Category: Buckstone Primary School

Dear Parents / Carers

Your child has been given an A4 sheet of paper with the blocks of ‘tricky’ words they learned to read in P1 and P2. As these are words that appear often, in the English language, pupils are likely to use them in their writing and we would like them to develop their confidence when spelling these words.

Further to an assessment, the words your child needs to work on have been highlighted on the sheet. The blocks assessed, at this stage, have also been highlighted. This means that although your child might not have any words highlighted in blocks 5 and 6, for example, these blocks may not have been assessed at this stage.

We have asked your child to learn to spell their highlighted words. These can be worked on over a period of time. It may be that they choose one or two to work on per week, in addition to the spelling lists we are learning.

We have one or two assessments to complete, but all sheets should have been sent home by Wednesday. If your child has lost their sheet, please just let us know by writing a note in your child’s reading record (and letting them know so they will show it to one of us).

Thank you for your support.

Mrs Bailey and Mrs Munro

Our words this week have ‘ai’ or ‘ay’ making the long A sound. We noticed that in words with only one syllable, we normally find ‘ai’ at the beginning or middle of the word and that ‘ay’ is found at the end. Learning and remembering this will help us to decide whether we should use ‘ai’ or ‘ay’. As usual, we have two common words at the end of the list.

aim

pail

chair

train

straining

way

staying

pray

today

spraying

only

old

Challenge List

aiming

railway

chairperson

training

strained

always

stayed

prayed

Wednesday

anyway

only

old

• Team Jewel: single sounds a, t, p, n
• Team Gold: ow– cow, town, clown, flower, down, bow and ou– shout, loud, out, mouth, ground; Tricky words: into, here
• Team Treasure: Core list: aim, pail, chair, train, straining, way, staying, pray, today, spraying; Challenge list: aiming, railway, chairperson, training, strained, always, stayed, prayed, Wednesday, anyway; Tricky words: only, old

On Friday, we will try a dictation activity using a selection of these words so if you can, have a practise throughout the week.

Hello everyone

This is what we have been learning this week:

NUMERACY

We have continued to look at different addition strategies and use them to work out addition problems. This week in mental maths we were adding 9 by adding 10 and subtracting 1 and adding 11 by adding 10 then adding 1 to work out our answers.

We were adding 2 digits plus 1 digit and 2 digits plus 2 digits by adding units (or ones) first, then adding the tens. Some of us added 3 digits plus 2 digits to extend our learning.

TO DO AT HOME

Most of us completed a – ‘What Makes ?’ sheet and took it home. This worksheet is to help your child learn the number bonds within 10. It is very important that they are able to recall these facts quickly as this will help them to add bigger numbers quickly and accurately in the future.

You could play this game to help you.

https://pbskids.org/curiousgeorge/busyday/ten/

LITERACY

READING

We have continued to practise summarising a story. This week we have summarised ‘Sparkle Boy’ and ‘When Mum Turned into a Monster’.

‘They were really fun stories’

‘Sparkle Boy had lots of sparkles’

‘Boys can wear girl clothes, there are no rules’

‘These stories were interesting and unusual’

THINGS TO DO AT HOME

Remember to talk about beginning, middle and end when you are discussing stories with your child. Ask them to summarise the story without too much detail but making sure they identify the main points.

Please share and discuss your child’s reading book with them.

WRITING

We are trying to write super sentences and working very hard to think about where to put full stops in our writing. We wrote a personal piece of writing, trying hard to punctuate it correctly.

THINGS TO DO AT HOME

You could write some interesting (or silly) sentences to go with some of your spelling words making sure you have remembered capital letters and full stops.

TOPIC

We discussed what we would like to learn about Mynah birds and will be finding out answers to our questions in the next few weeks.

‘We hope to learn lots about mynah birds.’

‘Mynah birds are interesting’

PE

We have been lucky with the weather this week and have enjoyed keeping fit in the sunshine by exercising and playing games.

FRENCH

We tried to have short conversations in French this week, saying hello and asking each other how we were, then saying goodbye.

‘It was hard’

‘Fun but complicated.’

‘I got a bit muddled.’

Have a lovely weekend everyone.

Welcome to the Primary 1 Lion’s blog!

The Lion’s have had another great week in Primary 1! We have had lots of fun playing with our friends both inside the classroom and outside in the playground.

Literacy

This week we learned two more sounds: ‘d’ and ‘o’.

When we learn a new sound, we love watching Geraldine the Giraffe to help introduce the new learning. You could watch these again at home. (video below) We also learn the jolly phonics song for each sound. This week we even pretended to be noisy aeroplanes flying around the classroom. The full list of jolly phonics songs is linked below, find the sounds we know and have a practice at home!

Literacy Home Learning:

Numeracy

This week we continued the SEAL maths programme which teaches children the foundation skills in maths. We practised counting forwards and backwards to 10 and beyond together, counting claps, recognising dice patterns and random dot patterns and counting in sequences. The children are already showing that they are retaining the knowledge they are learning, which is showing greatly in our small group time.

The video below is also great for practising the skills we are currently learning in numeracy. Have a go at home and challenge someone in your family to have a go with you.

Other Areas

P1 has also been having lots of fun playing outside in the playground. In P.E we have been working on our fitness and spatial awareness when running around the playground. We also have been learning about different ways to move around the playground such as running, jumping, hopping, skipping etc. This week we had lots of fun races which made us work as a team and work together as a group.

This week we also started our new outdoor learning autumn topic. This week we talked about autumn and what it looks like. We looked outside for signs of autumn and had fun drawing them. We also got messy painting and painted autumn trees using our hands to create the tree branches and corks/paint brushes to make the leaves. These turned out so lovely – here are some of the trees.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

We also started something new this week. To help us with holding pens and pencils to get ready for writing, we started using playdough to help make our hands and fingers stronger. We have been having lots of fun following, the videos below. If you have any playdough at home why not practice at home!

We have had lots of fun developing our social skills by playing with our peers in the classroom. We have lots of fun drawing pictures and making crafts, playing in the home corner and reading in the book corner. We also have lots of fun building castles and towers with the construction blocks. There is always lots of fun things to do in the classroom to support our learning and play.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Things to Try at Home

• It would be lovely if all P1s could practice recognising and writing their own name. This is something which will help with the daily routines in P1 and a vital skill to assist their learning. You could practice making your name out of materials found in your garden, creating it out of playdough, writing it in sand or colouring it in.
• Ask your child to give you X amount of various things. For example sticks, leaves, stones. Whatever you can find. This will help with our counting skills.
• Practice using your ‘bunny ears’. Ask your child to show you a number on their fingers using the bunny ears method. They should practice holding up the number of fingers straight away without needing to count each finger. They then look at their fingers to check if they are correct. This is great for numeracy development.
• Ask and adult to clap their hands so many times, can you count how many times they clapped? For an extra tricky challenge try clapping your hands at different speeds, for example 2 slow and 3 quick. Can your child count the number of claps?
• Practice making words out of the sounds we have learned so far – ‘a’ ‘t’ ‘p’ ‘i’, ‘e’, ‘s’ ‘r’ ‘d’, ‘o’ and ‘n’ – for an extra challenge can you write and sound out the words you have made?
• Could you find out any interesting facts about autumn? Look outside for signs of autumn, can you take a photo of them or draw them?

P1 Lion’s Favourite Things of the Week!

“I enjoyed playing in the castle with Georgie and Alistair.” – Islay C

“I liked playing in the book corner with Sofie, Isla B and Abigail.” – Chloe

“I enjoyed playing in the brick corner with Kieran.” – Logan

“I liked doing my autumn tree painting.” – Maisie

“I enjoyed painting my autumn tree.” – Georgie

“I liked playing in the brick corner with Archie and Alistair.” – Maximos

Happy Weekend!

• Thank you for understanding the technical difficulties of parents evening this term. I hope I managed to answer any questions you had and gave you enough information of how your child has been settling into school. As i said, if you have any further questions please get in touch with the office to arrange another phone call or meeting.
• P.E will be on Mondays and Thursdays – please come dressed and ready for P.E. (only on Thursday next week)
• Ms Leach will be teaching the class on Monday.

Thank you for your continued support with your child’s learning and time in school, it is greatly appreciated. I hope you have a lovely long weekend and I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday!

From Miss McGillivray

Numeracy & Maths

This week we have continued learning about number bonds and using them to help us answer addition questions. If we want to work out 46 + 7, we can use number bonds to 7 and 10 to work it out: 7 = 4 + 3 / 46 + 4 = 50 (because 6 + 4 = 10) / then 50 + 3 = 53. This is quicker than counting in 1’s!

Class Comments:

• “We have improved our number bonds”
• “I can do number bonds to 100”
• “Everyone has improved number bonds to 10 and 20”
• “We enjoy playing around the world to help us learn our number bonds”

Things to do at home:

• Keep on practising you skip counting for the numbers you have set as your target (you could do this walking up and down the stairs or down the street)
• Find numbers and add them together (look at price tags, number plates, clocks etc. numbers are all around us)

The Windowless Ladder Cleaning Company were looking for more work, so we took a survey of the school building, counting windows, doors and down pipes. We used our tallying and creating pictograms skills to do this.

Class Comments:

• “It was hard doing the tally outside because it was raining”
• “I liked it because it was fun”
• “My paper got wet”

Literacy

We have been reading Operation Night Monster. We used our prediction skills to work out what Ali would do differently the next night; using our prior knowledge and information from the book to make sensible predictions that are likely to happen. We have been learning how to write a summary. We thought about the main events and the beginning, middle and end of the book to help us write a summary.

Class Comments:

• “I thought he would do the same the next night – doing checks under the bed and his cupboard”
• “We are getting better at predictions”
• “We wrote what would happen the next night”

Things to do at home:

• Try giving a summary of a book you have read / TV show you have just watched in 3 sentences (think: beginning / middle / end)
• Ask questions about books you are reading / shows you are watching (there is a link below for questions you can ask before, during and after reading)

Our handwriting is getting neater because we are practising our cursive handwriting. This week we have added “t, n, h & m” to the letters we are practising.

Class Comments:

• “we have done really well”
• “we are writing words with the letters we have learned”
• “we wrote words including London”

In Art we have been looking at the artist Paul Klee, discussing the quote “A line is a dot that has gone for a walk” talking about his paintings and using one of his techniques “Taking a Line for a Walk”. In music we have been making up songs using one of the songs from the Giraffe the Pelly and Me. We have also been sharing interesting facts the class have found out about giraffes, pelicans and monkeys.

Things to do at home:

• Take a line for a walk and see what you can create!
• Keep looking for interesting facts about giraffes, pelicans and monkeys to share with the class.

Class Comments:

• “We have created animals using lines”
• “We have made some pictures – some looked like the sea”

Today we got to use the loose parts equipment in the woodland area of the playground! It was a lot of fun!!!

Class Comments:

• “It was lots of fun – I got my own base and sang my own songs”
• “Me and my friends made up a song”
• “We tobogganed down the mound”
• “With loose parts you can build loads of cool stuff”
• “We played Pokémon in the tunnel”
• “It was lots of fun because we were playing games”

We had a busy week in P6NM. Here is a summary of our learning.

Literacy

• We read more of our novel Friend or Foe. We made inferences about what characters were thinking and feeling. The tricky bit was finding evidence in the text to support what we were saying.
• We researched and made notes which will help us to write biographies next week.
• Here are our spelling words.

Opportunities for home learning:

• Please check the reading record for pages to be read.
• Read some biographies on the Ducksters website. (https://www.ducksters.com/biography/)

Think about these questions:

What do you notice about the way they are structured/organised?

What do you notice about the language features?

• Write a mini autobiography. Think about your personal family history and important events in your life.

Maths

In maths we identified lines of symmetry and created symmetrical shapes. Here is some jotter work.

Opportunities for home learning:

• Play this symmetry matching game and select ‘patterns’.

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/symmetry/symmetry-matching

• Log into Education City and use the Username P6NM and Password P6NM. Click on Homework and there is an activity to complete in the folder called ‘Symmetry’.

EducationCity

Other areas of the curriculum:

• We made food chains with paper chains.
• We enjoyed using drama to understand a key event in Friend or Foe.
• We enjoyed being outdoors and making symmetrical obstacle courses.

Here are some grids and posters from our reflective Friday session this morning.

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs McFarlane

Hello and welcome to this week’s blog..It was lovely to “meet” you all at our virtual Parent’s Consultations and share the children’s progress It was a strange first time experience but, despite the technical difficulties, welcomed the opportunity to have this one to one contact.

We have had another busy week developing our learning . As usual the blog is compiled by the children based on their reflections

Spelling

We learnt how to spell words with al they make an aw sound

Super/fantastic talk, stalk,chalk,walk, salt,halt, alter, false, scald

Challenge talkative, stalking, alteration, Malteser, halted,walking, chalk

Tricky words where , were

Home learning . Try and write the words in alphabetical order

We found out the difference between their, there and they’re . It is tricky but we found a good way to remember how to spell them

Home learning Can you tell people how we remember them and use them correctly in sentences

In “The Storm” we looked at the author’s words. We had to up level sentences by finding words in the text. We are going to try and use these in our own writing.

We read “How to Look after a Cat ” together and then answered questions , We had to read the text ourselves to find the answers. We were being detectives again!

We wrote about an invention and had to use adjectives to describe it.

Handwriting Practising cursive handwriting using spelling words. We self assessed with pink / green highlighters

Numeracy

We worked out whether numbers were greater >, less than > or equal = another number and use the correct sign . We used 2,3,4 digit numbers

We were rounding numbers up to the nearest 10. We looked at numbers and said whether they should be rounded up or down. We did it with 3 digit numbers

eg. 34 is rounded to 30 37 is rounded to 40 256 is rounded up to 260 251 is rounded down to 250

In mental maths we had to recall 3 times table and number family facts and Jigsaw numbers to 20 and up to 100 as a challenge.

Information Handling: We recorded the results of surveys with tally marks. We discussed the purpose of surveys and some situations they might be used and used tally marks

Home learning Practice rounding numbers up or down to the nearest 10 Challenge yourself with 3 or 4 digit numbers

Practice number fact families

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/number-facts/number-fact-families

Other Areas

IDL We looked at Scotland on a map and tried to find the 6 cities. We found out information about them .

Home learning Can you find them on a map at home?

In PE we did relay races and worked as a team.. We were trying out new skills . We also tried to improve our skills and realised sport is about improving yourself not comparing to others.

In Outdoor Learning we wrote numbers in digits and words using anything natural we could find.

In Music we explored different rhythms using body percussion. We completed sequences and perform / layer rhythms as a class.

French We revised words and phrases for greetings and practiced “elle s’appelle…’ and ‘il s’appelle…’ in pairs.

HWB In Circle time we discussed friendships and what makes a good friend.Some of us are finding it hard not being able to play with other classes and we talked about ways to get through that!

In Assembly we said Goodbye to Mrs Ritchie. We made a class card! She was on Teams with us.It was good fun!

Half term starts next Friday!

Have a good weekend

P4H ( and Ms Hastie)

Please see below for a summary of our learning this week. Thank you to the pupils who created this.

You will also find a list of spelling words & a couple of useful websites for practising numeracy skills.

Finally, it was an enormous pleasure meeting with you all at the parent consultations.

Wishing you all a great weekend.

Join Our Mission

https://www.timestables.co.uk/

Another super week in the Golden Treasures class. Here’s what we’ve been learning this week. 

Literacy

• Spelling- Team Jewels: initial sounds
• Team Gold: revision of the igh/-y sound for example: fight, might, tight, night, sight, my, why, shy, by. Tricky words: come, said
• Team Treasure: spelling words with a ea sound– tea, meat, east, steal, cheat, beast, beach, scream, speaking, reaching. Tricky words: little, down
• Reading- continuing to work on our fluency skills when reading aloud; predicting what will happen in our new reading books.
• Reading- enjoying the story of James and the Giant Peach and drawing pictures of the characters Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker.
• Handwriting- continuing to practise our letter formation. We have worked on forming b, B, c and C correctly this week.
• Writing- descriptive words for George’s Marvellous Potions.

Ideas for home learning

• Spelling: draw a spelling flower where each petal has a word written in it from your spelling pattern (as practised in class).
• Choose a character from a book, TV show or film and talk about or write a detailed description of them.
• Practise reading and writing your tricky words. Here are all the tricky words on flashcards for Block 1-4 in case this is a handy guide for you. Try to use the correct letter formation if you’re writing them down!

b

b

Numeracy and Maths

• Sequencing/ordering numbers from smallest to largest.
• Counting from a variety of starting points both backwards and forwards.
• Practising counting in 2s, 5s and 10s.
• Working on number bonds to 10, 20 and 100 and knowing these really confidently.
• Addition skills: using largest number first strategy and counting on using a number line.
• Reading and displaying information in charts: Carroll diagrams.

Ideas for home learning

• Play number bonds to 10, 20 or 100 Bingo!
• Practising counting on and back, especially crossing decade numbers
• Count out loud in 2s, 5s and 10s.
• Find numbers in your local area (for example, door and bus numbers). Can you add 5 to the numbers you find?

Other Areas

• Continuing our learning about sound in science. We listened to lots of different instruments being played, talked about how they make their sounds and completed a sorting activity.
• French- continuing to revise French greetings including bonjour, bon nuit, au revoir, and ca va?
• Outdoor loose parts play- we had so much fun using our imaginations with the loose parts play equipment, we didn’t let the pouring rain spoil our learning!
• Outdoor PE- games to help our teamwork and listening skills- Cats and Dogs and Letters and Numbers.

Ideas for home learning

• Do you have any instruments at home? Can you work out how they make their sounds? Do you blow, strike, bang or pluck them?
• Do you have loose parts around you house or garden? What can you do with them?

It was really nice to chat to you all at parents’ evenings this week. Have a great weekend!

Mrs Graham and Mrs Tweedie