Literacy – Page 4 – St Ninian's Primary School

Nursery News

Welcome back after the October break!! I hope you’re all noticing the changes to the lay out of the nursery room. We are focusing on our Froebelian approach to learning in Early Years by providing breadth and challenge through discovery and independence in each individual child’s interests. Natural resources foster the child’s imagination. Open ended resources create opportunity for multi purpose scenarios in learning e.g. a block can be numerous things from a phone to a plate, all according to the child’s imagination.

What a week it has been too! On Monday we launched our ‘Word Boost’ Initiative, each week the children will be read a book in nursery with a focus on some new words to learn. This week the words were; Ashtonished, Creep, Brave and Creatures.

Welly Wednesday started back with a great adventure to the local woods to investigate and explore Autumn and it signs in our local community. This area will be used every week so the children can experience seasonal changes and become familiar in their surroundings to be able to investigate and risk assess on their own.

Next weeks Welly Wednesday is Witchy Welly Wednesday, our first fundraiser of the year, the children will go to the woods on a Halloween hunt and have a Halloween story.

NEXT WEEK

MONDAY –

TUESDAY – Halloween activities in the nursery, the children can come in fancy dress, but no masks or face paint please. We will be dookin for apples and donut catching.

WEDNESDAY – Today is our Sponsored Witchy Welly Wednesday, children will be going to the woods so will need to be in appropriate outdoor clothing. We will be having a Halloween hunt and a Halloween story in the woods.

THURSDAY – P.E. 10.25 today and no P.E. in the afternoon.

FRIDAY – PEEP sessions start back with Mrs Beattie.

Please also see in the pictures the new snack menu for the next term beginning on Monday with week 1.

Have a great weekend everyone !! From the nursery team xx

P3 Weekly Round Up!

We have had a wonderfully creative and calm week in P3 – despite it being very busy!

The boys and girls were a great help in keeping Mrs Conway and Mrs Scott organised as they swapped their Tuesday and Thursday this week – Mrs Conway was SO pleased to see how amazing the class are at writing! We wrote our own Skeleton fact files on Tuesday morning and can’t wait to share them with you at Stay, Play and Learn on Friday 12th at 9am. Do you love the warm/cold colour art work in our featured image? These will also be on display on Friday!

Mrs Scott was also very impressed with how well our boys and girls are developing their reading comprehension! Most of our reading groups came home with special bookmarks this week – these will help you and your child choose some questions to discuss about their reading books when they do reading homework with an adult or older sibling. If your child doesn’t have theirs please let Mrs Conway know by writing a note in their homework diary 🙂

Our number work continues this week with addition and working with numbers to 1000! Some people couldn’t load our homework game – but our Sumdog homework challenge next week will be focusing on these areas. Your child’s sumdog login will be in their reading diary – please let us know if they are unable to complete sumdog homework at home, time can be given to this across the school day!

This weeks Boost words were;

Nudge

Nervous

Astonished

Continue

Separate

Co-operate

Our core literacy homework task will be based on some of our Boost words next week!

In RE we have been learning a lot about Our Lady, which will continue to be our in class RE theme throughout October – we LOVE this action song… have a go at home;

How can you and your child say YES to God, like Mary did?

We have noticed some fantastic creativity in our collage Smartstart! This week we even had some budding authors making books during their smart start time! Mrs Scott has taken these ideas on board to incorporate into our writing sessions next term.

Sean joined us this week from St Margaret’s Academy on his work experience! He has been a hit with the boys and girls of P3 – and even brought his Nintendo Switch in today for us to enjoy during FUN31! Sean’s help this week has been great and we will all miss him next week – we hope he will come back and visit us!

Have a great weekend! Next week will be the last week of term before the October holiday!

P3 Weekly Round Up!

A quick week it has been!

The boys in girls in P3 have packed in so much learning to three short days!

We are so excited to begin our science topics! Mrs Scott will be exploring the Skeleton with the class and Mrs Conway will lead the learning about the sun, moon and stars – with a focus on the patterns of night and day! We have started to think about both of these and the things we would like to learn about.

Wednesday saw a class vote for our new class novel! The choices were Fantastic Mr Fox, How to Train Your Dragon and Gangsta’ Granny. As How to Train your Dragon and Gangsta’ Granny got three votes each we asked those who chose Fantastic Mr Fox to vote again… which led to Gangsta’ Granny as the overall winner!!! We will read short parts of this novel as a class over the next few months at suitable times in the school day. We continue to promote reading for enjoyment in our class – if there’s a novel or book that your child enjoys at home, please allow them to bring it to school to read for enjoyment on Wednesdays/Thursdays 🙂

This week saw the end of our symmetry topic in maths – and a tricky topic it has been! Some of the boys and girls moved on to creating symmetrical block patterns, which we found quite tricky. Here is a great symmetry matching game which explores reflective symmetry, perhaps you could try it at home?

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/symmetry/symmetry-matching

This morning we had our first pupil committees! The P1-3 committees are play based and range from outdoor learning to games to Mini Glee! This was a big hit with our boys and girls and we are already looking forward to the next meeting!

Keep an eye on your post over the coming days as today we popped some important mail in the post box 😉

At the end of the day today we reflected on our week and the things we enjoyed the most;

Ephraim ‘we were playing a game called poisonous ball in PE, I enjoyed that you got to throw your ball and if it hit the other teams bench their bench would be poisoned’

Amber ‘I liked doing my committee today – it was arts and crafts – I made one painting and one drawing’

Klaudia ‘I really enjoyed the committees. I did the mini glee – we are going to perform on the stage!’

Adam ‘ I liked when we were doing our textbook work in maths’

Sahara ‘I loved posting my letter’

Kerr ‘I liked doing the picture of the world in RE’

We are looking forward to distributing homework on Monday which reflects the changes in our home learning policy following feedback from pupils, parents and staff – stay tuned! 🙂

Have a fantastic weekend!

P3 Weekly Round Up!

Another whirlwind week in P3!

In writing, Mrs Scott was so impressed with the quality of work that we didn’t just have one star writer… we had three!! Our three star writers wowed the class with their amazing news reports about Flat Stanley. Using connectives, ambitious vocabulary and understanding that newspapers need headlines – these are all the skills we built on this week. We can wait to show you at Ninian’s Natter next week!

Our reading groups are up and running now that we have settled into the swing of things 🙂 the boys and girls are using their decoding strategies to build fluency as they read. We plan to change the reading books on a Wednesday, though when children begin to read novels it happens as and when the book ends. We hear reading on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday in small groups where we use various questioning skills to challenge the children’s understanding of what they have read.

As we are continuing to build a reading culture in our class – boys and girls are encouraged to bring a book from home that they might read for enjoyment in class. We have some avid readers in P3 – Roald Dahl and Diary of a Wimpy Kid books have made an appearance this week 🙂

In maths we are continuing to build on our knowledge of number as we practice skip counting in 2s, 5s and 10s. We LOVED the whack a mole game and will continue to use it as we practice counting in 3s, 4s.. etc. Have a go at home – some of us got up to 1000 today!

http://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/whackAMole/

During Word Boost we read together a picture book throughout the week, focussing on chosen ‘boost’ words to help us develop a broad ranging vocabulary. This weeks boost words were; local, popular, repeat, mumble and vast. Every time you hear any of these words with your child pop your finger on your nose to indicate a ‘boost word’! Can your child use these words in a sentence?

Ninian’s Natter information is on the school’s weekly update – Mrs Scott and I would love to meet the parents/caters of all of our children! Please do come along to meet us, discuss what learning looks like in the P3 classroom and ask questions about the year ahead! 🙂 looking forward to seeing you all then!

Transition – Initial Sounds

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 🙂

Nursery News

Och aye the noo and lang may yer lum reek!

The nursery has been alive with thoughts of Scotland this week! Tartan, haggis and highland dancing – what more can you want!

Mrs Beattie tested the power of many a families washing machine this week after ‘ball painting’ with the boys and girls to make a lovely tartan shawl! The laughter and engagement in this activity was fantastic with many of our boys and girls choosing to join in. The end result of rolling balls covered in paint in lines across a large bit of paper definitely resembles tartan – a tartan shawl was created, which is now hanging on our learning wall!

Welly Wednesday was postponed due to high winds – but the PM group managed to sneak out for ten minutes in between the worst bouts of wind and rain.. Mrs Hogg made ‘kites’ with the boys and girls out of plastic and string to see what effects the wind had – their strength was certainly tested as they flew about in the gales! We are glad no-one ended up flying away!

Thursday brought our Burns night celebration! It was lovely to see so many Scotland items brought in and worn on the day! Mrs Conway had four handy helpers during each session to prepare the Burns supper of Haggis, Neeps and Tatties – which we discovers included Scottish words for turnip and potatoes! We talked about where turnips and potatoes come from, what the feel like and smell like – and how to cook them.. we said the Selkirk Grace and sat down together to enjoy our traditional Scottish meal!

The PM group then had a wee ceilidh led by Mrs Macdonald – who has some serious Scottish dancing skills! We dosey-doed and skipped together, counting, clapping and keeping the time.

Mrs Martinek’s yellow group had a fantastic challenge at group time when they had to dress themselves for winter from a bag full of different clothing items! One of our assessment focuses this month involves looking at how much support the boys and girls need when getting dressed independently – some boys and girls are there already, some at the beginning of their learning journey.. our job is to support and encourage – maybe you could challenge your child to get their own clothes/pyjamas on one day, if they don’t already?

Mrs Mushet was delighted to relaunch the Big Bedtime Read on Tuesday, joined by a sea of onesies, pyjamas, house coats and slippers! Our boys and girls LOVED coming to nursery in their pyjamas! Mrs Mushet is looking forward to the return of the Big Bedtime Read bags on Tuesday to swap them for new ones! She has lots of lovely feedback to work on and will be on the lookout for parents to come in and share stories with their children in nursery!

Our ‘Ladies Night’ fundraiser was a rip-roaring success! Thank you to Mrs Beattie, Mrs Martinek and Mrs Mushet for supporting this event and ensuring our lovely ladies were well looked after and entertained! We were delighted to make £258 from this event to add to our funding pot.. this money will come in handy to subsidise the costs of trips and resources in the coming term! We have had many requests for another and are hoping to organise this for June. Keep your ear to the ground 😉

we hope you have had a restful weekend and are ready for another busy week ahead!

Fairy Tales?

Interesting reading on the importance of Fairy Tales….

http://scottishbooktrust.com/blog/reading/2014/06/5-reasons-why-fairy-tales-are-good-for-children

Nursery News

It’s been a spoooooooky week this week at St Ninian’s Nursery!

The boys and girls had so much fun at the Halloween party on Tuesday! Dooking for apples, biting donuts off a string and decorating biscuits to name but a few – we have loved having the nursery decorated this week to add to the eerie atmosphere!

There have been many many wonderful additions to our water tray this week! We have had shaving foam, jelly and spaghetti to get our hands on – this has led to wonderful discussions about how it ‘feels’ in the water tray with super words like sticky, squishy, squashy and ‘like gummy bears’ 🙂 we love to hear our boys and girls using interesting vocabulary! Be sure to check the weekly Box Clever words on the weekly update to help your child expand their vocabulary at home!

We have also had lots of interesting conversations about Autumn, hibernation and nocturnal animals! Does your child know what hibernation means? It was one of our box clever words last week and there are lots of lovely stories out there about bears going to sleep for the winter! We read Mr Bear Snores On in the hut this week and a few boys and girls were able to tell us that he was hibernating!

The writing table was covered in black on Thursday like the night sky as we talked about and drew fireworks in preparation for Guy Fawkes this weekend! The PM group also collaged some lovely sparkly rockets to add to this – we wonder if anyone will have a story about fireworks night on Monday at nursery??

Mrs Beattie is looking forward to having PEEP start back next Friday! The five week block begins 10/11. Classes are now full but keep an eye out for new sign up sheets for PEEP into the new year!

We have our termly Parental Coffee Morning on Wednesday 8th November from 11.20-12. AM children and parents are encouraged to stay on at the end of the session with PM parents encouraged to come along early with a packed lunch for their child. Children will be able to watch a movie in the nursery while parents enjoy a cuppa in the hall. We value your views and have acted on all points raised at last terms coffee morning in order to make our kids experience of nursery the best that we can!

Please keep an eye on your email inbox for the nursery weekly update – usually sent on a Sunday night. It has a plan for the week and important information to share!

A gentle reminder that parents are asked not to take any photos or videos in the nursery environment.

Thank you for your continued support!

Nursery News

Today we had our Big Bedtime Read launch. It was a lovely day and I would like to thank all the parents, carers and grandparents who came along some even dressed in their pyjamas. It was fantastic to see so many and I know the children really loved you being there.

I hope you you enjoy reading your pack of 5 books which you have for a week . Once returned next Tuesday you can then pick another pack to take home. I can’t wait to see any photographs of the children enjoying this new learning adventure. Please don’t hesitate to ask either myself or any member of the nursery team any questions you may have about this initiative.

Here are some photographs of our exciting day.

Mrs Caskie

Nursery News!

This week has seen the beginning of our Outdoor Learning days! What a day it was 🙂 the AM and PM groups enjoyed a woodland walk to the Mid Calder woods, across the bridge. We discussed many things before, during and after our walk. Some of these included safety when out and about; we seen broken glass and dogs mess and discussed how to keep ourselves safe from these hazards. We talked about when it is ok to run and when we need to stop (when Mrs Conway, or another adult, shouts STOP!). When we got to the woods we learned about ‘jaggy’ nettles and dock leaves – we even had two ‘nurses’ on the PM walk who took charge of the magic leaves incase anyone needed them. We all collected some interesting things and brought them back to nursery, including sticks, stones, leaves and acorns.

We are looking for a catchy name for our outdoor learning days – feel free to add one to our facebook post, or tell the nursery staff any ideas you have!

Mrs Caskie has been busy this week setting up our ‘Big Bedtime Read’ initiative. We are hoping to increase parental engagement and give children great literacy experiences through this initiative, where each child will receive a book pack with five stories each week. As part of our Pupil Equity Funding we hope to achieve 80% of our children to be sharing bedtime stories with their families on four nights of the week or more. You will see our lovely ‘bedtime’ area created in the nursery – letters went out today to outline the plans for this and we look forward to launching it at the beginning of October.

Next week is ‘MATHS WEEK SCOTLAND’ – the boys and girls have enjoyed exploring the talking tub which was full of interesting maths resources, their views and ideas have been taken into account and will be used to plan learning for next week. Please come along to stay and play, or come back and play next week – sign up sheets in the nursery!

PEEP classes begin on 22nd September – Mrs Beattie is hoping to meet some of our PM parents this week to encourage their attendance at these classes 🙂 a fantastic way for kids and parents to bond!

Ninian’s Natter is on Thursday 6-7pm – please do come along! Nursery staff will be on hand to chat all things nursery and have you joining in with maths week activities 🙂 kids and parents welcome!