Park Primary School

Welcome toPrimary 1

Park Primary SchoolKerrera Terrace

ObanArgyll

PA34 5AU

01631 563941enquiries-park@argyll-bute.gov.uk

Dear Parent/Carer

Welcome to Park Primary School. If this is your first experience of Park School, we hope that this information booklet will be a useful guide to what happens when your child comes to school.

At enrolment, you were given our “Induction Booklet” which contained some practical information about your child starting school. I would now like to give you some more detailed information about the curriculum and what you can expect. I hope that it will answer some of your questions. However, if you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contacts me or speak to a member of staff.

Mrs MacLaurin, Mrs Adair and I look forward to getting to know you and your child and working together as your child grows and learns with us on the next stage of their journey in education.

Remember that all children are different and some take longer than others to settle in and gain confidence. We listen carefully to you and your child to ensure that your time with us at Park is a great experience for everyone.

Gillian CarneyHead Teacher

AimsWe aim to work in partnership with parents/carers and

children in Park to:

Provide a happy, safe and nurturing environment.

To encourage positive relationships and respect for self and others through the use of positive behaviour reinforcement strategies.

Develop self esteem through an ethos of celebration of achievements and where each child’s contribution is valued.

Provide opportunities to explore and discover through active learning.

Develop necessary skills to prepare our children for the future and life-long learning.

We recognise the importance of continuity of children’s learning and experiences to enable them to build on prior learning and achievement. To promote this and foster continuity of learning, all of our new Primary 1 children have been involved in our Pre School Induction Visits. The visits have provided opportunities for your child to get to know the staff and familiarise themselves with the school.

Curriculum for ExcellenceCurriculum for Excellent is the curriculum which all schools in Scotland are following. It is built around “Four Capacities” or objectives for all children and young people. At Park School, we are committed to giving every child the best possible chance to realise their full potential and become:

Successful Learners through using their imagination and creativity, tackling new experiences and learning from them, and developing important skills including literacy and numeracy through exploring and investigating while following their own interests.

Confident Individuals through succeeding in their activities, having satisfaction of a task accomplished, learning about bouncing back from setbacks and dealing safely with risk.

Responsible Citizens through encountering different ways of seeing the world, learning to share and give and take, learning to respect themselves and others, and taking part in making decisions.

Effective Contributors through learning together in leading or supporting roles, tackling problems, extending communication skills, taking part in sustained talking and thinking, and respecting the opinions of others.

Curriculum for Excellence offers a broad and deep general education from early years through to S3 (typically age 15). It includes a senior phase of education (typically 15-18) which provides opportunities to obtain qualifications and develop skills for learning, life and work. It promotes the ability to learn and to reflect on their own learning, a skill for life that will help young people go onto further study, to secure work and to navigate through life.

Staff work together to plan a child’s ‘learning journey’ from 3 to 18, across different subjects and curricular areas. They will ensure young people can learn in a way that works for them, at a pace they can cope with and with enough challenge to stretch them.

Curriculum LevelsThe table below is a general guide to the five curriculum levels with progression to qualifications. The framework is designed to be flexible to permit careful planning for those with additional support needs, including those who have a learning difficulty and those who are particularly able or talented.

LEVEL STAGE

Early The pre-school years and P1, or later for some.

First To the end of P4, but earlier or later for some.

Second To the end of P7, but earlier or later for some.

Third & S1 to S3, but earlier for some. The fourth level Fourth broadly equates to Scottish Credit and

Qualifications Framework level 4.The fourth level experiences and outcomes are intended to provide possibilities for choice and young people’s programmes will not include all of the fourth level outcomes.

Senior S4 to S6, and to college or further means of Phase study.

How Do We Promote Learning?Active Learning

“Active Learning is learning which engages and challenges children’s thinking using real-life and imaginary situations.”

(Building the Curriculum 2)

It involves children using their thinking, language, practical and movement skills actively in meaningful experiences to enhance their learning. Active Learning is seen as an important way for children to develop vital skills and knowledge and a positive attitude to learning. It is learning that engages and challenges children’s thinking using real-life and imaginary situations. It takes full advantage of opportunities for learning.

All existing programmes of study, including maths and language, are taught with the emphasis on delivering them in a more active way to take account of different learning styles.

Children are taught through inter-disciplinary topics (themes with links to two or three subject areas) and at times through discrete subjects. All learning is set in context. Children will still make and do, write and count and all of the other things which children have always done, but the emphasis will be on them being ‘ACTIVE IN THEIR LEARNING’ and ‘ENGAGING FULLY IN IT.’

If you would like to know more about Curriculum for Excellence and Active Learning, visit the Education Scotland website at:

www.educationscotland.org.uk or www.acurriculumforexcellentscotland.gov.uk

Literacy and LanguageIntroduction

“Early literacy starts with attunement between parent and baby. Tuning into the baby’s needs by understanding, respecting and responding to first sounds, facial expressions and body language helps to support early literacy development. Offering opportunities for stories, conversations, listening, rhymes, singing, mark making, environmental print and creative and imaginative play are all effective and fun ways of developing literacy.”-Pre-Birth to Three, Positive Outcomes for Scotland’s Children and Families, 2012

Literacy is fundamental to all areas of learning as it unlocks access to the wider curriculum. Being literate increases opportunities for us in all aspects of life, lays the foundations for lifelong learning and work, and contributes strongly to the development of all four capacities of Curriculum for Excellence.

The importance of the development of literacy skills across all areas of the curriculum cannot be stressed enough. We are all in a position to make important contributions to developing and reinforcing the literacy skills of children and young people, both through the learning activities and a shared understanding of what we are doing.

Reading and responding to literature and other texts play a central role in the development of a child’s knowledge and understanding. Texts not only include those presented in traditional written or print form, but also orally, electronically or

on film. Texts can be in continuous form but also charts and graphs. The teaching of literacy reflects the increased use of these different texts, digital communications, social networking and the other forms of electronic communication encountered by children and young people in their daily lives. It recognises that the skills which children and young people need to learn to read these texts differ from the skills they need for continuous prose.

Our Aim Is:

To develop and extend literacy skills by providing opportunities for our children to:

Communicate, collaborate and build relationship Reflect on and explain their literacy and thinking skills, using feedback

to help them improve and sensitively provide useful feedback for others

Engage with and create a wide range of texts in different media, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by ICT

Develop their understanding of what is special, vibrant and valuable about their own and others’ cultures and their languages

Explore the richness and diversity of language, how it can affect them, and the wide range of ways in which they can be creative

Extend and enrich their vocabulary through listening, talking, watching and reading

READING

In the past we used Oxford Reading Tree. This year we purchased Project X – a modern , highly motivating whole school reading programme containing a variety of genres and digital resources. The children will meet the main characters: Tiger, Cat, Ant and Max. The children will join the four friends who have special watches that allow them to micro-size in their adventures.

Primary 1 start their reading with Project X phonics stories which provide many opportunities for consolidation and practice of synthetic phonics (blending). The books are read in a certain order, so that the

children can benefit from the revision and consolidation of the sounds. Most words in the books are phonically decodable. Each book contains a list of phonemes and tricky words as well as suggested activities and questions. We would ask you to do these in addition to the main story.

The children will also start learning some of the ‘tricky words’ which can’t be sounded out, like ‘the’, so there will be a balance of words that they can ‘look and say’ and others that they can ‘sound out’.

A good firm basis for tackling new words with confidence is being learned, which will help the more able to progress quicker, while allowing those who learn more slowly to have time to master these skills at their own rate.

Remember to keep reading stories to your child as it will be even more fun now because he/she will be able to start picking out words and sounds that they know. Be admiring of their skill in spotting letters and words rather than wishing they’d be quiet and let you get on with the story! Remember that this is the first step to independence and mastery of reading and when they can do this they will want to read all by themselves and you will feel redundant! Learning to read is a magical time for children, so enjoy the excitement with them.

SOUND AWARENESS

In Park, we know that children will learn to read and spell better if we help them to be aware of the sounds in spoken words. The Literacy and English framework in Curriculum for Excellence focuses on the systematic teaching of Phonics as an essential tool for reading.Being able to hear that ‘bat’ rhymes with ‘hat’ – they sound the same at the end of the word – is an important skill for reading that needs to be developed.So also is the ability to recognize that ‘mum’, ‘milk’, ‘man’ and ‘mirror’ all begin with the same sound. This is called alliteration.Children who have been trained in recognising sounds in words tend to learn to read more easily than children who do not have the skill. This is called PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS.

Phonological Awareness

There are 3 levels of phonological awareness:

1. Syllable – cat2. Onset and rime – c at3. Phonemes – c-a-t

Most children will have had lots of experience of this at home and in nursery.

Children can be helped to develop phonological awareness through:

Teaching nursery rhymes and providing rhyme/song CDs for children to learn

Ask children to act out rhymes e.g Humpty Dumpty

Say nursery rhymes but miss out rhyming words and ask your child to tell you them

Say silly rhymes e.g Humpty Dumpty sat on a fence! The idea being that your child recognizes that it’s wrong and doesn’t ‘sound right’.

Teach number rhymes e.g 1,2,3,4,5 once I caught a fish alive, Five little ducks went swimming etc.

Children can be helped to develop alliteration through:

Tongue twisting e.g William wears wonderful wellies

Get your child to describe themselves with a letter beginning with their name e.g ‘Giggly Grant’, ‘Marvellous Margaret’

Look for as many things as possible that start with the same sound in a picture e.g sea, sand, sun, sandwich

Play ‘I Spy’

Play ‘The Minister’s Cat’ e.g The Ministers Cat is called Bob and he likes to eat bananas!

All of the above are fun for your child and can be done anywhere – car journeys, in the bath, at the beach etc. Your child will know that you are helping them and you will help train their memory, very important in learning to read and of course develop a love of words and books.

PHONICS

In Park we teach Synthetic Phonics.

This means that; Sounds are taught rapidly and right from the start of Primary 1,

the first set of sounds taught are s a t p i n The emphasis is on word building The children very quickly learn to make words Children learn to blend individual sounds into words quickly

e.g sat, pat, tat, pin, pit etc. and have the immediate feeling of being able to read and make their own words

We introduce sounds through action songs of Jolly Phonics to add a fun element to the teaching of phonics. Please, practise the songs and the actions daily, as well as help your child identify words beginning with/containing the sound.

1. Learning the Letter Sounds

The children are taught the 43 main sounds of English and not just the alphabet names.

Please practise the sounds every day. At first it might seem that the pace at which the sounds are introduced is fast but with daily practice and revision of previously introduced sounds confidence will grow.

The letters are not introduced in alphabetical order. The first group have been chosen because they make more

simple words than any other six letters. Sounds with more than one way of being written are first taught

in one form only e.g the sound ‘ai’ an in rain and then later they will learn a-e as in cake or ‘ay’ as in day.

2. Blending

Blending is a process of saying the sounds in a word and then running them together to make a word e.g c-a-t is cat.

It is a technique your child will need to learn, and it improves with practice.

Some children take longer to do this than others. To start with you should sound out the word to see if your child

can hear it. The sounds must be said quickly to hear the word. It is easier if the first sound is said slightly louder e.g b-u-s To give your child practice at blending, he/she will bring home a

bag with sounds and a blending board. Please listen to your child blending the sounds to hear the words.

3. Identifying Sounds In Words If your child is going to be able to write independently, he/she will need

to be able to hear the sounds in words and write the letters for those sounds.

Your child will bring homework in which they will practise writing initial, final and middle (which is often more difficult) sounds.

This is the first step in your child becoming an independent writer. Before long, they will be sounding out and writing 3 and 4 letter words independently.

4. Tricky Words Some words cannot be sounded out or spelt correctly by listening for

the sounds in them. These are called ‘tricky words’ and need to be learnt.

As your child becomes more fluent in reading and writing they will be taught how to cope with these tricky words.

5. The Alphabet Why learn the alphabet?

The ability to name and recognise letters of the alphabet is vital to your child’s later success in learning to read.

Recite the alphabet with your child as often as you can. Use magnetic letters (fridge magnets) Change the starting point e.g start at N or C or S Fill in the missing letters Make an alphabet scrapbook Use dough to make letters

Use your body to make the letters! Tricky but fun.

This all sounds like a great deal of work, but it goes in stages and is spread over a long period of time. The children learn a little at a time but do ‘sound work’ every day.Your child will be tired when he/she comes home and remember when you ask the question “What did you do today?” and they answer “Nothing!!” you know exactly what they are doing and that’s only for sounds.

Learning to Write Letters and Numbers

Writing involves many skills and it requires:

Well developed muscles in the fingers to be able to control a pencil

Good hand to eye co-ordination

Children need:

Knowledge of where to start a letter and where the ‘flicks’ go To remember which way a letter goes

What can you do to help?

1. Please encourage your child to hold a pencil correctly. If they are unsure, a ‘pencil grip’ will help this. In Primary 1 we use chunky pencils and although children bring normal pencils from home we encourage the use of the former.

2. Initially some efforts at forming letters will look like squiggles, but praise and practice will work magic! The more practice they do writing letters and numbers, the better they will become at doing it.

In school, children are given lots of activities to strengthen the muscles in their fingers e.g threading, cutting, playing with playdough etc. You can help with this at home too.

3. Be familiar with the ‘script’ we use in school and encourage your child to form the letters correctly. (See attached sheet)

a b c d e f g h i j k l m

n o p q r s t u v w x y

z

Big Writing in Primary 1

What is VCOP?

The children are taught components of writing which will help them produce the best writing they can.

V – stands for ‘Vocabulary’. These are ‘wow’ words in our stories to make them more exciting for example; wonderful, huge, greedy etc.

C – stands for ‘Connectives’. These pull short sentences together to make a longer one; using ‘and, but, because etc.’

O – stands for ‘Openers’. These ‘open’ sentences in an interesting way, for example; Once upon a time, as, while etc

P – stands for ‘Punctuation’. Children need to remember to use full stops and capital letters in their writing.

Numeracy and Mathematics

Introduction

Children’s experiences of early mathematics begin at home. They become aware of number and its importance and how it is developed through everyday family life experiences such as shopping, setting the table or cooking. These activities are rich mathematical opportunities and can provide a secure basis on which to build their future skills.

Before starting school or nursery, many children can already:

Count Recognise numbers Represent quantities Share things out Sort and match items Understand the language of comparing and ordering objects Do simple addition and subtraction

As children make sense of the world they live in, they start to build up knowledge of maths based on their experiences. Children learn at different rates but they learn in a similar way as they all need to:

Explore the world around them Discover patterns in what they see and do Repeat actions and test the pattern they have recognised Add understanding to how things work Use words to make clear what they know

Our Aim Is To Help Children To:

Develop essential numeracy skills which will allow children to participate fully in society

Understand that successful independent living requires financial awareness, effective money management, using schedules and other relevant skills

Interpret numerical information appropriately and use it to draw conclusions, assess risk, make reasoned evaluations and informed decisions

Apply skills and understanding creatively and logically to solve problems within a variety of contacts

Appreciate how the imaginative and effective use of technologies can enhance the development of skills and concepts

How do we do this?

The best learning starts with the interests of the children. It is important that maths experiences are meaningful, as children have to

make meaningful connections in order to understand and retain their learning. They also need to practise their new skills. They need to talk about what they are learning. One of the most powerful and motivating contexts for developing early maths concepts is PLAY.

Play provides opportunities for children to be active in their learning and to share in adult led activities as well as consolidating new learning in their free play situations. We try to organise our classrooms to make them ‘a maths rich environment’.

The language of maths is very important and it needs to be correctly used in practical situations.

What does maths look like and what do the children do?

You will see sorting, classifying, ordering and counting. They do this using counters, pegs, cubes, bears, shells etc

You will see children exploring pattern and shape.This is done using multilink cubes, pegboards, linking elephants, beads and ribbons, laces and beads, flat shapes and solid shapes etc.

You will see children measuring. They may use rulers, numberlines, balances, scales, tape measures, stop clocks etc.

You will see the children exploring number.They will do this by using counters & dominoes and dice & board games. They use calculators and computer games.

Number rhymes and songs are plentiful and support counting forwards, backwards, addition and subtraction. They are sometimes done using props and pictures and always with actions!

Children can be helped to develop mathematical awareness through:

Identifying numbers, shapes and patterns in the everyday environment Giving lots of practice in counting Playing board games with dice Giving a number of coins to be counted (1p, 2p, 5p)

Playing guess my number, e.g. “I’m thinking of a number more than 4 and less than 6”

Telling the time , o’clock to begin with and then half past Using terms like “how many altogether”, “1 more than”, “1 less than”,

“which has more / less”

Finally

Maths is fun and children need to see that it is enjoyable and relevant. It is important that they are encouraged to see maths around them and remember that it is more than just number work – it is about investigation and problem solving too.

Health and Wellbeing

To help emotional and social development, we use Paths programme which focuses on identifying and coping with feelings. A friendly turtle Twiggle helps us deliver the lessons. Being a Paths helper/Star pupil is a special event for the children as they receive compliments from teachers and peers and carry out special duties. Please, discuss this special event with your child and add your compliments to the list.

Each month we will focus on one of the SHANARRI indicators (Safe, Healthy, Active, Nurtured, Achieving, Respected,

Responsible and Included) but each year the children will learn about a different aspect of each indicator, e.g. Safe: hygiene, sun safety, road safety, etc.

FrenchThe Scottish government is taking a new approach to language learning. Modern languages need to become a central part of children’s learning from P1 onwards. In Park French is introduced in Primary 1 as Language 2 and Gaelic in Primary 5 as Language 3. The languages will be integrated into our daily lessons and routines.

Other Information

Parents Meeting

Meetings for Parents and Carers are held twice a year in November and May.

You will be given the opportunity to make an appointment with your child’s teacher for either a late afternoon or evening appointment.

Learning Logs

Every term the children are involved in self-evaluating and evidencing their learning through Learning Logs. We focus on Literacy, Numeracy, Health and Wellbeing and Interdisciplinary learning. Learning intentions and success criteria are always discussed with the children. Children’s progress is evaluated by means of traffic lighting, pupil and teacher comments. Learning Logs are sent home every term to enable you to discuss progress with your child.

Helpful Hints: Check the school website. Check school bag every day. Important notifications will be sent to you through text alerts. Homework and important letters / notices will be put into the

“Homework Bag”. The signature column in the Homework diary can be used for

informal notes between teacher and parent / carer. Finished work will be put in the school bag. This can be kept at

home. It is extremely helpful to have all items of clothing labelled –

Primary 1 often get their items mixed up! On P.E days it is not necessary to wear a school tie. Jewellery

should be removed if possible. Money for buses should be placed in a purse / wallet, with your

child’s name clearly marked. Packed lunch boxes should also be labelled.

Please provide an absence letter following the occasions when your child is off school.