Teacher - Mrs Emma Cuthbert
Gym days - Monday and Tuesday
Outdoor Learning - Wednesday morning
I cannot believe that we are at this time of year. Term 2 has whizzed by and here we are ready for Christmas. This term has mostly been Nativity and Christmas Writing with a bit of Maths.
What can I say. We have been working really hard at our narration parts, learning the songs and learning to play instruments to accompany our songs. So looking forward to showing you all our hard work. We hope you have bought your tickets for our performances!
The children have loved doing their Christmas Writing. They are excited about their books coming together and love to redraft their work. It has been great to see them become more confident in their writing and more independent. We look forward to sharing these with you over the holidays.
We will send home a feedback form to accompany your child's work. If this could be returned to school this would be great. Gives us feedback to improve our next piece of writing.
Primary 3 have been busy exploring right angles this month with a fun and active classroom hunt. Pupils searched high and low for examples of right angles in everyday objects, using their angle checkers to test what they found. This hands-on activity helped them deepen their understanding of shapes and angles while enjoying a lively and engaging maths lesson.
investigating right angles
investigating right angles
investigating right angles
investigating right angles
This month we have been revising and consolidating ordering of numbers within 1000. We have been doing this in different ways- worksheets, interactive games and activities. We can do this from smallest to largest and largest to smallest.
We have been looking at the Hundreds digits to help us and where needed the Tens digit. We can now do this confidently.
We are revising the strategy of crossing out whilst we order the numbers. This helps us to identify which numbers we have used and which numbers we still have to order.
This term in Outdoor Learning, the children have been exploring the book Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson. We began by reading the story together and talking about the different events and characters. The children then took part in a variety of hands-on activities inspired by key themes and scenes from the book.
These included making wands from natural materials, camouflaging their own woodland animals, and designing imaginative creatures that could help scare off the dragon in the story. We have thoroughly enjoyed bringing the book to life outdoors!
We have thoroughly enjoyed bringing the book to life outdoors!
It's been a busy start to term 2, but as usual the children have risen to the challenge. We are well underway with our Christmas Writing, have chosen our Nativity with rehearsals to start this week coming and Numeracy and Maths is conitnuing to progress with all groups. I know we have only been back a week, but here is a little snippet of what we have been up to:
T4W process is a 3 step process we use to help the children with their listening and talking as well as their reading and writing. The 3 stages are as follows: Imitation, Innovation and Invention.
We have made a very positive start to our Writing project this term. We learned the story of 'Little Jack'. To do this we put actions to the story to help us learn it and then retell it. After this step we used the actions to help us retell the story by creating a story map. These are brilliant and the children all worked very hard to complete them to a high standard. They will definitely be able to use them to support the invention stgae of T4W.
We are just about to start the invention stage and we are very excited about this. We look forward to welcoming you in when our books have been published and are ready to share. In the meantime ho ho ho!
Just this week we started to learn about joined up handwriting. We are LOVING this. Yes it is a little tricky but we are making very good progress. We have so far joined 'i, t, p and n' What do you think?
A couple of us have been making salt dough decorations as part of our Christmas writing and Christmas crafts. We worked with Mrs MacDougall to make our own salt dough and then using different cookie cutters we made our own decorations. Next week we are going to paint them and decorate them.
making the salt dough
ready to roll it out
cutting our designs
ready to bake
This week have been learning about clockwise and anti-clockwise turns. We are all pretty secure in this. We have extended this learning by investigating different types of turns: quarter turns, half turns, full turns.
Linked to this learning we have been using beebots to programme, to get them to move from one place to the next. We love using these in the classroom.
We have been revising counting in 10s from any number up to 100 and then we extended this learning to numbers to 1000. Mrs Cuthbert was very pleased with how we did and then we moved onto counting in 100s from any number. Everyone did very well. Ask us at home, "What is 100 more than 356? or what is 200 less than 781?
This term we will continue to progress with our Phonics/Spelling and Reading programmes, however our focus will be on our Christmas Writing.
We will be learning to:
Reading
We are learning to:
read and understand texts about the Nativity story or Christmas traditions
read an increasing number of common/high frequency words, key reading words, core topic words and words of personal significance
use of punctuation such as question / exclamation marks and layout to help learners read with understanding and expression
Writing
We are learning to:
use the Talk for Writing process to create a Christmas story
use adjectives
use nouns
use pronouns
present our writing in a neat and legible way
Listening and Talking
We are learning to:
listen and talk during discussions or performances.
takes turns and contribute at the appropriate time when engaging with others in a variety of contexts
select and share ideas/information using appropriate vocabulary
Our focus in Numeracy during this term will be numbers to 100 or numbers to 1000.
We are learning to:
count forwards and backwards in 2s, 5s, 10s, 100s
partition 3 digit numbers
order numbers up to 1,000
describe the order of things up to 30th
doubles and near doubles to add mentally
use number patterns and known facts to add and subtract
add and subtract multiples of 10 from 2-digit numbers
add and subtract 2-digit numbers
Mental Maths (daily focus)
Problem Solving (weekly focus)
Our Maths focus this term is Angles, Symmetry and Transformation
We are learning to:
make full, half and quarter turns using the terms clockwise and anti-clockwise
find right angles
use grid references to locate objects and places
recognise symmetry
PE Focusses will be Scottish Country Dancing and Gymnastics
We will be learning about:
Scottish Country Dance
Coordination and Balance
Musicality and Rhythm
Spatial Awareness
Teamwork and Cooperation
Cultural Heritage
Gymnastics
Balancing
Rolls
Travelling
Jumping
Creating sequenced movements
IDL Topic – Christmas and the Nativity
We will be learning about:
performing, acting, and using voice and movement in a Nativity play
creating art, crafts, and decorations
expanding vocabulary related to religion, celebration, and emotions.
writing Christmas Stories
understanding the Christian story of the Nativity and its meaning.
understanding historical and cultural aspects of the Nativity story.
exploring values such as kindness, giving, love, and community.
We have got off to a flying start with our phonics and spelling programmes. Some children have now started Nelson Spelling and are making good progress. The rest of us are working through our RWI set 3 sounds and also making good progress. Hopefully by Christmas there will be another group of children ready to start Nelson Spelling. Excellent job everyone, keep it up!
Now that we are in Primary 3 we have started to learn about different spelling strategies to help us learn our spelling words. So far we have looked at colourful words, rainbow words and blue vowels. We have enjoyed learning in a different way.
Matilda by Roald Dahl has been our class novel this term. We chose this as our IDL Topic is learning about Rights and Responsibilities and UNCRC charter.
We have also based our writing on the novel and have written character descriptions on Matilda and Mr Wormwood and from now till the end of term will write a couple of diary entries from Matilda's point of view. Taking into account whether her rights have been met and how she has been feeling.
We have had quite a number of star writers so far and I am sure there will be many more as the year goes on.
This term we have been revising 2/3D shapes and their properties. This is one of our Numeracy/Maths targets this term. We are well on our way to achieving these and are showing a good level of understanding.
Currently we are learning about tessellation/tiling using 2 shapes. We have enjoyed investigating and making different patterns.
To start off our learning this term we learned about rounding a 2 digit number to the nearest 10. First of all we used a number line to help us, but now we are able to round a number without the use of a numberline. We have learned the rule 'if the ones digit is 1,2,3 or 4 you round down and if 5,6,7,8 or 9 you round up'
In numeracy we have been extending the range of whole numbers we can work with by explaining the link between a digit, its place and its value. We have done this through a range of different activities and games.
We have enjoyed using chromebooks to consolidate and reinforce our concepts. We have played some topmarks games, ICTgames and Wordwall games. We have also played place value bingo, TO/HTO activities as well as SMARTboard and jotter work.
tessellation
making 3D shapes
making 3D shapes
This term we have been learning about Christianity with Miss Ferguson. The main focus has been investigating Christian symbols and Christian artifacts.
Aswell as learning about symbols and artifacts Miss Ferguson has been doing draw with me videos online to help us create very detailed drawings. Mrs Cuthbert was very impressed with everyones attempts.
To consolidate our learning and to show what we have learned we visited St Ninians Old Parish Church and the Rev Gary McIntyre. He was great, showed us around and let us tell him what we had learned. He was very impressed with our knowledge. We were allowed to go up into the pulpit, sit in the pews, investigate the gallery and look at the hymn books and bibles.
We had a brilliant time, thank you Rev McIntyre.
Through RME as well as Christianity we have also been learning about Islam. We had the opportunity to visit Stirling Islamic Centre to find out more.
What an afternoon we had. First we got the bus into town- this was so exciting! We knew when we arrived at the Mosque we would have to take our shoes off as a mark of respect. We placed our shoes into the little cubbyholes and then went into the community space. Shahid spoke to us about what the room was used for and a little bit about his religion. After this we were shown around the Mosque. Our first stop was the washroom where we learned about how Muslims wash before praying. If we wanted we could have a go. We loved this! After this we were so lucky and privileged to be able to sit at the back of the prayer room and watch during a prayer session. Mrs Cuthbert was so impressed at how respectful we all were. To finish our visit we wen back to the community space and were ale to ask any questions that we had. Thank you Stirling Islamic Centre we had a great time!
This term we have been learning about plant and animal classification. We were pretty confident with categorising animals, but plant groupings were a little bit more tricky.
From this we then moved on to inheritance, looking at traits and characteristics from our parents.
To further investigate and learn more about genetic inheritance we invited some S6 pupils from Stirling High School to come and work with us. We learned more about chromosomes and the combinations that go together and what they produce. We made a reebop baby based on the chromosome patterns from a mum and dad. Mr Henderson and I were blown away with their understanding and carried out this activity twice, once with the S6s and then again the week after. This was a great experience and we look forward to working with S6 pupils again.
chromosome genotypes and finished reebop
Identifying Chromosome genotypes
Using genotypes to create our reebop with specific traits and characteristics
reebop
We have had a very busy start to our first term back. Everyone has settled in well and are confident at carrying out our classroom routines. There has been a positive start to our learning and I am looking forward what we get up to before the October holidays...
This term in literacy we will be focusing on our spelling and our phonics. We have already made a good start and are building upon what we had learnt last session. As the children are now in P3 we have started into introduce different spelling strategies to aid them with spelling.
This term we have started with Colourful Semantics. This is something we have all done last year and has helped us revise sentence structure.
As this term continues we will be writing character descriptions and diary entries. These will be based around our class novel of Matilda.
We continue we work on our comprehension through bug club and our reading books. This is a favourite in class with everyone.
Our class novel has already given us opportunities for listening and talking. We enjoy discussing the characters and the story plots.
This term in numeracy we will be revising numbers to 100 and extending this to numbers to 1000. We have already made a positive start to this learning through games and activities.
Place Value dove tails very well with our number work. Understanding the value of the digits and position of where the digit sits within the number is important and will help with new concepts in learning.
We are continuing with strengthening our mental maths through a variety of different ways. Daily 10 is an interactive game which covers lots of different concepts and we will start 'New Wave' Mental Maths. This is an everyday programme.
Our beyond number topic is 2D/3D shapes and their properties.
We will also revise estimating and rounding.
To start our new session we have created a class charter. Our charter reflects the rules we want in our classroom for everyone to be 'Ready, Respectful and Safe'.
We are continuing to develop our emotional literacy through the Emotion Works Cogs.
We are also looking at individuality and that it is okay to be different. This will be done through stories and drama.
Our IDL topic links very well with our HWB experiences and outcomes for this term. Using the UNCRC Rights of the Child legislation, the children will develop their understanding of their rights and what responsibilities come with these rights.
In PE this term we will be focusing on physical literacy skills and fitness.
We will be learning about safety and expectations, revising different ways to travel, sending and receiving objects as well as object control.
Through games and activities we will be working co-operatively.
During fitness we will be investigating the effects of fitness on the body and mind.
Our IDL topic this term is 'Rights and Responsibilities'
Using the UNCRC Rights of the Child legislation, the children will develop their understanding of their rights and what responsibilities come with these rights.
Our learning will take place using our class novel, Matilda, and the characters in the book, through active learning experiences and comparisons between different places. Real life contexts will also support our learning.