Religious and Moral Education – St Ninian's Primary School

Nursery News

A wonderful fun filled week in the nursery, lots of rainbows in the sky this week we spotted them on our walk on Wednesday and from the window through the week. This inspired lots of creative activities and mathematical learning around colours and shape. Children began singing the song ‘ I can sing a Rainbow’. Nativity practice is in full swing, we are rehearsing ‘Away in a Manger’, the story of Maurice the Mule and his manger in a stable. Children are having great fun learning the songs and at the same time developing their language. Of course who could forget about our visit to the local care home this week!! Lots of connections, fun and friendships built here this week. Such a heart warming experience for all involved xx

NEXT WEEK

Monday –

Tuesday – Achievement assemblies am and pm.

Wednesday – Welly Wednesday

Thursday – P.E. CHRISTMAS FAYRE 5.30 PM

Friday – PEEP.

Have the most amazing weekend everybody !!! love the nursery team xx

Awesome P3!

Another very busy week for Primary 3!

SHELTER BUILDING – OUTDOOR LEARNING & TEAMWORK

The whole class showed their resilience and ability to cope well with change on Tuesday when our Shelter Building Activity was postponed at the very last minute. This was unavoidable due to the weather but we are delighted to announce that it will now be taking place on Tuesday 20 June in the afternoon (P1-P3 Sports Day in the morning)…..so watch this space!

RE/HWB

Primary 3 also discussed the importance of having enough sleep, rest and exercise each day. They were very good at explaining how they feel when they are tired and how this can impact on how well they concentrate in school.

In Maths, we were consolidating our understanding of Measure as well as looking at timetables and durations of time then combining this with some interpretation of diagrams. The boys and girls enjoyed using Mr McCurdy’s Health Week timetable to do this where they had to interpret the information to find out which day P3 were doing a particular activity, where the activity was being held, the time the activity started/finished then working out how long it lasted.

GLOBAL GOALS – Clean Water and Sanitation

Primary 3 have been really thinking hard this week about the availability of clean water in school (or at home) and clean toilets which flush – things we all take for granted. They saw images of poor toilets in some African countries for schoolchildren and had to imagine what they would do if they didn’t have access to either taps or toilets – not pleasant but the children were really engrossed and engaged in considering these situations. In writing they had to suggest reasons as to what might happen if there were not taps or toilets in St Ninian’s – ask your child to explain what they wrote about!

READING – Primary 3 have continued to develop their independence at making sense of what they read by accessing non-fiction texts and finding information from the texts to answer questions.

http://myonlinereading.com/

BIG TALK homework next week

Would you rather be the Three Little Pigs or the Wolf? Give your reasons!

Have a lovely weekend from Mrs Scott and Primary 3!

Hard at work in P1R

Another week passes with lots of learning and fun!

Fractions was our new topic in maths and we learned about halves, quarters and sharing fairly and equally. We started the learning with some chocolate! Mrs Roy gave us a challenge to cut a mini roll into halves then quarters, we had to be very accurate with our slicing. As we did so well we then got to eat the pieces, if only maths could always involve chocolate!!! Our learning continued when we learned about sharing fairly and equally. Mrs Roy was very naughty and shared sweets with all of us but it wasn’t fair! Some children got 1 bag, some got 2 bags and some got 3 bags! So we had to use our thinking heads and solve the problem,we came up with lots of good ideas and tried them all out. We decided the best way to do it was by giving each person in turn 1 bag then another bag and so on until all the sweets has been handed out. We have a good understanding of fair shares and as a reward got some Haribos which we shared fairly.

We continued to discuss the Gruffalo story and this week worked on sequencing the order of the story in preparation for making our own Gruffalo storybooks to share with the nursery,this was Dexter’s idea from our learning wall. Everyone worked really hard on these and when Mrs Scott popped in we took pride in sharing them with her. In Art we made ‘big’ Gruafflos which again was another idea from our learning wall. We used coloured sugar paper to do this, we made connections in our learning as we folded paper in half and then in quarters, we made also made different 2D shapes for our Gruffalo.

As it is the month of May we have been learning about Mary our Mother. As a class we started to make a special altar for Mary at the front of the classroom and discussed the meaning behind the different symbols. We will add to this next week. Then we all shared our thoughts about Mary and wrote them down.

During nursery transition we flipped it around and we went to the nursery instead of them coming to us. We went out into the nursery playground and buddied up with a nursery child to play and have fun with. We are being really responsible and helping the children prepare for coming into P1.

We also had a visit from the UN Ambassadors and they talked to us about Global Goals. They asked some of us to have our say by writing a tweet for our new Global Citizenship display in school. Have a look when you are here next week for Parent’s Evenings.

Signs of spring

This week we have been continuing to look for signs of Spring or new life during our RE lessons. Many children have spotted some new flowers growing near our school or in their gardens. We decided to do some planting of our own in the classroom. We made lots of links in our learning when doing this:

RE – new life, Lent, preparing

Science – growing seeds, what will we need, what are the best conditions for growing things, seasons, weather

Literacy – sequencing, writing instructions

Numeracy – counting seeds, measuring soil

In phonics we learned about ‘ng’ and ‘wh’, we all agreed that they were quite tricky. Ephraim has been great at spotting ‘ng’ throughout the week in reading books or on the smartboard – well done Ephraim. We tried a new activity at our choice station this week – the ‘wh word hunt’ – we had to use magnifying glasses to spot the tiny wh words hiding in a colourful picture, it was good fun. We have also been using magnetic letters, playdough and written tasks to help us learn these new sounds. Another station was the peer assessment station, one of us read the words and the other person had to spell the words on the whiteboards, we loved taking it in turns to be the teacher! Next week we are moving onto the rude clown sound -Th.

In numeracy we worked on number names to 10 as this was something we chose as a next step after learning about money. We played games to help us do this, eg. Matching names to numbers, spelling number names games on the spelling bug app, number name wordsearches. We are all more confident now in reading number names and are ready to move onto something new next week. Remember to log onto Sumdog to take part in the West Lothian Contest this week. We will also make time at school next week during Smartstart and numeracy to do it too.

In IDL we learned about mapping and made our very own treasure maps for our pirate adventures. We discussed what you would find on a map: symbols, a key, a compass, a route. This will help us during Outdoor Learning Week where we will have a go at following some maps outside.

Pupil voice:

Dexter- I liked playing the sky phonics app on the iPads.

Klaudia-In PE we were playing hockey.

James-I enjoyed learning about Lent.

Amber- I liked learning about subtraction.

Isla- We made a treasure map.

Brooke- I liked our RE work this week.

Ephraim- I liked learning about number names.

Mark- We were planting seeds.

Celebrate World Religion Day – Wednesday 18th January 2017

Article 30 of the UN Convention states that: You have the right to practice your own culture, language and religion – or any you choose. Minority and indigenous groups need special protection of this right.

Whether you’re Hindu, Jewish, Catholic, Shinto, Buddhist, or one of a million other faiths, World Religion Day is your chance to share your culture with others and take an opportunity to learn from others about theirs.

World Religion Day is easy to observe, you need merely take the time and effort to study the faiths of the world around you with an open mind. World Religion Day is about learning about the religions that shape the world around you, and becoming aware of how many there are.

Take some time to share openly and learn about what those around you believe, and maybe do a little research into your favorite culture to learn a bit about its foundational religions.

Whether you’re learning about the Hindu faith with its thousands of Gods, or precisely how the thousands of denominations of Christianity grew out of the Judaic faith thousands of years ago, World Religion Day is your opportunity to broaden your horizons.

Speak to another with an open heart and open mind, and share what your religion has to say, and then take the time to listen to them talk about theirs from a place of understanding and love.

Image result for world religion day

Creativity in P1R

As the title suggests this week the focus has been on ‘being creative’. P1R have been working on a joint project with the nursery as part of the transition programme this year. Our chosen theme was ‘Rhyme Time’ and we linked the learning in literacy and the expressive arts subjects.

We chose Dingle Dangle Scarecrow as the song we would perform for the nursery.

On Monday we had to identify the rhyming words in the song using highlighters and we played rhyming games on the smartboard. We also used the wooden spoons we had brought in from home to make scarecrow puppets. Then on Tuesday in our reading lesson we had to visualise a scarecrow from the descriptive poem we heard. On Wednesday we played rhyming bingo and washing line rhymes on the netbooks. Thursday was a bit trickier as we had a go at writing acrostic poems about a scarecrow and then did some watercolour collage paintings. Friday was our big performance where we dressed up and sang our song to the nursery children then we went over to the nursery to hear their performance. We all enjoyed ‘Rhyme Time’ and look forward to welcoming the nursery children to our carousel activities over the coming weeks.

In maths this week we have progressed onto developing our knowledge of numbers within 20, this has involved counting forwards/backwards, sequencing and ordering. The children enjoyed using the number flowers to play games, the favourite was when they got to steal flowers from the garden and the other children had to guess what flowers were missing!

Our PE block this term will be athletics focusing on running, throwing and jumping. We will be practising these skills every week in the lead up to Sports Day in June where we will take part in the inter-house championship.

In RE we have started to prepare for our class mass which will be on Thursday 28th April in St Philip’s. Next week the children will bring home a copy of the hymns we are learning and some children will be selected to read the bidding prayers or be a part of the offertory procession. I would be grateful if you could assist your child in these preparations.

Next week we look forward to starting our new IDL topic which will focus on Health and Wellbeing.