PE – Page 2 – St Ninian's Primary School

Amazing P2/3 News!

What a busy week it has been in Primary 2/3!!

One of the highlights of our week has been the West Lothian Sumdog Challenge. Everyone has worked so hard to achieve a great score. We’ve been working at home, working in school and even had to set up a relay team in class. We were delighted to achieve 34th place out of 211 classes.

The children would also like to share some more highlights:

Oma – I liked our maths carousel because we get to self-assess our work and this helps me learn.

Harry – I liked doing PE because we were working on tennis skills.

Maya Kasia and Annayah – I liked Sumdog because you can play games at the same time as you learn.

Michelle and Dominic – I liked working on ‘green for growth’ because it helps me learn.

Maeve – I liked researching the history of the Egyptian Pharaohs. We used Google to help our research.

Brooke and Andrew – I liked watching the P3 assembly today.

Kuba and Pawel – I liked the literacy carousel because I worked on handwriting, spelling, reflective reading and guided reading.

Levente – I liked working on writing subtraction sums and subtracting tens and units. It was hard at first but it got easier.

Chloe – I liked spelling today because it helps me learn words to use in my story writing on Thursdays.

Alishba – I liked handwriting because it helps me join letters and I get better and better.

Carly – I liked when we wrote about our friends in Big Writing.

Angel – I liked my learning conversation because we talked about my learning and mummies and pyramids.

A busy week in Primary 2/3

It has been another busy week in Primary 2/3 with lots and lots of learning going on! Some of our highlights are:

Andrew – I liked designing a coffin for a mummy. We had to do lots of research first.

Michelle- I liked using the new Heinemann textbooks because I’m getting better at numbers.

Matthew – I liked taking away numbers this week. I used a number square to help me.

Carly – I liked doing our spelling test because it helps me learn words. We keep learning from our mistakes.

Brooke – I liked doing chimney sums in maths. We’re getting really good at them!

Jakub, Annayah, Pawel, Levente, James and Harry – I liked Big Writing when we wrote book reviews for the Killer Cat

Rachel – I liked today’s assembly because pupils from St Margaret’s came to talk to us about SCIAF.

Alishba – I liked when we were doing music with Mrs Steele. We got to dance!

Dominic – I liked doing Sumdog and I’m excited about the West Lothian contest.

Chloe and Maeve – I liked doing art when we made pictures of camels and pyramids.

Maya – I liked working in pairs on Heinemann Active Maths. Its fun working in pairs and it helps you learn.

Zuzanna and Kasia – I liked PE because we were learning tennis skills.

Oma – I liked investigating mummies in Ancient Egypt.

Calvin – I liked working in teams to make posters showing a healthy school in health and well-being.

Have a great weekend!

from Primary 2/3, Mrs Howley and Mrs Keegan

Bookworms in P1R

What a busy week it has been, we have lots of things to share with you this week.

As the title suggest books have been a big focus in school as we celebrated World Book Day, lots of us dressed us as characters from books.

Our P7 buddies continue to visit us weekly to do paired reading during smart start time. We always look forward to their visits. The PM nursery also visited us this week for a shared reading session with Mrs Young. The boys and girls from the nursery have started their transition programme so will be visiting us more often. James commented that he remembered coming to P1 for World Book Day when be was a nursery boy. How time flies… We decided to become authors in our writing lesson and made our very own picture books. We had to remember to put a title, author, page numbers and pictures, just like in real books. Here are some of the titles chosen by the children:

Lloyd – The Busy Road

Lucy- The Busy teacher

Brooke – The wizard of Oz

Nathan- The tornado

Everyone wrote independently and some even took on the fantastic challenge to add sentences to their stories. Dawid asked if we could go and share our stories with Mrs Purdie AKA Gangsta Granny so that’s what we did. We have also downloaded some new ebooks on our iPads, ask us what ones we have read this week.

Money has still been the main focus in mathematics. We have been learning about more coins this week, 20p, 50p,£1, £2. We all agree that the pounds are the trickiest to remember. Next week we will focus on number names to 10 as we noticed that many coins have the words written on them but we sometimes found it tricky to read them. One of our favourite activities was coin rubbing although sometimes the coins moved around as we rubbed! Try some more rubbing at home, this is one of the homework tasks on the maths menu this term.

In PE we continued to practise our skills in hockey, dribbling, passing, tackling and shooting. Mr Mc Curdy was so impressed with us that he let us play small matches.

On Tuesday we learned about Shrove Tuesday, a day when we have a feast before the beginning of Lent. Mrs Caskie kindly brought in pancakes for us to join in with the celebrations. Then the next day we changed our altar colour to purple as this is the colour for Lent. We also added some daffodils to our altar to represent new beginnings, a sign of Spring, thank you to James for bringing these in. We all joined in with the Ash Wednesday service then came back to class to do some self portrait pictures using pencils and charcoal for the ashes on our foreheads. P4 also did their class assembly about Lent helping us understand more about this important time in the church year. The week ended with a visit from some boys and girls who go to St Margaret’s but used to come to St Ninian’s, they told us all about Malawi and how we can help children who love there. During Lent we are going to try to fill some bags with gifts for the Malawi children.

One last thing to share, we had some visitors in our classroom on Tuesday, they were impressed with how hard everyone was working on their phonics tasks, well done boys and girls, Mrs Roy is very proud of you all! You are all super stars!

Celebrating our 40th Anniversary

This has been a really special week as we celebrated our 40th Anniversary on Wednesday. Archbishop Cushley celebrated mass with us which was really lovely. We all felt very special and joined in with the singing and mass responses. The celebrations continued onThursday when it was our Superhero funday. We did arts and crafts, had a special Goldentime, had a piece of anniversary cake and then finished the day with a superhero movie! Thank you to all the P3-P7 children who invited us to their dress rehearsal on Friday, we all thought you were awesome!

In literacy the focus was still on ai and oa. Having a second week on these sounds has helped us become more confident in word building and reading. We really liked the ai board game activity,we worked with an elbow partner to take it in turns to roll the dice and read the ai words. We really impressed Mrs Roy at the muddled sentences station,we worked with a partner to read the words and put them in the right order. We used our knowledge of punctuation to help us. We have added some new phonics apps to our iPads and had great fun trying them out.

Subtraction has been our focus in numeracy and we introduced the number line for taking away. We also remembered last week’s rule when writing subtraction stories, start with the biggest number first. Everyone enjoys using the interactive dice on the smartboard to help us choose numbers for our subtraction sums.

Our pirate adventure is in full flow as we on have our own pirate ship and lots of work on display. Mrs Thomson helped us make our own cutlasses which look amazing! We learned about what pirates like to do in their spare time as this was something we had wrote on our learning wall at the beginning of the topic. Then we had an afternoon of being a pirate and trying out some of their favourite hobbies – playing card games, singing, dancing, telling pirate stories, making own our music with recorders.

In PE we have been trying really hard to perfect our balances, jumps and rolls in gymnastics. We have been peer assessing one another by watching each other and then thinking of 2 stars and a wish to say about their performance. We also learned how to link our movements to make a sequence.

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:

Nursery News

This has been Cool to be Kind week in both school and nursery. In Nursery we had two special visitors arrive to help us think about how we could be kind. They were called the Kindness Elves and they had even sent us a letter! The letter said that they would be setting us challenges and looking to see all the kind things we could do in the nursery and we can also write them letters too! We all had a discussion about what rules we could have in our Nursery Charter and wrote some ideas in our talking book. The Kindness Elves are going to help us next week to decide which rules we will put up on our charter which is next to where the elves are going to be staying as they liked being in our nursery so much. There is a picture of the elves on our Facebook page and you are also more than welcome to come and see them in their little house. The children would be delighted to show you😊

As part of this special week’s focus we had an achievement assembly on Thursday and Miss Smyth got a surprise in her office when a letter appeared from the Kindness Elves with the names of the children who had tried really hard this week to be kind and they had even left special certificates for them.

Our AM children were Seren and Isabelle and our PM children were Mark D and Jiya.Well done for being our stars of the week.

We have also started practising this week for our Nursery Nativity which is on Tuesday 6th December at 10 am and 2pm save the date for what will be a very special event😊

To finish off our week we celebrated Children in Need by wearing spots or pyjamas. We made spotty headbands and pictures and danced to Pudsey music. We collected 80 pounds which was fantastic. Thank you to everyone for their kind donations.

We have also been continuing in PE with improving our fitness and have been working with both Mr McCurdy and Primary 7 to go round different fitness stations. It was great fun but hard work!

This week it is the turn of our PM children to share their learning.

Milena, Hanna and Jiya ” We love playing with the magnets”

Emilie M ” I like drawing pictures”

Mark D and Kayla ” We like building with the big bricks”

Syzmon” I like the sand”

Emalie ” I like doing jigsaws”

Some events coming up soon. This Tuesday 22nd November both AM and PM will be recording Christmas songs which will be put onto a Christmas C.D which will be available to buy at our Christmas Fun Day in school on 2nd December. Every class in the school will also be singing a song for this C.D. On Thursday 24th November will be family and individual photographs. For parents of new Primary 1 children coming to school next August there will be an information evening on Thursday 1st December at 6p.m.

We are always looking for ways of improving our Nursery and we really appreciate your ideas and feedback. In the entrance of the Nursery we have put up pink and green pieces of paper along with post it notes of the same colour. Pink for things you think we are doing well and green for any ideas you may have for us to take forward. Please write up your thoughts on the post its the Nursery team would love to hear your feedback.

If you have any questions regarding any of the above information please ask any member of the Nursery team who will be happy to help you.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery team.😊

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

Nursery News

First of all we would like to thank all the parents and carers who came along last night to our Ninians Natter. It was lovely to see you all and we hope you found it helpful and informative. Don’t worry if you didn’t manage along please ask any member of the Nursery Team and they will be happy to share what we discussed.

This week it is the turn of our PM children to share what they have enjoyed doing in Nursery.

Mark ” I learned about making things. I made a house in the construction area.”

Kayla ” We made a stage so we could all sing and play instruments.”

Liam” We have made rainbow fish for the wall”

Riley and Emilie ” We like playing in the sand”

Jiya ” I like the play dough”

Robert ” I like building things”

A little update from our AM children they have been very busy in all areas of the Nursery and have even been writing their own plans for our new Planning wall which is fantastic.

We continue to welcome new children to our St Ninian’s family and we are very proud of our older children who have made them so welcome and looked after them. You are all superstars.

In P.E. with Mr McCurdy the children were learning how to use all areas of the hall and developing their coordination skills using hoops. Even the teachers had a go!

Just to let you know that paper copies of the Nursery calendar for the year are now available in the Nursery. However if you receive our weekly Nursery update via email on a Monday you will receive an electronic one plus the Nursery handbook in the next few weeks.

A little reminder that Nursery is closed on Monday and Tuesday. We look forward to welcoming the children back on Wednesday 21st.

Have a lovely holiday weekend.

The Nursery Team.

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!

Busy bees in P1R

This has been a very busy week for P1R as for two mornings they worked in the P7 classroom to allow the nursery children to spend some time in the P1 classrooms in preparation for next session. The children enjoyed sitting on the ‘big chairs’ and working at the ‘big tables’. As always the children showed how responsible they were and continued with their carousel activities in the P7 classroom.

In literacy we have been revising all the sounds we have learned by doing lots of word building and spelling activities. Next week we will focus on the alphabet particularly looking at vowels/consonants/alphabetical order/letter names in preparation for P2. Mrs Gardner was working with the children on their Fry’s words and they all ‘blew her socks off’ as they know so many words now -well done everyone!!

In maths we have been learning about estimation, which to begin with was tricky. We have been estimating in our carousel activities, here are some of the activities we did: guess how many cubes will fit in our shoes?, measuring with cubes, estimation games on the smartboard, and many more. We all agreed that we are making more ‘accurate’ estimates now.

In IDL we started a mini-topic about minibeasts and enjoyed playing guess who?, writing our very own clues for a guess who game, matching minibeasts, drawing minibeasts and learning about minibeast habitats.

Here were some of the clues the children made up, see if you can guess the minibeast they are describing:

” I have 8 legs and I make webs. I eat insects. I am creepy and black.” Dominic

“I fly beside water. You can almost see through my wings. I have a sharp tail.” James

“I have black spots and I can fly. I have six legs. I am red and black.” Alice

“Butterfly’s are beautiful and pretty and they can fly. They are colourful. They like to go to warm places.” Oma

PE was great fun as we learned a new game, ‘Rounders’. Everyone listened carefully to the rules then split into 2 teams – fielders and batters. I was really impressed at how quickly everyone picked up the rules and we all had good fun out in the sunshine.

Have a lovely weekend everyone!! (Sorry no pictures, technical issues with blog this week)