Technologies – St Ninian's Primary School

A surprise for P1M

This week we have been really busy completing all of the tasks that Trex asked us to do. We took a walk around the school grounds to look for the different things in our local area. We saw shops, another school (Dedridge Primary), the park, the Lanthorn and we recognised the path that would take us to the pond. After our walk we had a look at all of these different landmarks on google earth – this was lots of fun! We then made our own maps for Trex. We gave each different route we created a number to help Trex find his way around our local area.

We had a fantastic afternoon at the park on Thursday. The children wanted to bring in their own teddies to meet Trex so we decided to take our teddies and Trex to the park together. When we were at the park we all played so well together. We shared the apparatus and took turns too. We also spoke about ‘stranger danger’ and we know that we should only speak to adults that we know.

Thank you to all who sent in photographs of your houses and your address. We had so much fun looking at our houses on google earth. We then used the photographs of our houses to paint our own representation of these. Our painting skills are constantly improving. This week we were working on using the correct amount of paint on our brush and ensuring we cleaned our paint brush properly so the colours didn’t mix together if we didn’t want them to.

Last week, we went to the library and took out some books which we would like to read in class. We have enjoyed reading our own books in class this week and sharing our books with our friends too. Ask your child what book they took out from the library?

Do you remember about our letter from Trex last week? Trex told us that his baby brother was going to join our class. Well… you will never guess what has happened this week! A nest with an egg in it has appeared in our classroom. When we came into our classroom Trex was watching over the nest so we think it must be his baby brother that is inside the egg. We are so excited about the egg hatching, we keep checking on the egg throughout the day to check it is safe. This week in our writing lesson we wrote stories about what we think Trex’s baby brother might look like. Our writing is fantastic and well done to Adam our star writer this week!

Our numeracy skills are constantly improving and this week we participated in some fun activities to improve our numeracy skills. We are becoming much quicker at recognising random dot patterns and we loved using sand trays to work on our number formation too. We played the caterpillar ordering game on the smartboard. Search for this on your device at home too to play this game. We are continuing to work on our ordering of numbers, we used numicon and lollipop sticks to order our numbers this week. Can you believe that we are also learning about addition too! We are clever clogs in primary 1!

A big well done to Kerr who joined Mrs Purdie for ‘hot chocolate with the head’ today. Kerr always works hard and is a good friend to everyone in our class. A well deserved treat for you, Kerr.

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan

P1M Weekly News

What a fantastic week for P1M again. We have all settled in to school life so well and we are all engaging in the learning opportunities we are provided with. It has been a very busy week for us but we would like to share our highlights with you.

The sounds we have been working on this week are ‘s’ and ‘p’. We have really enjoyed the songs that go along with these sounds. Check these out on youtube by searing ‘s jolly phonics song’ and ‘p jolly phonics song’. One of the tasks we really enjoyed this week was forming the ‘s’ sound with pipe cleaners and wool – we used the colour blue for this because ‘s’ is a blue sound. Can you tell someone at home why it is a blue sound? Can you remember what colour of sound ‘p’ is? Why is it that colour?

We have continued our number topic of counting and number formation. We have now learned about the formation of numbers 0-8. We will be doing some work on 9 next week. We have also been working on counting through a range of different activities and games. We used our number formation booklets to practise our number formation. We also practised forming numbers in sand trays. We played games on the ipads and smartboard to help us with out counting and we loved playing hop-scotch too where we explored numbers to 20! Here are some pictures of our learning experiences in number work this week.

We are coming to the end of our ‘Harry and the Dinosaurs’ topic. This week we created our own dinosaur masks. We all picked a different mask to colour in and then we used lots of different materials to decorate them. We can’t wait for our masks to dry so we can pretend to be dinosaurs – keep an eye out for our pictures of this next week!

We loved our technologies lesson this week. We used coloured clay to create our own dinosaurs. After creating our dinosaurs we used the ipads to film short video clips of our classmates telling a short story using their dinosaur. Some of us were very creative and even use clay shaped rain to use in their video too. Miss Meechan and Miss Burns loved watching all of the videos!

Remember that on Monday we are getting our photographs taken for the courier so remember to bring your smiles and full school uniform!

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Meechan and P1M

Successful learners in P1R

This week in literacy we introduced a really tricky sound, ‘qu’, the children enjoyed learning a little rhyme to help them remember the rule when writing qu. If you click on the link you can learn the rule too!

QU rhyme

Here are some pictures of the children showing off their spelling skills!

In maths we decided to revise all the concepts taught so far, the children amazed me at how much they have learned and remembered! They enjoyed revising addition, subtraction and money using a variety of activities during carousel time – smartboard games, money sorting, smartpal worksheets, using the rekenrek, question time, etc.

The theme for Religious Education this week was Lent, the children learned about Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. On Shrove Tuesday we enjoyed learning about celebrations around the world and thought it was really funny that in France and USA it is called ‘Mardi Gras’ which translates as ‘fat or grease Tuesday’. We had the opportunity to try some pancakes with our favourite topping, chocolate sauce!! I was really proud of how well they all participated in our whole school Ash Wednesday Mass, it was lovely to see so many children joining in with their prayers and mass responses.

Technology was a whole school focus and we decided to look at food technology but with a pirates twist! We learned about how to prepare our work surface for making different foods, how to prepare ourselves and how to safely use utensils. We enjoyed making treasure map pizzas and pirate ships. Some of us also did some extra food technology at home and made pirate snacks for Friday morning, thanks to Harry and James for making everyone a pirate cake, they were yummy!!

We also had a visitor called Sharon who works in the construction industry. She showed us lots of pictures of different buildings and we were able to link this to previous learning by telling her about different materials they were made from. She set us a challenge in teams to copy a building she had made using bricks, this was really good fun and all teams managed the challenge! To finish off we had a go at P4 work, yes you heard us right, P4 work!! We were able to build a city using co-ordinates and a grid. Thanks Sharon!

Safer Internet Day was on Tuesday and we watched an animation which taught how us about how to stay safe on the internet, we were all really sensible and identified what we should do if people were being mean to us online.

It was also lovely to see our nursery friends as they celebrated Chinese New Year, they certainly celebrated loudly as we could hear them before we could see them! Next week we are going to visit both morning and afternoon groups to teach them how to use the ipads in preparation for when they come to big school.

Have a lovely holiday weekend and I look forward to seeing all the children back in school on Wednesday!