We are working hard to Get it Right for Every Child…
Supporting learning happens, first and foremost, in and across all of our classrooms. This term, Mrs K. Gray, will be spending time in all classes helping to support writing (see our School Improvement Plan). Additionally, there will be a number of different interventions running specifically to target spelling (IDL and Outdoor Spelling), Reading (Read, Write, Inc. and ReadingWise) and Maths & Numeracy (SEAL and 5 minute Box Time).
In order to best support the health and well-being of our pupils we will continue to run our Nurture Clubs (The Monday Club and Outdoor Skills Club) too.
Follow our School Twitter Feed to see what we are doing on a day-to-day basis and see our learning, as it happens…
To all of our pupils, Nursery-P7, staff and families, a huge WELCOME BACK to Williamston!
We want to extend a special welcome to our new children in the nursery and P1 and new families joining our school community too, we feel very lucky to have each and every single one of you.
All classes have been super busy these first few weeks, community building, establishing class rules and charters, recapping literacy and numeracy learning and sharing our knowledge and understanding of each other.
More information to come from classes… but for now… KEEP CHECKING TWITTER TOO for updates.
A really important part of a learner’s journey through school focuses on these key questions:
What do you know?
What do you enjoy/like?
What would you like to get better at?
How can we make these improvements?
Taking this into consideration, these last few weeks have involved lots of planned learner-teacher conversations, assessments and planned support interventions. There will be an opportunity to speak more about this process at the upcoming parent consultations, but for now, here’s just one way we have been documenting this… TARGET SETTING…
Thank you to all the parents and carers who made it to Meet the Teacher, it was great to speak to lots of you and introduce myself and some of our team around Support for Learning.
If you couldn’t make it not worry, above you will see our key messages around Support for Learning this year.
Our S f L vision: Support for all learners, in all classrooms, by all staff.
Where possible, the majority of support for our learners will take place in their own classrooms, with support from the class teacher, myself, pupil support workers, specialist staff and/or other agencies where relevant.
A huge focus for us this year at Williamston is both Numeracy and Literacy and these are our key areas of targeted support for Nursery to P7 children. Additionally we are hoping to start a nurture group, based around health and well-being needs and developing life skills…
Both the P7 classes really enjoyed themselves this morning at JYHS. They engaged in a modern languages event called ‘The German Adventure’. There, they were able to work with S1 pupils and P7 pupils from another school.
Please enjoy looking at our photographs on Twitter!
We have had a busy time in P3b this week! We started the week with a dance session with dance teacher Amy, where we enjoyed some contemporary dancing with a ‘Scottish twist’! We are looking forward to learning the next part of the dance routine on Monday 26th!
Ronald Dahl has been a big focus this week as it was his 100th birthday on Tuesday. We LOVE Roald Dahl in P3b and have had many laughs reading ‘The Twits’! This week, we have been creating Mr Twit’s beard and even finding out our names if we were a Roald Dahl character! Come and ask us more about it! We have also been talking about adjectives and coming up with some amazing examples to describe The Twits and other characters we have created this week!
On Wednesday at PE, we worked in teams and played the ‘raft game’- come and ask more about it and why we had to work together to be successful!
I maths we have been looking at ‘tens and ones’ and partitioning numbers. We are experts now at splitting numbers like 65 into tens and ones. We know that there are 6 sets of ten in 65 and 5 ‘ones’ left over! We have also been developing our mental arithmetic skills everyday, too!
Last weeks Reading Activity was based on reading for information and our Social Subjects focus of Space (see our display for evidence of your work 🙂 ). This week I would like you to hop back into your novels… but more specifically your authors. FIND OUT MORE AND COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING.
Can you share your findings in the comments box below so we can all access your work?
If you finish early can you take the following quiz….
http://www.booktrust.org.uk/books/children/have-some-fun/quizzes/15 – I’d be interested to hear your feedback here too.
Do you follow us on twitter, if not, please do! Here you will find daily updates on children’s learning and ‘What’s On’ across the school.
We are… @williamstonps
This week it’s National Digital Learning Week. We continue to explore the benefits digital learning and teaching can bring to every level of the learner journey across the school. In addition to this we are keen to share these through our BLOG and Twitter and would love to hear your thoughts on these too.
BYOD… opening new doors of creativity at all turns for P6.
On Friday P6 entered into the realms of sheer and absolute creativity, and, perhaps even without knowing…
In our ‘Digital Technologies Across the Curriculum’ (D-TAC? We’re trying to think of a name!) session we were looking at emailing. We all ‘assumed’ we knew how to do it. 85% of use already have personal email accounts. So we know how to email right? NOT QUITE YET…we discovered!
Key Skills we learnt about EMAIL IN GLOW:
1. Know your login/password (And if it is your device – click ‘save for future’, little box, saves time!).
2. Click on Microsoft Outlook 365 tab. Wow it looks different to my other email account!
3. Find out my own email address… ‘My Profile’
4. Add contacts through ‘People’ – this makes it easier to see my friends, add groups, email quickly.
5. Send an email to Mrs Gray. Wow we filled her inbox, didn’t we P6?
6. Found out what ‘CC’ stands for/means in emailing. Yeah, we had seen it before, did we know what it meant? Nope. It means ‘Carbon Copy’, like if you want other people to see what you’re emailing but it’s not exactly for them. Pretty good idea, right?
7. We all got excited about changing our profile picture, and then had to be even more creative. All our devices were very different. Everything appeared very different on all of our screens. Let’s start real exploration – we found out how to change/create lots of stuff through doing this!
FEEDBACK FROM MRS GRAY…
~ P6 trust yourselves and each other more, remember I am no expert either. Let’s ask each other, before we ask me, if we are unsure about something.
FEED-FORWARD FROM MRS GRAY…
~ What now? Shall we set up an email group? Shall we use email within a lesson/activity (peer assessment method?). You will have better ideas than me…
SO P6… let’s have some FEEDBACK/FEED-FORWARD IN THE COMMENTS…
P6 have been taking inspiration from the late, and great, Steve Jobs…
In P4b, we have been talking about how we feel when we are learning something new. The feelings we have as we don’t understand something or find it challenging (as we go into “The Learning Pit”) and how we feel as we make progress in our learning and eventually succeed (as we come out of “The Learning Pit”).
