to discuss these with our peers. Here are some examples of our writing this week:

Jarred: “At the park I was on the slide.”

Esmee: “At the park I was swinging.”

Kaitlyn: “At the park I was climbing.”

Sophie: “At the park I was playing in the tunnel.”

This week we really enjoyed our structured play session. There were lots of different tasks for us to participate in. Next term we are going to introduce 3 ‘play: plan, do, review’ sessions each week. These sessions will offer literacy and numeracy activities and allow us to learn through play. We are really looking forward to this. Look out for our ‘Just Play?’ display in our classroom.

We really enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on our learning in our Ninians Natter this week. We completed a few different activities. With Miss Meechan we started to complete our GIRFEC wheel – we had to think about how safe and healthy we feel. We also were asked to choose a piece of work which were most proud of. This was a tricky choice – have a look for the post-it note in your child’s jotter. We also drew a picture about something we have learned this term too. You can find these pictures in ‘our special work’ poly pocket in our yellow profiles.

Well done to Romera who was one of our stars at our achievements assembly this morning. Miss Meechan was asked to choose someone who had settled into their new class and is working well. Great job, Romera. What a wonderful achievement.

Finally, this week we said a sad farewell to Miss Burns (only for a little while!) as she goes off on maternity leave. Miss Burns has been working with us since the beginning of the term and we are so thankful for all of her support and helping us settle into P1. Today, we decided to throw Miss Burns a surprise baby shower. We wish Miss Burns all the best in the next part of her adventure and we cannot wait to meet your little princess!

I hope everyone enjoys a well deserved holiday,

Miss Meechan and P1M

A surprise for P1M

This week we have been really busy completing all of the tasks that Trex asked us to do. We took a walk around the school grounds to look for the different things in our local area. We saw shops, another school (Dedridge Primary), the park, the Lanthorn and we recognised the path that would take us to the pond. After our walk we had a look at all of these different landmarks on google earth – this was lots of fun! We then made our own maps for Trex. We gave each different route we created a number to help Trex find his way around our local area.

We had a fantastic afternoon at the park on Thursday. The children wanted to bring in their own teddies to meet Trex so we decided to take our teddies and Trex to the park together. When we were at the park we all played so well together. We shared the apparatus and took turns too. We also spoke about ‘stranger danger’ and we know that we should only speak to adults that we know.

Thank you to all who sent in photographs of your houses and your address. We had so much fun looking at our houses on google earth. We then used the photographs of our houses to paint our own representation of these. Our painting skills are constantly improving. This week we were working on using the correct amount of paint on our brush and ensuring we cleaned our paint brush properly so the colours didn’t mix together if we didn’t want them to.

Last week, we went to the library and took out some books which we would like to read in class. We have enjoyed reading our own books in class this week and sharing our books with our friends too. Ask your child what book they took out from the library?

Do you remember about our letter from Trex last week? Trex told us that his baby brother was going to join our class. Well… you will never guess what has happened this week! A nest with an egg in it has appeared in our classroom. When we came into our classroom Trex was watching over the nest so we think it must be his baby brother that is inside the egg. We are so excited about the egg hatching, we keep checking on the egg throughout the day to check it is safe. This week in our writing lesson we wrote stories about what we think Trex’s baby brother might look like. Our writing is fantastic and well done to Adam our star writer this week!

Our numeracy skills are constantly improving and this week we participated in some fun activities to improve our numeracy skills. We are becoming much quicker at recognising random dot patterns and we loved using sand trays to work on our number formation too. We played the caterpillar ordering game on the smartboard. Search for this on your device at home too to play this game. We are continuing to work on our ordering of numbers, we used numicon and lollipop sticks to order our numbers this week. Can you believe that we are also learning about addition too! We are clever clogs in primary 1!

A big well done to Kerr who joined Mrs Purdie for ‘hot chocolate with the head’ today. Kerr always works hard and is a good friend to everyone in our class. A well deserved treat for you, Kerr.

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan

P1M Weekly News

Another busy and productive week in P1M. Here are our highlights:

Monday was ‘European Day of Languages’. We learned how to say ‘hello’ in a few different languages. Polish “cześć”: pronounced “cheh-sh-ch”. French “bonjour”. Irish Gaelic “Dia dhuit” Pronounced “gee-ah-ditch”. Spanish “Hola”. We have been really enjoying learning more and more Spanish in class. Pedro our Spanish Parrot is very impressed. He even joined us on the daily mile on ‘European Day of Languages’. We also made Spanish flags to celebrate this day.

We have been learning all about God’s world as part of our RE lessons. We have watched and responded to the Creation Story. This is the link we watched:

This week we explored the school garden to look for evidence of God’s creation. We loved finding some animals, there were lots of bees in the garden and Patryk told us that the bees were collecting nectar. We found some plants which we loved the smell of, Miss Meechan told us that this plant was called lavendar. Trex enjoyed watching the bees too!

On Tuesday we went to the library. We were very excited to take Trex with us because this was part of our topic plan. We found out about how to behave properly in the library and all of the different things the library can help us with. We listened to a story called ‘The Library Lion’. We even got our own class library card and we all chose a book to take back to the classroom. We will return to the library in a few weeks time to return our books and choose a new one.

We have now learned all of our set 1 sounds and we are busy completing lots of different activities to consolidate our knowledge of these sounds. Ask your child to tell you about some of the activities from this week.

On Thursday when we came into our classroom we were very happy to find an office area! In the office area we have been very busy answering phone calls and writing out important notes and filing them away. It has been a very busy office! Trex sent us a new letter this week. He told us that his baby brother was going to be joining our class. He asked us to write his brother a letter to tell him all about our classroom. We can’t wait until Trex’s baby brother joins us! Watch this space…

Trex also wanted us to take some photographs so he could send them to his Mum and Dad. We have made a book for Trex with lots of photographs; all of our names in the book and some drawings too. Have a look for this next time you are in our classroom.

This week we have been continuing to order numbers to 10 as part of our numeracy lessons and we have also been learning about number names. We completed some dot-to-dots but instead of numbers, it was number names. This was quite tricky but we all tried our very best. We have been using a resource called numicon and ordering these from smallest to largest. One of our favourite games in our class is bingo and this week we played number name bingo. Miss Meechan has been so impressed with how well we are learning number names.

Pupil voice. Our favourite parts of the week:

Casper: “I liked getting dojo points.”

Kyle: “I like when everyone gets dojo points.”

MacKenzie: “I liked play time.”

Kaitlyn: “I liked handwriting.”

Jakub: “I like saying my prayers.”

Kerr: “I liked playing in the office.”

Kaimee: “I liked playing with Sophie.”

Jarred: “I liked going to the library. I like the book I picked from the library.”

Adam: “I liked taking pictures of Trex around the school.”

Oliver: “I liked playing with toys.”

Sophie: “I liked going to assembly.”

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.

Trex joins P1M

What an exciting week we have had in P1M and the highlight for all the children has been the arrival of Trex. On Tuesday we found a letter in our classroom. The letter told us about a new visitor that would be joining our class. This person is from a land far away and wants us to show them about our local area. The letter told us that the person is very tall, with a long tail and 3 claws on each foot, they also have green skin. We listened carefully to these instructions and drew a picture of what we thought they would like. We decided that it was going to be a dinosaur that was joining our class! Thankfully, the letter told us that it wasn’t a scary dinosaur and in fact he is very shy and nervous. Finally, after a long wait, on Thursday Trex appeared in our classroom – he was hiding on Adam’s chair! We took Trex a tour of the school (we loved visiting P4/5 and Mrs Wassell) and we even took him on the daily mile. We have decided that we want to teach Trex all of our sounds and numbers that we now know – he even has is own dojo account too!

In PE we have been developing our gross and fine motor skills. Our PE lessons with Mr McCurdy and Miss Meechan follow the same pattern where we make our way around 9/10 circuit stations with a partner. Each station helps us build and improve our gross or fine motor skills. Each week we add a few new stations to explore.

Have you heard about Pablo our Spanish parrot? This week Pablo was teaching us how to say our name in Spanish. Me llamo Pablo (my name is Pablo) – pronounced: mee yamo. Pablo has already taught us how to say hello (ola), adios (goodbye) buenos dias (good morning) buenas tardes (good afternoon) and buenos noches (good night). What a clever parrot he is! Here is Kaimee and Poppy telling Pablo their names in Spanish. Have you practised your Spanish at home?

We are continuing to work on our 1:1 correspondence and number formation in our number lessons. This week we took part in lots of fun activities to help us with this. Did you see our paper plate and pom-pom activity on display on our maths wall last night at Ninians Natter? We have also made different shapes and towers with cubes. We had to count out the correct number of cubes and make a tower with them. We played a new game on the smart board this week. Here is the link for it if you wish to play it at home too:

http://www.ictgames.com/newduckshoot.html

In the photographs you can see 2 photos of us participating in a counting exercise song. Why don’t you try this at home too?

This week we learned the ‘a’ and ‘t’ sound. The ‘a’ sound is a very special vowel sound. It is a black sound because to make the sound it comes through a big black tunnel in our mouths, at the back of the tunnel is a special house where all the vowel sounds live. Check out the ‘a jolly phonics’ video on youtube for our song for this sound. The ‘t’ sound is a blue sound as it comes from our tongue. Have you listened to this song on youtube too? This week as part of our literacy activities we played phonics hop-scotch, i-spy and bingo. We also used black play-dough to form the ‘a’ sound and blue paint for the ‘t’ sound. We have even started to stretch our sounds together to make some words – cat, map, cap etc. What a busy week!

Our writing lesson was very exciting this week. Last week, we created our own dinosaur character. This week, we had to imagine that our dinosaur came alive and jumped out of our jotters. He walked about the classroom for a little while and then decided he wanted to go somewhere. Some dinosaurs wanted to go to the park, some wanted to go swimming and some even wanted to go camping! We are beginning to share our ideas with our peers before we begin our writing and Miss Meechan is so impressed how much our listening and talking skills are improving through these tasks. Before or after we complete our story writing we can participate in a range of different literacy based activities. Below are some pictures of Patryk reading a book in the story; Sophie is watching a puppet show that Romera and Rutendo were putting on; Daniel is playing a phonics game on the smart board; Jarred and Esmee and drawing and colouring in pictures and Kaimee is writing her story. We are all really enjoying our writing lessons.

Have a lovely long weekend everyone, see you on Wednesday.

Miss Meechan and P1M

P1M Weekly News

What a fantastic week for P1M again. We have all settled in to school life so well and we are all engaging in the learning opportunities we are provided with. It has been a very busy week for us but we would like to share our highlights with you.

The sounds we have been working on this week are ‘s’ and ‘p’. We have really enjoyed the songs that go along with these sounds. Check these out on youtube by searing ‘s jolly phonics song’ and ‘p jolly phonics song’. One of the tasks we really enjoyed this week was forming the ‘s’ sound with pipe cleaners and wool – we used the colour blue for this because ‘s’ is a blue sound. Can you tell someone at home why it is a blue sound? Can you remember what colour of sound ‘p’ is? Why is it that colour?

We have continued our number topic of counting and number formation. We have now learned about the formation of numbers 0-8. We will be doing some work on 9 next week. We have also been working on counting through a range of different activities and games. We used our number formation booklets to practise our number formation. We also practised forming numbers in sand trays. We played games on the ipads and smartboard to help us with out counting and we loved playing hop-scotch too where we explored numbers to 20! Here are some pictures of our learning experiences in number work this week.

We are coming to the end of our ‘Harry and the Dinosaurs’ topic. This week we created our own dinosaur masks. We all picked a different mask to colour in and then we used lots of different materials to decorate them. We can’t wait for our masks to dry so we can pretend to be dinosaurs – keep an eye out for our pictures of this next week!

We loved our technologies lesson this week. We used coloured clay to create our own dinosaurs. After creating our dinosaurs we used the ipads to film short video clips of our classmates telling a short story using their dinosaur. Some of us were very creative and even use clay shaped rain to use in their video too. Miss Meechan and Miss Burns loved watching all of the videos!

Remember that on Monday we are getting our photographs taken for the courier so remember to bring your smiles and full school uniform!

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan and P1M

Learning through play

What a busy week we’ve all had in P1R!

In literacy we introduced ‘s’ and ‘p’ – the children are quickly picking up the sounds and looking forward to introducing our first vowel sound next week. They had fun in the glitter tray finding the hidden sounds, playing literacy games on the ipad and smartboard, sorting out the toys by their beginning sound and lots more.

Our story writing lesson, linked to our topic work, was really productive and everyone had a go at drawing a dinosaur and then describing it using their own words. We chose Nathan and Amber as our star writers this week as they had managed to sound out some of the words in their story. Their work will go on display in our classroom for everyone to see.

In maths we have been working on our counting skills through play based activities. We enjoyed playing hopscotch, tracing number shapes in flour and counting stickers in a matching game. We even had a go at Mrs Roy’s fitness challenge – we had to exercise and count at the same time.

IDL has been great fun as we have continued to work on the theme of dinosaurs. We made dinosaur masks to use in our drama and structured play, made playdough dinosaur models which we then used to film our very own mini-movies using the ipads.

Play was again at the heart of our Goldentime activities where the children chose an activity as a reward for gaining lots of dojo points. Here are some action shots.

I can’t wait to see what we’ll all get up to next week. Remember to bring your biggest smile for the Courier photographer on Monday.

P1M Weekly News

We have had another fantastic week in P1M. Everyone has been working so hard and Miss Meechan is so impressed with how well we have all settled in and how much everyone is engaging in their new learning experiences.

We started off our week with our first phonics lesson. During phonics lessons we learn new sounds. This week our sounds were ‘m’ and ‘c’. The ‘m’ sound is made from our lips, this is why it is a red sound. We put jam on our lips and made the ‘m’ sound, rubbing our lips together to taste the jam. This was a very fun activity and we enjoyed participating in this. We then took part in a range of different activities to help us learn these new sounds. We have been listening to, singing along and doing the actions for these ‘m’ and ‘c’ songs to help us remember them. Why don’t you try this out at home?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFUhr2LToBA

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

In numeracy we are continuing to learn all about numbers to 10. We having working on our formation of the numbers as well as counting out objects (dinosaurs!) to represent this number. We have even been making numbers with play-dough and showing the amount of fingers to represent this value. We have also been doing a lot of counting aloud. This is one of our favourite songs at the moment!

This week we have also took part in the daily mile. Here is a picture of us enjoying the sunshine this week during the daily mile.

Next week, our homework tasks will be sent out on a dojo message. Look out for this on Monday! Have a lovely weekend.

Miss Meechan and P1M

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!