RE – St Ninian's Primary School

P3 Weekly Round Up!

What a fantastic week it has been in P3!

Routines and Behaviour

Mrs Scott and Mrs Conway have been SO impressed this week with the behaviour in P3! On Thursday we had almost everyone on our praise board 🙂 fantastic! We have been trying so hard with the routines in class – to help us listen to instructions, follow directions, show we are READY to learn, show RESPECT to our classmates and staff and to keep ourselves and others SAFE.

We have recently started earning table points which the boys and girls are really enjoying – if you are spotted being good, being organised, being ready to learn, being a good friend (amongst other things!) you can earn your table 10 points – the winning table at the end of each day get a special prize! We are thinking about team work and what makes a good team 🙂 ask your child if their table has won, and if they have any ideas to help their table earn table points next week.

Literacy

We have continued to work on our WORD BOOST work. This week we read ‘Beware of Girls’. Our boost words were;

damp

cottage

sniff

grumble

stagger

distant

Can you child use these words in a sentence? We are aiming to build the vocabulary of our children and word boost helps us do that! Does your child know any amazing words that would make us go WOW? Let us know of any next week 🙂

Numeracy and Maths

On Wednesday we managed to consolidate our grid reference work with a Halloween problem solving task. We had Mrs Swann (parent helper) to help with our grid reference colouring challenge. Mrs Swann was so impressed at how little help the boys and girls needed! Well done! Next week Mrs Conway is hoping to introduce the boys and girls to a simple version of Battleships – have you got this game at home? Ask your child if they would like to play to support their learning about grid references 🙂

The boys and girls LOVE learning about place value – especially when we can watch the ‘Place Value Rap’! This is a bit tricky for our boys and girls but has taught us about how we write numbers from left to right, but build numbers from right to left!

We showed maturity and respect at our whole school mass on Thursday to celebrate the feast of All Saints Day. The boys and girls completed lovely prayers to some of the saints we discussed in class. Although the clip below is American, it helped us with our discussions about All Saints.

Committees

This week we had our committee group Friday – we split into our committee groups 9-10am on Friday morning and each of us explore something different through play. Have a look at our school twitter page to get an idea of the kind of activities we have been taking part in!

Have a fantastic weekend!

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!

A week of fun and laughter in P6/7

Our chosen lead learners this week were James and Isla who did a great job of capturing some of the highlights of the week for us to add to our blog and Talking Books.

Literacy

In spelling we worked as a whole class to discuss spelling strategies and words that are commonly misspelled. Each team had to think of as many strategies as they could and then share them with the class. We then focused on 3 of these: make a song, make a mnemonic and does it look right.

We enjoyed this catchy tune to help us with there, their and they’re.

Can you make a mnemonic for the word ‘people’, post your efforts on our blog post for an extra dojo point?

In literacy we also learned about the work of author’s and how many stages it can take before having a finished piece of writing. We had a go at this and tried to up-level our diary entries from last week by revising, editing and redrafting. This led us nicely into an online meeting with Pamela Butchart, author of many children’s books. We logged onto BBCLive to hear about her work and joined in with the session by making sound effects, answering questions, having a go at illustrating and tweeting, we were delighted when we were mentioned on the BBCLive event and Pamela even tweeted us privately after the event!

Inspirational Maths Week

Wow, where do we begin…This week was all about mathematical mindsets and being creative in maths. We started the week by working in teams to create 2D and 3D shapes with a 7 foot piece of rope in the outdoor space. Lots of laughter, confusion, creativity, frustration and success was had by all! We then examined our own mathematical mindsets and carried out a class questionnaire which led for some interesting discussions. We made some mathematical mindset keys for our tables and maths working wall.

We studied the work of a famous artist/sculptor, Sol Lewitt, and how his work connected to mathematics. The best part was then working in teams to create our very own sculptures using marshmallows and cocktails sticks. Mrs Howley had us learning more about symmetry and did some fun activities connected to this.

Thursday was one of the favourite lessons as we, the pupils, led the lesson by sharing the maths activities we had worked on for homework last week, everyone had made a great effort with these.

Throughout the week we also took part in Numbertalks , the Sumdog contest and Mathanagrams. It was great to see some of the parents getting involved to through dojo. Congratulations to Oskar, Shiv, Mia Stewart and Max for completing the 1000 question Sumdog competition and to Mrs Nicol for winning the parents mathanagram quiz on dojo. A big thank you to the parents who also came along to Ninian’s Natter, it was lovely to see you taking part in some of these activities.

On Tuesday the P7 children accompanied their P1 buddies to mass at St Philip’s. It was a lovely morning and well done to the P7’s for taking their roles so seriously and supporting the younger children.We celebrated St Ninian this week and participated in a beautiful mass on Friday morning. Mrs Purdie awarded us some extra playtime to celebrate the day. The Parent Council also organised a fantastic Scottish afternoon to continue the celebrations. Mrs Roy’s quiz team, the numpties, came 2^nd! Everyone got into the spirit and had a fun afternoon!

Have a lovely long weekend, see you all on Wednesday.

Primary 6/7 and Mrs Roy

Weekly update

Another busy week in P1R.

In phonics we met a rude clown who taught us about the ‘Th’ sounds, Mrs Roy made us all stick our tongues out when practising this sound, have a go at home. We played a cool game on the smartboard which revised sh, ch and th where we had to fill the rocket tank with fuel. The game was called Letter Planet and it is on the Topmarks website if you want to play it again. We also made th books and practised spelling th words using magnetic letters.

Subtraction was the focus in numeracy this week and we learned more about mathematical language, did you know there are different words that mean the same as subtraction? We enjoyed playing the Lego subtraction board game with a partner to help us in our numeracy learning and also made subtraction ice cream cones. We also went on a visit to the local shop to finish off our money topic. Everyone had 20p to spend and had to look at the price labels before making our choices. Klaudia and Isla had a great idea to team up and put their money together as they saw something which was 30p, well done girls, good problem solving and teamwork! Nathan found it tricky choosing as there were so many things he liked. Dexter was able to buy 4 things with his 20p, he added the prices together to make 20p.

In RE we were looking after the new life we had planted and we were delighted to see how our seeds had grown. We’ve taken them home now to show our families. We decided to make our Lenten promises and came up with some lovely ideas – Ephraim will help look after his little brother, Brooke will give to the poor, as a class we decided to say an extra prayer every day in school. We also learned about St Patrick while listening to some traditional Irish music – Mrs Docherty visited us to show us her Irish dancing!!

Our pirate adventures continued this week and we all made pirate masks to use in some role-play activities. Isla enjoyed taking videos and pictures as we acted out our pirate adventures. We also wrote stories about being marooned on a desert island which we are going to submit to the Young Writer’s competition. There were some great imaginative ideas and a selection of WOW words.

Continue reading “Weekly update”

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!

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…

Feeling the heat in P1R

What a lovely sunny week we’ve just had although it’s not as bright today!

This week has been another busy one. In Religious Education we have been learning all about Mary and have been saying a Hail Mary every morning before we start our lessons. We watched a short Bible clip and then coloured in a stain glass window for our learning journals.

In maths we have continued to focus on ordering of numbers within 20 as some of us found this tricky last week, we’ve all got much better at it now. We enjoyed playing the loop card game and working in teams to order the numbers quickly before the timer ran out. The boys were victorious beating the girls 2 games to 1! We also played number bingo and a dice game to help us find the number more or less than. As a reward for everyone’s hard work we went outside to play ‘What’s the time Mr Wolf?’, we all remembered our o’clock times.

In literacy we continued to challenge ourselves by reading and spelling s blend words, everyone did really well with this. Our spelling and reading continues to get better each day and we love to beat our highest scores in our tricky words.

IDL has been fun this week as we have been learning about the parts of the body and the skeleton. We all made moving people, cotton bud skeletons and labelled the body parts correctly. Have a look at our class display when you’re here for Parent’s Evening. We also listened to some stories and songs about skeletons.

Preparations have begun for our class assembly which is in 2 weeks time. All the children have been issued with a speaking part to learn as part of their homework – well done to the children who know this by heart already! We will try to find some time next week to get the microphones out and practise using these. Congratulations to our friends in P1D who did their assembly today – you were awesome!

Next week as you know will be our annual Health Week, a letter has been issued today and there is further information on our class story on dojo. I will update this daily with the next day’s activities to ensure everyone comes prepared. Get lots of rest over the weekend as we’ll be really busy next week, hopefully the sun keeps shining!!

P1R weekly news

Although it’s been a short week we’ve managed to cram it full of learning!

In maths we have been ordering numbers within 20 and identifying largest/smallest numbers. We worked independently, with partners or as part of a team.

In our CLIC lessons we have been doing lots of counting. Here is the link for our favourite song, give it a go over the weekend!

In literacy things have got pretty tricky as we are now learning initial blends focusing on ‘s’ blends this week, eg. sm, st, sw, etc. The children quickly picked this up and could guess what the word was going to be from its initial sounds. We also got some time to do a Fry’s word spelling test and some us can now spell 32 words independently – good job everyone! Try this game which helps you learn blends. Here is a picture of Ana playing it in class.

http://www.literactive.com/Download/live.asp?swf=story_files/bowling_alley_US.swf

In IDL and RE this week we have been discussing our families and how they are all different. It was lovely hearing the children talk so lovingly about their families. We made some lovely family trees using collage materials and different coloured handprints for every family member.

Last week the children made some ‘Me’ bags as part of their IDL homework, we presented these to one another this week and had fun looking at all the things that made the children happy, eg. photographs of memories, sweets, toys, jewellery, etc. Well done to all the children that made these, you earned extra dojo points!

We continued our inter house championship in PE and learned about sprinting this week. We all had a go at racing one another making sure we were using our arms and legs properly. Next week we hope to go outside and try sprinting on the new tracks on the upper field.

To finish off the week Miss Meechan brought some surprise visitors to our class, Jinky and Joey, her pet guinea pigs. Some of us had a cuddle with them. Thanks Miss Meechan!

I hope you are all outside enjoying the warmer weather, hope to see some of you tomorrow at our Summer Fayre 10-12pm!

Feeling happy in P1R

What a busy week it’s been.

In literacy the children have been learning the ng sound. They have been playing sound bingo, reading sentences with ng words and playing games on the smartboard. They are really confident at recognising Fry’s words and punctuation as you can see from these pictures.

In maths we have been counting objects up to 20 and have enjoyed some noisy warm ups with our counting songs.

Feelings have been the theme in IDL and we’ve had some great discussions. We listened to some music and had to guess what emotion it sounded like then drew feelings faces. We then made a feelings wheel using lines and colours for different emotions. These are now on our class display.

The competition continued in PE and this week we learned how to throw a javelin. Ask your child the rhyme which helps them remember how to do this. Kyle and Filip were very good at this and threw their javelins the furthest.

I was very proud of all of the children this morning when they led mass at St Philip’s. They all showed how responsible they could be and the parishioners commented on this. WELL DONE BOYS AND GIRLS!

Counting fun in Primary One!

It’s been a busy week in P1R with lots of learning and fun!

In maths we have continued to develop our understanding of numbers and have been using songs and games to help us achieve this. One of our favourite games has been paint splat, working out numbers before, after and between. Try it out for yourself on our maths resources blog.

We also enjoyed looking for dot patterns and explaining to the rest of the class how we worked out the answer. Here’s what some of the boys and girls said about this pattern:

“I counted the dots one by one”

“I just knew it was 5”

“I counted the 4 on the outside, then added the 1 in the middle”

Image result for number dot patterns

Look at this dot pattern and tell someone how many dots there are and explain how you worked out the answer. Leave us a comment below.

Image result for number dot patterns

In IDL we planned our new topic, “All about me”, the children came up with some really good ideas which we’ll keep you posted about in our weekly blog posts. This week the focus was on ‘We are all different’, the children took part in discussions, listened to songs, wrote personal descriptions, made a torn paper portrait and did an eye colour survey. I think you’ll agree that they managed to cover a lot of subject areas using their IDL theme.

We also started our inter-house championship in PE, this week’s event was high jump. Everyone tried their best to master the scissor jump and the children loved when the bar got higher and higher! Well done to Oma, Alice and Dominic who were our house winners this week for the event.

Next week we will be trying out the new route for our daily mile, watch this space for an update on how we get on. Some of the route will now be on grass so try to remember trainers for next week.

Well done to all the children for participating in Ninian’s Natter this week, all the children have now had a learning conversation with myself to review last term’s goals and set new ones. If you didn’t make Ninian’s Natter ask them about their goals, we will continue to review these as the term progresses.

Last thing to mention is today’s Achievement Assembly, our class winner was Harry who was chosen for showing creativity in his work – well done!

See you all next week, remember our class mass is on Thursday 28th April at 9.30am in St Philip’s (wee chapel), it would be nice to see some parents/families there to support the children.