Our Learning Blog
Next week we are hoping to start making our own model castles with a moving drawbridge. We are looking for some junk for modelling with! If you have any shoe box sized boxes at home that you are finished with, that would be a great help and any kitchen roll tubes would also be appreciated.
What a great week!
Phonics
This week we have been using the ‘th’ sound to make and break words. We are trying hard to make sure we do not say t and h for the sound ‘th’ but stick your tongue out at the teacher and say ‘th’. The only time you get to stick your tongue out at the teacher!! 🙂
Can you make a word list at home with words that begin and end with ‘th’?
Spelling
We are all making great progress in spelling the bronze and silver words and it was a great week as some children moved on to their next spelling steps.
Here is a Bronze and Silver spelling list.
Try out the Spelling Tennis game or the Anagrams game.
Writing
Writing was a great success this week as the children are really starting to get the hang of using sentence starters to create their own sentences. Our sentences this week were about castle characters. The dragon is…, The knight is…, The Prince is…, The Princess…
We are learning to…
~say a sentence out loud to make sure it makes sense and write the words down and put a full stop at the end
~use our bronze and silver words to spell words correctly
~use finger spaces
~ have a go at sounding out new words
Handwriting
We are learning to write the one armed robot letters correctly.
Numeracy
We are learning to say the tens and ones in numbers up to 20 and beyond.
Fuel the Brain – choose your level
Can you tell someone at home about tens and ones?
We are learning to write the numerals correctly.
We have been trying to check our work using the numbers on the wall to see if they are the right way around. Super checking Primary 1.
PE – Health and Wellbeing
We are learning to use our bodies in a controlled way.
We had a go at a variety of different rolls this week. The pencil roll, the egg roll and the dish roll. We balanced along the bench and jumped off safely and used a bench to practise hopping from side to side.
IDL
We were learning how a pulley works. A pulley is used to lift something that is really heavy! To make a pulley lift the load, we used string/rope and a wheel. The drawbridge in our class castle needs a pulley to lift it just in case there are enemies! We are now thinking about modifying our drawbridge to have two ropes
A big thanks to Ossian for telling us about his Australian animal adventure. Great knowledge and enthusiasm Ossian!
We are really excited for World Book Day here at Crown. We will be celebrating the day with fancy dress, a competition, visitors, class buddying activities and other literacy related work within classes.
Fancy Dress
Story Box Competition
Sharing our Favourite Books
We can’t wait for a great fun-filled book themed day!
Over the next few weeks we are hoping to make some woking pulleys to create a drawbridge for our castles that lifts up and goes down! If you have any cotton reels or wooden bobbins at home that you are finished with we could put them to good use. Just send them into school. Thanks in advance 🙂
Phonics
I am learning to identify, match and write words with the sound ‘ch’.
Try out this game – watch out as it does have th and wh which we have not yet introduced!
Give this dice game a go!
Spelling
I am leaning to spell the bronze words.
Spelling has started! We are working towards the bronze medal certificate and to do this we have to learn to spell the bronze words. It is a little different to phonics work as not all of the words can be sounded out phonetically and some of them just have to be learned.
We have been using some games to practise saying the sounds and letters in order to spell the words.
Spelling Tennis – sit opposite a partner with your legs apart and your feet touching. Use a ball to take turns to roll it and say a sound e.g. and – the first person would say ‘a’ and roll to their partner, their partner would say ‘n’ and roll the ball back and this would be finished with another roll and a shout out of ‘d’, the – roll the ball with a ‘t’, then back again with a ‘h’ and finish with an ‘e’.
Anagrams – on a white board, black board or piece of paper, ask someone at home to choose a bronze spelling word and write the letters down in the wrong order. Can you put the letters in the correct order to make the correct word.
Writing
We are learning to say sentences aloud.
We are learning to use new vocabulary to write about the features of a castle.
We are learning to use our bronze words in sentences.
We had a go at writing about the castle today using the new vocabulary that we learned when we were naming the features of the castle last week. Our sentence starter was:
The castle has…
Numeracy
We are learning the value of numbers.
We have been chatting about numbers and the number system. Some numbers have 1 digit and some have 2. Others have 3 digits and some have 4. The numbers get bigger and bigger. Place value is the value of each digit in a number. We have been looking at what happens to numbers after 10 and what this means when we explain our understanding of numbers. We are learning to use the words tens and ones.
Place Value Basketball – choose the level that suits for you
We are leaning to tell the time using an analogue and digital clock.
Chat at home about your daily routine. What time is breakfast? When does school start/finish? What happens before and after? When is tea time? Is it bath time yet? When is story time? What time do things happen in your home?
IDL
We are learning about places of interest inside the castle.
We are making our play area into a castle.
Expressive arts
We are looking for shapes in artwork. Photos from last week of Inverness at Night 🙂
We are drawing shapes using curved lines.
We are cutting circles and choosing complementary colours to make a ‘Kandinsky’ inspired Art Attack.
… to check snacks and lunch boxes to ensure that there are no nuts as an ingredient in items that children bring to school, this includes bars, nut butters and Nutella.
Many thanks for your support with this 🙂
A busy and fun-filled week for us!
Phonics
We are learning to identify and write new words with the sound ‘sh’.
Over the next few weeks we will be learning to say and use digraphs. This is when we have a combination of two letters representing one sound. At all times we are encouraging and supporting children to say only one sound when they see this letter combination. In school our magnetic letters have the two letters stuck together to reinforce the need to read the sound as one and write both letters when building words with the sound e.g. ship is sh-i-p not s-h-i-p and brush is b-r-u-sh not b-r-u-s-h.
Have a look at Topmarks, Letters and Sounds, Games for 5-7years. There is a game called Letter Planet which practises – ch, sh and th. We will be covering all of these sounds in the coming weeks.
Writing
I am learning to use action cards and a story map to retell a story.
We introduced a new story telling adventure this week – We’re Going On a Castle Hunt! Everyone was trying really hard to join in and remember the sequence of the story. We talked about what happened at the beginning, middle and end of the story.
Have some fun with the story map at home.
Handwriting
I am learning to write the one-armed robot letters.
We have started to look at the letter formation for this group of letters. To ensure that all of our practise in forming the letters correctly is top notch we have been saying the directions out loud – down up and round, sometimes all the way up and sometimes just a little way up!
Numeracy
We have continued to work on counting back and the number before and after.
We are learning to display and interpret information in a bar graph.
We have collected weather information over the past 6 week so with Mrs Gillespie the children have created a Weather Bar Graph to show how many days of each type of weather we have had. It seems many rainy days!!
Maths and Art
I am learning to look for shapes in pictures.
I am learning to draw and cut rectangles, squares and triangles.
The children had great ideas for being successful in this task. They said that we had to cut straight lines, we need to have pointy corners and for triangle they had to be super pointy! We have to cut up and across and we have to turn the paper.
We used a wonderful ‘Inverness City Scape’ by Michael Carver to inspire a large art piece for just outside our classroom. We used our cut shapes to create the sky line for our very own City Scape. We tried out splatter painting for the sky and chalk reflections.
Photo to follow… 🙂
IDL
I am learning to name features of a castle.
We have been asking the children how they want to learn – Sarah had a great idea to watch a castle clip to learn some new castle vocabulary. Everyone enjoyed the slides and we did a cut and stick activity to match up our new words with the picture to create a labelled diagram.
AJ and Hibbah had great fun with their idea of using lego to build a castle 🙂 Be on the look out for lots of great creative ideas for learning inspired by your amazing children.
Here is our Term 3 Overview. We are excited to share our key learning with you.
Primary 1 