Our Gruffalo Party

November 11, 2010 User deactivated 10 Comments

Thank you for all your comments. We have loved reading them. Please keep putting comments on our blog as we will be looking at it every week.
What a Gruffalo week we have had!
On Monday our homework was making a Gruffalo mask.
In school we have played in the Gruffalo’s Kitchen, games on the internet from www.grufflo.com, listened to the story in the reading corner with our MP3 players and played with the Gruffalo puppets at the puppet theatre.

We made invitations to give to each other for the party.

We also made menus for our party food.

By Wednesday afternoon we were SO excited!
We played party games in the nursery garden. We played Gruffalo Corners, Catch the tail of the fox and Gruffalo tig. If we were caught by the Gruffalo then we had to change into a tree in the forest.
Then we went into the class for the party food.
Purple Prickle Juice (blackcurrant juice), Poisonous Warts (green grapes), Roasted Fox (carrot sticks), Owl Ice Cream (vanilla ice cream with chocolate drops), Scrambled Snake (popcorn) and Gruffalo Cake.

We all helped to decorate the Gruffalo Cake with chocolate butter icing and lots of yummy ingredients to make it look like the Gruffalo.

Next week we are going to play pin the poisonous wart on the Gruffalo and we are going to read the story of the Gruffalo’s Child.

The Gruffalo

November 5, 2010 User deactivated 14 Comments

This week we have been learning through the story of the Gruffalo. We have been playing in our roleplay area which has been turned into a wood. We have pretended to be the characters in the story. The Gruffalo, the mouse, the snake, the fox and the owl.

We have been learning new Jolly phonics sounds ai, ie and oa this week. Keep practising then at home! We have been playing lots of games to help us blend our sounds together.

Our number work this week has been all about apples. We have measured how long we are in apples. Look at the pictures this person was 17 apples tall. The tallest person was 20 apples tall!

We tasted different apples and put an apple on the tree to show which kind we liked the best.

We also make a pictogram of our favourite Gruffalo characters. We used stickers to add to our pictogram.

It is fireworks night tonight and we are all really excited about it. In the ICT this week we practised using Pivot and made an animation of a colourful fireworks night.

Today we have looked at our blog. Please leave us a comment. We will be looking at our blog every week.

Baxter Park and Halloween

October 29, 2010 User deactivated

What a week we have had!

On Monday we had our visit to Baxter Park to look for the signs of Autumn. We collected leaves, conkers and fir cones and brought them back to school to have a closer look. We recorded, using an Easi-speak microphone, our feet crunching in the leaves. We also took lots of photos using our digital camera.

We have been using Halloween to help us with our writing. We made spells in the water tray with jelly, we found spiders in the cornflour in our cauldron. Lastly we had to make up our own spells. We drew pictures of different things we would like to put in our spells and each class made a spell book.

In ICT we used Pivot for the first time. We made little animations by making the stickman move about and took pictures of him. We also changed his colour too.

You can download Pivot free of charge as it’s a bit of freeware. You can find the download here…

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/stickfigure.html

DCA Visit

October 22, 2010 User deactivated 3 Comments

Our first week back after the holidays and we have been very busy practising all our Jolly Phonics sounds. We have been beginning to blend our sounds together to make three letter words and write them down. We get lots of practise on our magnetic boards and at the writing table.

We have been learning to recognise our numbers and put them in order. Some of us made a ‘Ten Green Bottles’ video to help us remember. We took photographs of our ten green bottles wall and then recorded our singing using an Easi-speak microphone. It’s hard work making a movie!tengreenbottles

In the classrooms this week we have been learning about the book ‘We’re Going On A Bear Hunt’. We painted of all the things the characters met in the story and helped make a lovely display.

In the Active Learning Zone we have been learning about the book ‘Funnybones’. At the making table we made skeletons using black paper and white art straws and lots of glue. Our favourite activity has been ‘Sound the Room’. Funnybones left all his bones (with sounds written on them) hidden in our room and we had to find them and write them all down.

We had a trip to the DCA Film festival to see ‘The Varmints’ and ‘The Gruffalo’. It was a great trip to the cinema and we are looking forward to learning lots more about the story. We have been playing some games on www.gruffalo.com

Remember our trip to the park next week. Fingers crossed for dry weather.

Last week of first term

October 6, 2010 User deactivated Leave a comment

A great start to school for our P1s. They have settled into school really well, can follow instructions and have been learning about our school rules. It’s good to be green. They have all been successful learners. They confidently take part in all school life.

Both classes have been looking at our Oxford Reading Tree stories again in the last week and have been learning all about Mum, Dad, Kipper, Biff, Chip and Floppy. They have loved the stories At School and The Lost Teddy.

We have been learning more Jolly Phonics sounds and so far have learned 25! We keep practising these sounds all the time so we can remember them and use them when we start to read and write.

We used the microscope to look closely at conkers and fir cones and took pictures of them. We have made lots of art work eg. paper art trees and paintings of trees to help us remember about the signs of Autumn.

During play we have practised writing our numbers. We have continued to make patterns and look for shapes in the world around us.

Lastly, on the last day of term, we used Active Expressions for the first time. We used these to see how well we had remembered our numbers and shapes this term.

Thank you to all P1s and parents and carers for a fantastic first term. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Autumn is coming

September 24, 2010 User deactivated

We have all had a good week this week. We have learned lots of new Jolly Phonics sounds and we are practising them every day.
We have been reading our Oxford Reading Tree books. P1a1 have been reading The Lost Teddy and P1a2 have been reading At School. We have enjoyed using the Promethean Board to look at our stories using the Magic Page.
In Maths we have trying to remember what our numbers up to ten look like, trying to write them and to count up to ten things. We made ten green bottles at our Making Table and will be playing with them next week.
We have been talking about harvest and Autumn. We have been playing with conkers, leaves and fir cones and talking about the changes we will see outside. We have been investigating Autumn things through the microscope. We made finger print trees in art and during our ICT lesson we drew a tree in Textease paint and used the stamper tool to add leaves.

ICT

September 17, 2010 User deactivated

Hello everyone!

We have had a busy learning our new sounds, g, l and o. We have been continuing to practise all our sounds. Playing with making their shapes with play dough, singing our Jolly Phonics songs on the karaoke machine and writing our sounds on the whiteboards and pens at the writing table.

In maths we have been learning about making patterns. We have used beads to make patterns with two colours and practising these at our numeracy table during activities. We have made pictures with sticky paper and have used colours and shapes to make the patterns. We remember to use the digital camera to take photographs when we have completed a pattern.

We have been creating brilliant models at the bricks. We have used our imagination and created buildings, mosques and castles. Next week we will be using the bricks to build a town for our railway.

This was our first week in the ICT suite. We used a program called Textease Paint. We have been talking about ourselves in school and drew pictures of our faces. We thought about the colour of our eyes and our hair. Look out for a letter home next week as at Dens Road we have the Softease Community at Home licence and you will receive the download URL and password for use of Textease at home.

Full-time!

September 10, 2010 User deactivated Leave a comment

We have all enjoyed being at school full-time and have been learning to make choices at lunchtime. Well done to us, we won first prize at the Dundee Food and Flower Festival for our bugs craft activity!

We painted messy hand prints to make our learning tree. We have been talking about what we have been learning since we started school.

Our Jolly Phonics sounds this week were r, m, d and h. We need to keep practising our sounds because this will help us when we start to read.

We had gym for the first time and used our super listening ears to carry out all our instructions.

We have been continuing to learn about shapes and have been doing lots of shape activities and creating shape pictures.

Thank you to all the parents and carers who came to our ‘Meet the Teachers’ event on Thursday evening. It was great to see you many of you there.

Sounds, Shapes and Bugs

September 3, 2010 User deactivated Leave a comment

Welcome to the end of week three for our P1’s. It’s been a busy week with parents joining us for a school lunch. And it was Elaine the Cook made yummy spaghetti bolognese!

Our latest Jolly Phonics sounds are c, k and e. We have been looking for things beginning with these sounds and playing memory games to test our brains.

In maths we have been sorting. We can sort things by colour and size and put them into groups. We have also been making patterns with beads and peg boards. Try asking us about shapes because we have learning about triangles, circles, squares and rectangles.

Look out for our entry at the Dundee Flower & Food Festival at Camperdown Park as we have put in a P1 entry. We had great fun with our first art lesson and made bees, ladybirds, caterpillars and butterflies.

Full time on Monday. Looking forward to being in school from 9am till 3.15pm.

Welcome to Primary One

August 29, 2010 User deactivated 3 Comments

Welcome to our Dens Road Primary One Blog!

Here you can keep up to date with regular updates of the learning taking place in our classrooms. We’ll keep you posted with activities that the children have enjoyed, photos of displays and daily life in our classroom.

In our first week we have been learning our Jolly Phonics sounds s, a, t, i, p and n. We have practised writing them on our magic whiteboards, Nintendo DS’ and our class Promethean board. We have been making letters with play dough and thinking of words that begin with these sounds.