Reflective learners – St Ninian's Primary School

What a fantastic first term we have all had in P1M. We have all settled in to school life so well and everyone has such fantastic attitudes towards learning. Well done P1M!

Our numeracy focuses for this week have been counting and recognising numbers and addition. We are working really hard in these areas and our mental addition is improving every day. One of our activities this week was quite tricky but so much fun. Miss Meechan showed us some counters and then covered them up with a piece of paper. She then showed us some counters which she added underneath the paper and we had to say how many counters were under the paper now. This is something that you could try at home too. Here are a few games that we have played this week for you to try at home too:

http://www.iboard.co.uk/iwb/Adding-Two-Dice-716

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/learning-to-count/ladybird-spots

Can you spot Trex doing his addition work?! Trex even earned some dojo points this week too!

We have been working so hard on our writing these past few weeks. We are all trying so hard with our spelling and we are listening carefully for all of the sounds that we know to help us spell correctly. This week we even used some of our tricky words in our writing – great work everyone! For our writing lesson this week we were asked to recall and write about our trip to the park. Miss Meechan gave us some photographs of us playing at the park. We showed our partner our photographs and used our talking and listening skills to discuss these with our peers. Here are some examples of our writing this week:

Jarred: “At the park I was on the slide.”

Esmee: “At the park I was swinging.”

Kaitlyn: “At the park I was climbing.”

Sophie: “At the park I was playing in the tunnel.”

This week we really enjoyed our structured play session. There were lots of different tasks for us to participate in. Next term we are going to introduce 3 ‘play: plan, do, review’ sessions each week. These sessions will offer literacy and numeracy activities and allow us to learn through play. We are really looking forward to this. Look out for our ‘Just Play?’ display in our classroom.

We really enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on our learning in our Ninians Natter this week. We completed a few different activities. With Miss Meechan we started to complete our GIRFEC wheel – we had to think about how safe and healthy we feel. We also were asked to choose a piece of work which were most proud of. This was a tricky choice – have a look for the post-it note in your child’s jotter. We also drew a picture about something we have learned this term too. You can find these pictures in ‘our special work’ poly pocket in our yellow profiles.

Well done to Romera who was one of our stars at our achievements assembly this morning. Miss Meechan was asked to choose someone who had settled into their new class and is working well. Great job, Romera. What a wonderful achievement.

Finally, this week we said a sad farewell to Miss Burns (only for a little while!) as she goes off on maternity leave. Miss Burns has been working with us since the beginning of the term and we are so thankful for all of her support and helping us settle into P1. Today, we decided to throw Miss Burns a surprise baby shower. We wish Miss Burns all the best in the next part of her adventure and we cannot wait to meet your little princess!

I hope everyone enjoys a well deserved holiday,

Miss Meechan and P1M

Wow, where has this week gone, it’s been full of fun, learning and reflection.

Monday started with European Day of Languages and we decided to start the day by greeting one another in different languages:

Amber chose to use French and said “Bonjour” to the class.

Dawid and Klaudia taught us how to say hello and good morning in Polish “cześć and dzień dobry”.

Ephraim chose to use Spanish and said “Buenos dias”.

Mrs Roy chose to use Italian and said “Buongiorno”.

This theme continued throughout the day and during Maths Klaudia and Dawid taught us how to count to 10 in Polish, we found it tricky but had good fun trying! Then before hometime we did a fun Spanish fitness song which is Mrs Roy’s favourite. Click on the link and have a go at home!

This week we introduced ‘k’ and ‘ck’ to the class and we quickly realised that they sound the same but are written differently. We spent most of our phonics lessons revising our set 1 sounds and blending sounds to make words. Some of the activities we did were: musical sounds, using our ‘big mouth’ to match the sounds, blending with cubes and the mats and using the ipads to practise forming the letters correctly. Next week we will begin to do some assessments with set 1 sounds so will spend some time consolidating and reflecting on what we have learned so far.It has been lovely to read and hear about what the children have chosen to do at home using our new literacy homework menu. Keep up the good work!

In maths we are almost finished learning about the numbers to 10 and progressed onto ordering and number names. We are all getting better at putting the numbers in the right order and did some super independent work during our carousels to show this. We did a cut and stick ordering task and played some fun ordering games on the smartboard, you can do these at home too using the maths homework menu links. Have a look at our Talking Book when you’re next in our class to see our progress so far – we enjoy looking back and reflecting on our learning.

Trex was at the forefront of our IDL this week as we had to do lots of tasks to help him settle in and find his way around the school and local area. In our writing lesson we wrote him a letter which was tricky as we had to do it all by ourselves by having a go and using our phonics and tricky word walls. Mrs Roy was so proud of us all! We received another letter from Trex and decided to make him some picture maps and routes that he could follow to find places near our school. Next week we are hoping to go for a walk on Wednesday to visit one of these places. The most enjoyable activity was using Google Earth to find out where our school was on the map. We all sat down, put on our seatbelts and enjoyed travelling down from space and landing in our school playground. As an extension of this task many children wanted to visit other places so that’s what we did!

Bernice wanted to go to the beach so we went to ‘Burntisland’. Paul L wanted to go to ‘Bubbles’, James wanted to go to ‘his house’ and Klaudia wanted to go to ‘McDonalds’. Try using Google Earth at home to find your own address, it’s great fun!!

PE was all about teamwork and developing our movement skills. We set up lots of different stations to allow us to practise throwing, catching, balancing, running, travelling, etc. These are all really important skills to develop as later on in PE we will look at some specific sports which use these skills. We worked in trios and had to sometimes wait for our turn to use the equipment, share resources and help one another. This links in with our value of teamwork and friendship which is really important to us in P1R.

Tag: Reflective learners

P1M Weekly News

Being active and reflective in P1R