Literacy – Page 7 – St Ninian's Primary School

International week in P1R

This was the theme of the week across the school and the children took part in various learning experiences to explore the word ‘international’ and Global Citizenship. We looked at friendship as an important value for all to have and shared what we thought were good qualities in a friend. Here are some of our suggestions:

Klaudia-someone who plays with you

Lloyd-someone who likes the same things as you

Brooke- someone who is kind

Abigail-someone who loves you

We then asked some of our friends in the classroom to share their culture and mother tongue language with us. Klaudia and Dawid taught us some Polish phrases which we tweeted about! We continued this international theme by looking at children who lived in Malawi as we are linking up with St Margaret’s Academy during Lent to do some work with them on Malawi.

In addition to the above we also continued with our core learning and IDL learning throughout the week.

In phonics we learned all about the ‘ee’ and ‘oo’ sounds who live in Vowel House. We played sorting games, practised writing them and lots more. Did you know they are joining letters but only make one sound? We are really good at joining them and letter join helps us with this.

In writing the focus was to use our imaginations and think about he title ‘If I were a pirate…’ We listened to a song and a poem to inspire us then all had a turn at sharing our thoughts.

Lucy would shoot the cannons.

Dexter would sail the seven seas.

James would steer the ship.

Well done to our 4 star writers this week, check out your dojo messages to see if you were one of these!

Maths was great fun as we learned all about pattern and symmetry. We did lots of practical tasks, sponge pattern painting, smartboard symmetry, pirate symmetry using the smart pals, finish the pattern activities, Pom Pom patterns, peg board patterns. We all agreed that it was easier to stick with 2 colours when making patterns as using 3 got a bit tricky.

PE was exhausting as we have a started a new block of gymnastics, this weeks focus was on balancing and rolling. Ask us about the space shapes we learned and try some of them at home, the squatty alien was the trickiest!

Pirates have taken over the classroom, aarrrr…we’re all enjoying our new topic and have made a start at transforming our classroom and area into pirate territory. We did some fantastic pirate portraits using paint and oil pastels, they are on display on our new Art Gallery wall. We also drew pirates based on the descriptions we were given, they turned out well. We learned about the pirate code and some of the jobs the crew did. Check your letters in future, if you see a black spot it means the pirates are after you!! It has been great to see some of the activities you have been doing at home too-keep up the good work!

Finally we had something sad to think about on Friday, we had to say goodbye, Adios, Au Revoir to Miss Smyth. We have really enjoyed her visits to our classroom and playground and will miss her smile and laughter. Thank you for all your help and we wish you luck on your next adventure!

School-Home Learning: Here are some apps, websites and videos we have used to support our learning in class this week.

http://www.ictgames.com/dinosaurEggs_phonics/index.html

http://resources.hwb.wales.gov.uk/VTC/simple_patterns/eng/Introduction/StarterActivity.htm

http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/math/games/preschool-kindergarten/pattern-matcher/

http://resources.hwb.wales.gov.uk/VTC/simple_patterns/eng/Introduction/MainSession.htm

http://www.abcya.com/shape_patterns.htm

iPad app: spelling bug

iPad app: doodle app (use this to practise writing the sounds you know – make sure you use the correct colour)

Videos:

Primary 2/3 News!

What a busy week it has been in Primary 2/3. We rounded off the week with a lovely farewell assembly for Miss Smyth. We’ll all be so sorry to see her go and wish her lots of luck in her new job.

Everyone has participated so well in International Week and we loved drawing pictures and introducing ourselves in Spanish to our friends in a school in Spain. We hope that they write back to us!

Some of our highlights have been:

Brooke ‘Learning a song for Miss Smyth from the Trolls movie’.

Andrew ‘Learning about pyramids in Ancient Egypt’.

Hasan ‘Maths carousels were my favourite’.

Levente ‘I liked writing the story of Jack and the Beanstalk because I used lots of connectives’.

Aaron ‘I liked learning about the pyramids and the River Nile in Ancient Egypt. I can’t wait to make a pyramid next week’.

Rachel ‘I liked drawing a picture of myself and writing in Spanish to send to our friends in Spain’.

Oma ‘I love our Ancient Egyptians topic and I’m excited to learn about mummies’.

Chloe ‘I liked scribble spelling because I like writing my words in different colours. It helps me learn my words’.

Carly ‘I liked handwriting because we are getting faster at joining letters’.

Our writing focus next week is the Story of ‘The Snail and the Whale’. It would be really helpful if you could share the story with your child. You can access it at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B0kSTA-ma90 When we are writing, we’ll be concentrating on spelling common words and using different openers for our sentences.

Have a lovely weekend!

From Mrs Howley, Mrs Keegan and Primary 2/3

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all our friends and family! It’s been a busy start to the year and P1R got straight back to business this week with lots of learning.

The focus of the week was Vision and Values.We spent time looking at our school vision statement and values in the classroom and what it meant to us. We discussed that we should try to be like Jesus when we are at school and here are some of the children’s thoughts:

We should work hard-Dexter

Be kind-Brooke

Make friends and play together-Amber

Pray together-Ephraim

Share with one another-Klaudia

Have good manners-Lucy

Respect everyone in our school-Dexter

We then decided to look at our class charter and refresh this for the New Year, we chose a pirate theme.

In literacy we had some revision of all the sounds we know and spent time wordbuilding. Next week we will move onto ee and oo.

In maths we finished off our addition topic by learning the number bonds for 10. We watched a news flash to help us and also watched a video about rainbow facts which helped us remember the linking number facts for 10. We also had another go at missing number facts using the number line to help us.

IDL was exciting as we found a message in a bottle, a pirate hat and a pirate eye patch. The letter was from Pirate Pete Pigeon asking us to join him on the Squeaky Sail for some pirate adventures. We’re really excited about this. We used our talking book and visible plan to think of ideas for our adventures. Over the coming weeks we are hoping to transform our classroom and area with some pirate props.

All about numbers in P1R

This week our school took part in a numeracy review and our learners were able to showcase what they have been learning in numeracy. James and Lucy were selected to meet some special visitors and talk about their learning-well done to both of them for speaking so confidently!! On Wednesday Miss Smyth and Mr McDowall, the Depute Headteacher from St Margaret’s visited our classroom and joined in with our number talks lesson and a numeracy carousel. They were really impressed at how well the children could talk about their number work and enjoyed using play dough, the ten frames and the iPads. Everyone was keen to share what they had learned about addition and number stories.

The children were all excited this week when we began learning about Advent. We all went over to our class altar and set up our purple colours and the manger were baby Jesus lay. We all learned that Advent is a time of waiting and preparing. On Thursday we also began opening our Advent calendar to help us count down the days to Christmas.

Looking after ourselves is really important to us and we managed to get outside to do our daily mile. Everyone is managing to run more and walk less! In PE we are getting really skilled at dancing and impressed Mr McCurdy in the Grand Ole Duke of York dance. We are also looking after our teeth and brushing them during the school day.

In literacy we learned our last sound for this term, z. Everyone made their very own z zebra and thought of different words with z in them. Bingo was one of the favourite activities of the week. Our focus for the rest of term will be blending all of the sounds we have learned and spelling. We have been continuing to work on our Frys words and our word wall is looking very busy. Some of us are now using these words in our writing and are looking for them in our reading books.

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!!!

Hard at work in P1R

Can you believe that another week has gone by in P1r, the clocks might have changed but we’ve certainly noticed that time is flying!

Our focus in number continues to be addition and we have been consolidating our knowledge of number stories to 5 in a variety of ways. The children have enjoyed using the ten frames and smart board games to practise making different number stories. In number talks we have enjoyed taking about how we see numbers,it’s amazing to hear how everyone’s mathematical minds work differently. It was great to see some of the children trying number talks activities at home this week. We then moved onto missing number sums which proved to be quite tricky for everyone. We learned different strategies for working them out,for example, using cubes with our imaginary partners, using the number line or using our fingers. What’s your favourite strategy for working out missing number sums,share this with your child. We finished our number work on Friday with our weekly Big Maths Beat That test,it was great to see so many children beating their scores from last week.

In phonics we learned 2 more sounds, h and u. Miss McGuire planned some exciting lessons to help us write and blend these sounds. We also had a visitor during one of our phonics lessons and she commented on how clever we all were! Everyone enjoyed using the new blending cups and blending tree that Miss Mc Guire made for us to use in our carousels. Reading time was busy and we all took it in turns to read aloud using expression,ask us about exclamation marks!

We got another important letter from Santa this week with our tasks for the week. We had to learn all about toys, old toys and new toys. We enjoyed looking at photographs of toys that our parents and grandparents might have played with. We also wrote stories about our favourite toys,we have filmed ourselves reading these and will be putting the videos in our online journals for you to see. Real life learning skills was also a focus as we used toy catalogues to research our favourite toys. It was good fun making a collage of these.

You might be wondering why we are all so tired on a Monday and Wednesday,well it’s because we’ve been working hard on our personal fitness during our PE lessons. We are determined to have “strong abs” by Christmas to help us with all the heavy lifting in Santas workshop.

Have a lovely weekend!

Mrs Roy & P1r

Fantastic P2/3

It has been another busy week in Primary 2/3 with lots and lots of fantastic learning.

We have reached the last chapter of The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark and we have loved listening to the adventures of Plop, the little barn owl. Ask your child what their favourite part of the book was and let us know in the comments.

We celebrated All Saints’ Day with a lovely whole school mass. It was great to have so many parents joining us for this special feast day.

In Spanish we have been counting to 20 and having great fun challenging ourselves to learn the trickier numbers.

In maths we have continued our work on telling the time. In numeracy P2 have been adding doubles and near doubles and P3 have been adding teen numbers.

We are so excited that our new topic is The Funfair! We had a busy and creative planning session on Thursday when we worked in groups to plan our topic. Our first challenge was to create a price list for a Fairground food stall – you can see our creative price lists in our Learning Journals.

Everyone has been busy setting their targets in literacy, numeracy and health and well-being. Our targets are all in our online learning journals – please log in and have a look.

In writing we thought about firework safety and created rules to keep everyone safe at the weekend. Look out for our stories appearing on our Learning Journals.

The highlight of our week was the multi-sports festival at James Young High School. We tried badminton, rugby, basketball, football and a mini assault course and we loved all of the activities. It was great to try so many new skills!

Have a great weekend.

Mrs Howley, Mrs Keegan and P2/3

Visitors at work in P1R

We don’t know where to begin with today’s post, we have been so busy and have so many things we want to tell you about!

Reading has been the topic of discussion as we are all really excited about our new reading books and the Fry’s words we have been learning. Everyone enjoyed the Fry’s word challenge to see who could spell the most Fry’s words correctly before the timer ended – the highest score was 14!! During our reflective reading time we read aloud and spoke about the stories. Mrs Roy, Miss McGuire, Mrs Stewart and even our buddies were really impressed with us all!! We can’t wait to see what next week’s books will be about…

In phonics we have been learning 2 new sounds – b and f. Ask us at home where in our mouth these sounds come from. We did lots of blending work using the new sounds are getting more confident at wordbuilding.

Storywriting was very mysterious when Mrs Roy turned up in our classroom dressed as a witch! She showed us an animation of a Haunted House and we had to think about WOW words to describe what we saw. Then we worked on a story about the animation. We all tried our best to write the sounds we could hear in words and some of us were also using our Fry’s words in our sentences.

Miss McGuire has been leading our number lessons and she has been teaching us all about number stories to help us with addition. Ask us what number stories we know for 3,4 and 5. We have used different resources in our carousels to help us with this – ladybird pictures, counters, cubes, smartboard games, pumpkin seeds, ipad games and lots more. Next week we will look at missing number sums using the facts we have learned to see if we can make links in our learning.

IDL was our favourite this week as we had a visit from Elvis the Elf with a letter from Santa. Santa has asked us to be honorary elves this term and help him get everything ready for Christmas. He asked us to write down our ideas on our visible plan and in our talking book. Remember to have a look at these next week when you visit the classroom for Parent’s Evening.

In RE we are learning about God’s Holy Book and have been listening to some Bible stories – The Great Flood and The Secret Baby. We also learned about the Feast of All Saints and attended a whole school mass. We all tried really hard to join in with the prayers and hymns. Mrs Roy was very proud of us all!

We also started our structured play afternoon on Thursday, we all got to plan, do and reflect, ask us what we chose for our play afternoon. Have a look at our learning through play display next week to see some of our pictures. Mrs Roy, Miss McGuire and Mrs Stewart enjoyed playing with us and having fun!

Phew, what a week, well done everyone!!! Can’t wait for more exciting learning opportunities next week…

Little rays of sunshine

The sun has been shining outside and P1R have been little rays of sunshine in class this week!

Our buddies came to visit on Tuesday morning to do some paired reading with us, we were all really excited to see them. They read to us using the library books we had chosen last week. We can’t wait to see them again next week.

We didn’t learn any new sounds this week, instead we spent time practising all the ones we have learned already – m,c,p,s,t,n,a,i,ck,k. We are really good at recognising them in colour or when they are all black. It was fun trying to make words using 3 sounds at a time. We’ve learned that if we say them slowly to begin with, then faster, it helps us say the words, eg. m-a-t says mat, t-i-n says tin. Mrs Roy has asked us to keep practising this at school and at home, it’s called oral blending. We enjoyed using playdough to make the shapes of the letters during our carousel.

In maths we had our final week of learning about numbers to 10 making sure we are all confident in counting, writing the numbers and ordering the numbers. We had some new activities at carousels this week, some of our favourites were lollipop ordering and threading beads. Ask us at home about what we did.

We took advantage of the lovely weather this week and took Trex for a walk. The children decided to go to Dedridge Primary School as this was somewhere we had talked about in class. On our walk we stopped at various points when we saw something of interest – Bernice spotted the local shop, Lloyd spotted the Chinese Take-Away, Paul M spotted Dedridge Primary School, Paul L spotted the big bridge. We also chatted about the importance of using the underpass as the road is very busy in Dedridge. Everyone was very well behaved and passers by commented on this, I was a very proud teacher!! When we returned to class we made a lovely collage of all the places we saw, it’s on display in our P1 area, remember to have a look when you’re next in school. We also wrote super stories about walk and Dawid and Rafay were our star writers – well done boys!

Our wellbeing is very important to us and we are trying to create a wellbeing culture in our classroom. Every morning we check in with Mrs Roy and Mrs Stewart and discuss how we are feeling before recording this on our wellbeing chart. We have also enjoyed circle time and circle games allowing us to work together and share our thoughts. In October our GIRFEC focus is Healthy so we are taking time to discuss this and make sure we are looking after ourselves at school. We are now brushing our teeth daily at school and have all been given lovely new toothbrushes. As well as this we have our 2 slots in the gym hall for physical activities and take part in the daily mile.

We ended the week with a learning conversation with Mrs Purdie, James, Lucy and Ephraim chose to go along to Mrs Purdie’s office with our talking book to discuss their learning. They enjoyed this and especially liked meeting with the nursery children to look at their floorbook too!

Have a great weekend!

P2/3 Weekly News

It has been a short but busy week in Primary 2/3!

We celebrated ‘International Day of Peace on Wednesday and looked at international symbols of peace then we chose to create individual ‘Rainbows of Peace’. Our rainbows were used to create a ‘Path of Peace’ to our friends at Dedridge Primary School on Friday morning.

We were so pleased to see Father Kenneth when he dropped into our class on Thursday morning and loved telling him all about our writing on St Ninian last week.

On Thursday we started our Big Writing lesson with a VCOP game where we threw a ‘snowball’ with a mystery word on it to each table. The person who caught the ‘snowball’ had to come up with an interesting sentence which included the mystery word. The sentences were very creative!

In Science this week we investigated weather, finding out about thunder and lightning. Next week we’re investigating rainfall and would really appreciate it if anyone has any empty 2 litre plastic bottles which they could send in.

Today we all went to our new committees – everyone had chosen the committee which they would like to be on. Everyone loved being part of their committee and working with children from all stages across the school.

We’re continuing to improve our fitness with the Daily Mile and getting fitter each week.

Have a lovely weekend!

Mrs Howley, Mrs Keegan and P2/3