Literacy Across Learning – Page 4 – St Ninian's Primary School

Creativity in P1R

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.

We’re going on a ………hunt!

Wow I can’t believe it’s Friday again, what a busy week we’ve had in P1R!

In reading this week we have been focusing on revising all the sounds we have learned and blending sounds together to make CVC words. We have used a variety of approaches and resources to do this, Miss Smyth even paid us a visit and spent the morning observing us as we worked. She was very impressed at how well the children used the apps on the ipad and their classroom displays as a tool for learning.

Maths has been great fun as we continued to learn about shapes, this week we looked at 3D shapes and spent lots of time exploring the shapes using our sense of touch and sight. We played games on the smartboard, went on a shape hunt, played shape bingo and dominoes and even wrote detailed descriptions for each of the shapes in our writing lesson.

In IDL we looked at how pirates defended themselves when at sea and how they used different weapons in battles. Everyone chose a weapon they would like to make using junk or recycled materials. We have put these on display for everyone to look at, hopefully we won’t have to use them too often!! On Wednesday we went outdoors for learning on a pirate scavenger hunt, we had to listen carefully to the clues and then go and look for evidence of pirates in our school grounds. We worked in two teams and chose names and captains for our crew – The Jolly Rodger and The Squeaky Sail. It was lovely to see everyone working together and helping one another in their search. The fun continued on Thursday when Mr Hunter asked us to create our very own sea monsters which were often a feature in pirate stories. We again took the learning outdoors for this and the children created fantastic monsters! Harry loved making the weapons and pirate play, Matthew enjoyed making weapons and Angelina liked finding pirate things in the school garden.

For Catholic Education Week we spent time discussing how we could show mercy to others, the children enjoyed watching the Pope Francis animation and all produced their very own Hands of Mercy for a whole school display.

Finally we finished off the week with an Achievements Assembly and our committees. Oma was awarded a special certificate for being a reflective learner – well done Oma! When asked how she felt she said, ” I felt really good.”

Well as I said at the beginning of the entry, it’s been a busy week! We’re all looking forward to next week when we have Technologies Week as our focus and Lent begins.

Wanted…harrrd sailin’ children…last seen in P1R!!

Ahoy there mateys, good to see ye all!

It’s been a grand ole week in P1R with lots of learning and fun. It all began on Monday when we learned a new sound, ‘ai’, we’re flying through the sounds now and getting better every day at blending. We used letterjoin to practise joining the a and i together to remind us that even though it is two letters it only makes one sound.

In maths we continued the sharing theme but focused on learning all about fractions/halves. Chocolate was aplenty in our lessons, we were given a challenge of working out how to share 1 mini-roll with our partners, we decided to cut them in half meaning each person got 1 piece. On another day we looked at whole chocolate bars and counted all the square pieces, we then had to work out half. We even found out that half of 5 is 2.5!! The best bit was getting to eat our share of the chocolate!

We also had a go at making fraction flags using 2 colours and decorating half a pizza (don’t worry they were pretend pizzas!)

In PE we were trying to combine the skills we had been learning and apply this to the different apparatus.

Famous pirates were the talk of the class this week. We learned all about Blackbeard and Anne Bonny. Ask your child to tell you one of the facts they found out. We made Wanted Posters for our class display, puppets and pirate hats for role play, sang Pirate songs, danced like a pirate, wrote some facts about famous pirates and used the Morfo app to create talking and moving pirates.

Outdoor learning was also part of our week although unfortunately the rain changed this slightly, we brought the outdoors indoors! All the children were set a challenge by Mr Hunter to make a ‘Crow’s Nest’. They had to think about which of our school values would be important, the children thought ‘teamwork’ would be the best way to approach the challenge.

We’re all now looking forward to tomorrow’s skills academies and going along to the dress rehearsal of the ‘Great Scots’ show!

Ahoy me hearties!!!

It’s been all systems go this week in P1R as we continued our Pirate Adventure. The children enjoyed learning about the different jobs pirates did when they were on their ship, made pirate portraits using oil pastels, sang pirate songs, did some pirate dancing, started our pirate displays with P1D and chose facts to write about and illustrate. In reading they heard about the adventures of Captain Pugwash and had fun finding examples of VCOP in the story. Ask your child to tell you all about Punctuation Parrot, he has been helping us recognise different punctuation marks in stories. In writing they had to complete the sentence, “If I were a pirate…”, there were some super ideas:

Ahmad – I would have a battle with other ships and shoot the cannon.

Matthew – I would have a ship race.

Elenta – I would fight the pirates and push them in the water.

Ryan – I would drink rum (I think Mrs Gardner liked this answer the best)!

Why don’t you ask the children to teach you this song, they even made up some actions for it!

In phonics we learned all about ‘l’ and ‘r’ having a go at blending the sounds to make words, writing the sounds using letterjoin, finding objects that began with the sounds and lots more!

Sharing continued to be the focus in maths and the children have picked this concept up really quickly, we all had fun sharing out the pasta and toys and playing interactive sharing games on the smartboard. We also met some pirates who needed to share out the treasure they had captured!

Try some of the games they’re good fun! Here are the links:

http://pbskids.org/curiousgeorge/busyday/dogs/

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Flash.aspx?f=sharingv2

In PE we developed our gymnastics skills and started transferring last week’s floor work to apparatus. The children were amazed when Mrs Roy was able to demonstrate a forward roll to the class (I amazed myself!!!!) Well done to all the children who were finding this difficult to begin with, they persevered and by the end of the week everyone could do a forward roll!

In RE we learned about the importance of speaking to God, we revised how to make the sign of the cross properly and learned how to say the ‘Our Father’. We were asking children of other religions how they prayed and next week Ahmad is going to teach us a new prayer which we are all looking forward to.

We also got some good news on Friday, congratulations goes to Matthew who was a winner in the road safety competition organised by the JRSO, we were all really proud of him! This week we took part in a Robert Burns colouring in competition for Morrisons, fingers crossed we do well!

Next Friday we will be starting our Skills Academy, all the children selected a skill they would like to develop, the choices were amazing, we’ll tell you more next week.

P1R are pure dead brilliant!

As you may have guessed from the title of our blog we were celebrating all things Scottish this week. We made a class tartan using an online weaver then chose 3 colours to make our own tartans with coloured pencils to display in our classroom. In reading we heard a story aboot a wee wee moose then had a go at learning some Scots words. We enjoyed our carousel activities which included using the netbooks to play some games and listened to some traditional Scots poems and rhymes on the scuilwab website. We also listened to bagpipe music and enjoyed having a wee jig and a sing song as we made some bagpipers to add to our display. I think our favourite activity was playing Simon says in Scots-touch yer heid, yer

shooders, yer lugs- it wis guid fun!

In maths this week we continued learning about

subtraction and also learned about more than/less than using Ally the Alligator to help us.

On Thursday we discovered some funny looking elf shoes under our Christmas tree – we came up with some really good ideas about why they were there and wrote them down:

Matthew thought that the elf had dropped them from the sleigh when it was flying through the sky.

Anthony thought the elf had come down the school chimney.

Maeve thought the elf had been trying to fill the stockings under our tree but when he heard the school bell he left his shoes behind as he ran away.

When Miss Smyth came to visit we asked if they belonged to her, she tried them on but they didn’t fit, some of the children also enjoyed trying them on.

This week also marked the beginning of Advent, each day we open our calendar and take time to think of others by saying an extra prayer.