Play – St Ninian's Primary School

Nursery News

The children have had a wonderful Halloween week in nursery. Dressing up and dookin on Tuesday then a Halloween hunt on our fundraiser sponsored walk on Wednesday. New pipes and hoses in the water tray caused great interest on Thursday and we ended the week with a fantastic assembly all about kindness and how our kindness can colour the world. I’m sure your children colour your world, but they most certainly colour ours. Thank you all so much for your support during our Care Inspectorate inspection this week. We are delighted with the feedback given and will share the news when we get our final report.

Have a great weekend everybody!! from the Nursery Team xx

NEXT WEEK

Monday – GIRFEC – ‘ACHIEVING’

School photos, siblings can be included from nursery in these.

Can we please ask for any Sponsor forms to be back in today x.

Tuesday – Library Visit at 9.30 am and 1.30 pm.

Wednesday – Breakfast Blether at 8.30 with Mrs Mushet and Noon Natter at 12.00, any parent is invited to come along and have a chat about the nursery and our vision for the future.

Thursday – P.E.

Friday – Ladies Night.

Winter Ready – Nursery

Nursery

If nursery is closed due to bad weather you are welcome to try some of these challenges. You can bring any pictures, models or photos in to show

*Share stories together – use your bedtime read pack, check out ‘storyline online’ on YouTube, talk about what might happen and/or at the end recap on what did happen

*If you have access to a laptop or computer, visit Curious George’s Busy Day website to play some ICT games
Make a snowman – take a photo!

*Talk about the weather and the seasons together.

*Find a recipe you can make together – can your child get an opportunity to weigh, measure, chop, pour, grate whilst being supported by you?

*Play a game together – if you don’t have any board games or dominoes, play X’s and O’s

*Do a jigsaw, alone or supported by a parent/sibling.

*Can you draw patterns, shapes, letters in the snow with a stick? Take a photo and share with us!

*Paint, draw, dress up, pretend.. Get creative and use your imagination!

*PLAY! TALK! Share a meal together! Enjoy the time together <3

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

What a wonderful week we have had at nursery! All of our August starts have joined us and we have been very proud of how involved they have become in the activities in our nursery.

We have got almost all of our EE2 forms back from parents – please return these asap as our outdoor learning days depend on them 🙂 in our nursery Welcome area we have all sorts of sign up sheets next week! Take a minute when dropping off or picking up to read over them and sign where suits..

PEEP Sign up

Outdoor Learning Parent Helper Sign Up

Stay and Play/Come Back and Play Sign Up

We value our parents, carers and families very much and thank you for your continued support.

The boys and girls have learned so much this week! We are exploring our changed nursery environment and learning about independent, collaborative and imaginative play across all areas. We have been really interested in the old cameras and have used these in both the morning and the afternoon. Mrs Macdonald has got some photo albums and we hope that parents/carers will bring in some photos from home to help us fill these 🙂 we will also look to get the photos printed that the children take in the nursery.

The Travelling Teddies are back out and about on adventures this weekend! We can’t wait to see what they have been up to 🙂

Mrs Conway was blown away this week by the fantastic skills the boys and girls are developing around the snack table. Last week the AM group used pictures of food and a weekly timetable to choose snack for the week ahead. This week was the turn of the PM group. Once we chose, we then wrote shopping lists to include everything we needed to buy. Some children helped order the food online to be delivered the the nursery. At the snack area we have chopped cucumber, carrots, strawberries and bananas in preparation for snack time. The boys and girls also spread butter on their own crackers this week – which provides them with a wonderful opportunity to build up skills in food and health education. We would love to see some photos of the boys and girls helping to prepare food at home!

A wonderful week and we can’t wait for the next

Nursery News!

We have had a busy week at St Ninian’s nursery this week.

In transition the boys and girls have had their ‘moving up mornings’ and enjoyed getting to know their new teachers – Miss Meechan and Miss Boyes. They were missed in the nursery in the AM group where we were depleted in numbers, in the PM group we were very impressed with how well they joined in after a busy morning at school! Next week in transition we will have our ‘lunch hall experience’ in groups.

Red Group – Monday

Blue Group – Tuesday

Green Group – Thursday

Children and parents should report to the school office at 11.45am. The children will go to the dinner hall and the parents will get the opportunity to chat to Miss Boyes and Miss Meechan in the hub. The kitchen staff have all the chosen options for lunches but will also provide the children with a wee ‘taster’ of the other trays so they can see how a school dinner is served and the kinds of food it has 🙂

We are fast approaching the end of term and as such life in the school and nursery is very busy!

This week in addition to the transition lunches we also have NURSERY SPORTS DAY! Please send your child in a tshirt/jumper the same colour as their group on sports day 🙂 it will be weather dependent but we are hopeful for some sun to come and shine through for us! Parents and families are invited to come and watch (and cheer us on!) – 10 – 11am for morning group and 2 – 3pm for afternoon group. Get running around this weekend so you have built up your fitness!

We have been chatting lots about summer this week and have changed our seasons display from Spring to Summer. There have been some lovely summer pictures drawn and great discussions had. The AM floorbook has some ideas from the boys and girls about summer which we will use to plan learning over the next week 🙂

School has been a big talking point this week and the addition of school uniform to the dress up area has been very popular! The ties have been like gold dust – we are thinking that the boys and girls might like to make some of their own next week so that everyone can have one 🙂

We had a good turn out at our parents coffee moring – all feedback is recorded in the talking books. We are looking to enhance our outdoor learning provision next session and would value very much your views on this 🙂 there was some great discussion between staff and parents on Wednesday which will help us in our planning of these developments for next session!

Have a lovely weekend everyone – see you next week!

P1M Weekly News

We have been lending a helping hand this week. Can you remember one of the letters we received from Santa asking us to become honorary elves and help him prepare for Christmas in his workshop. So… meet the P1M elves…

We have been helping Santa through our Play: Plan, Do, Review sessions. Read on to find out about how we have been helping Santa.

Just Play?

Red: (Maths: Measurement and Pattern) Santa has needed us to help him wrap up presents. We have to estimate how much wrapping paper we need to wrap up presents, we have been very good at measuring out the correct amount of paper. Santa doesn’t have much wrapping paper though and he has needed us to design some wrapping paper. He likes his wrapping paper to have a pattern though so we must make sure we create a pattern. We also must remember to write a label on the present after we have wrapped it.

Blue: (Literacy: Writing) We MUST write our letters to Santa! How will Santa know what presents we want if we don’t write him a letter? We know how to format a letter correctly (where the address goes). After we have wrote our letter we need to put it in an envelope. We have also been learning about stamps, if we want our letter to get to Santa really quickly we know to look out for a number 1 on a stamp. It is also very important to write Santa’s name and address on the envelope before we post it in the special Santa’s postbox.

Yellow: (Literacy: Writing) Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a Christmas card! At this station we design, create and write our Christmas cards. We each have a special folder just outside our classroom, if we receive a card, the sender posts the card in our special folder. This is quite tricky as we have to try really hard to read our peers names. We love checking our folders at the end of the day to see if we have been given a card.

Green: (Maths: Patterns) Santa has been so busy that he hasn’t had time to decorate his workshop. He has asked us to make decorations for him – Christmas cracker and baubles for his tree. But remember, Santa loves patterns! We need to make sure our designs follow a pattern. We have been using a range of different materials at this station – foam shapes, pom-poms, stickers, glue, crayon, glitter – it has been a bit messy! I’m sure Santa will love his decorations!

Purple: (Literacy: Listening and Talking; Imaginative Story Telling) We have been pretending to be Santa and his friends. At this station we can make a Christmas themed mask and act out a story with our peers. It is important that we take turns and allow each other to have a turn at talking during story telling. Miss Meechan has been enjoying listening to the different stories we have created.

Orange: (Maths: Data Handling) Santa needs to know all about toys that people want this Christmas. We need to separate the toys into categories for him. We look through toy catalogues and pick out some toys and stick them into the correct category. Kerr was sorting out girls toys and boys toys. Adam and Sophie were sorting out big toys and small toys. We hope this helps Santa get ready for Christmas.

In the Christmas spirit now? This week we have started rehearsing for our nativity show! We have all been working so hard during our performances. We can’t wait to practise on the stage next week! Well done boys and girls, I have been very proud of how hard you have been working rehearsing your songs and lines.

Even with all of this going on we have still squeezed in lots of other learning tasks! We are working extra hard with our addition. This week we have been working on ordering an addition number sentence. We know that the biggest number in an addition sentence always goes at the end (after the equals sign) because when you add two numbers together the total is always more. We played this game on the smart board to help us understand this concept more:

http://www.oswego.org/ocsd-web/games/SumSense/sumadd.html

We have been working on our imaginative writing this week. Our stimulus for our writing lesson this week was this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEpiCEPkX7o

We then had to think about if we were that little girl, where we would like a bubble to take us. Stefan wanted his bubble to take him to see the Mona Lisa! Jakub wanted his bubble to take him to the dessert. Kyle wanted his bubble to take him to the sky. Ask your child where they wanted their bubble to take them?

We enjoy having learning conversations with our teacher. During this time we look at our dreams, check if we have achieved these dreams and set a new one if we need to. We also talk to Miss Meechan about what we enjoy at school and we can tell her if there is anything that is concerning us. One of our focuses for this month has been ‘achieving’. We have been self-assessing how we feel about our achievements, we keep this sheet in our special yellow folder in our classroom. Here are some of the dreams we have set this week:

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan and P1M

P1M Weekly News

Here are our highlights of this week in P1M:

We are loving our Play: Plan, Do, Review sessions – this week was our last sessions with a literacy focus. The focus for our play for the next two weeks will be numeracy. We shall update you next week with the different tasks. One of the play sessions this week, Miss Meechan joined in with the puppet theatre group. During this, Stefan and Kerr acted out the vowel house story using puppets.We then showed off our actions for sounds we know. Daniel showed us the ‘c’ and ‘o’ sound actions and Kerr showed us the ‘ee’ sound action. This week, Kerr also built a lego vowel house – great job!

Our sounds for the next week have been ‘f’ and ‘b’. Check out the ‘f’ and ‘b’ jolly phonics songs on youtube – we really like the ‘b’ song. We found that ‘b’ is quite a tricky sound as it very similar to the ‘p’ sound we already know but we all worked really hard and can now easily tell the difference – ‘p’ is a quiet sound and ‘b’ is a loud sound. Below are some pictures of us learning more about the ‘f’ sound. Jarred made the word ‘fan’ with the spelling stones; Rutendo is finding words beginning with ‘f’ on the smart board; Stefan is practising the correct formation for the letter ‘f’ and Romera and Poppy are playing ‘f’ sound bingo.

This week has been our first week using reading books in class. We have loved getting our books and reading them aloud in class. We now have a reading buddy in primary 6 and every Wednesday morning one of the P6 children will join us to read together. We will be reading our reading books, the books we have chosen from the library as well as practising our tricky words. Ask your children who their reading buddy is.

We have started our ‘fitness’ block of learning in PE. We are learning about developing our fitness levels and participating in a range of different activities to help with this. What was your favourite activity this week?

Our writing skills are getting better and better. This week we were shown a picture of a haunted house. We thought that it was an old empty house but we soon spotted that there was a light on in a window in the house. We wondered who might be living in this house? We have some fantastic ideas! Who did you think lives in the house? When we were writing our story Miss Meechan asked us to try to use finger spaces between all of our words. We were given finger spacer helpers to remind us to use spaces between words. Below is a picture of Partryk using a finger spacer; Jarred is showing us his picture of a haunted house he coloured in and he wrote on it ‘beware’ – fantastic! Kerr is also showing off his story writing. His story says: “2 vampires live in the haunted house.”

Did you hear about our special visitor this week? On Thursday Rudolph appeared just outside our classroom! He was holding an envelope and we guessed that it must be a letter for us inside. We thought that the letter might be from Santa – and it was!! The letter asked us to be honorary elves! WOW! Santa is going to need lots of help this year and he needs us to help him. Our first task was to think about ideas for our new topic ‘Santa’s Workshop’ – what can we do to help Santa? Have a look at our ideas?

Our last highlight of this week was our ‘health and wellbeing’ focus. We are constantly working on turn taking, sharing and playing fairly. On Thursday, Miss Meechan set up lots of games in the hall for us to participate in. All of the games involved us sharing and taking turns. We were all really good at this and Miss Meechan heard some beautiful manners from the children when they were playing!

What a busy week! I wonder what job Santa will ask us to do next week…

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…

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

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.”