Hello and welcome back to the second P1 blog of this new school year!

We are so busy in P1 even though we are still only in school for the morning.

We learned 4 new sounds this week. They were ‘n’, ‘p’, ‘i’ and ‘ck’. When we are learning our sounds, we sing the Jolly Phonics song and do the matching action to help us remember them.

The action for ‘n’ is to stretch our arms out wide and pretend we’re an aeroplane and say, “nnnnnn”. The action for ‘p’ is to put our finger to our lips pretending our finger is a candle and blow the candle out saying, “ppppp”. The action for ‘i’ is to put our hands at either side of our face wiggling our fingers like whiskers and say, “iiiiii”. the action for ‘c’ is to click our fingers like castanets and for ‘k’ to wave our hand in the air like a kite flying in the sky.

We’ve also been making our new sounds using playdough, playing sound games on the interactive whiteboard, finding sounds in the sand and practising writing our sounds on our whiteboards.

We’ve also learned the numbers ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’ and ‘4′ this week. We have been listening to number stories and singing number songs and rhymes. We have been doing lots of number activities. We have been matching numbers on our teddy bear number washing line, we have been throwing bean bags and balls into coloured hoops, but we had to make sure we matched the correct colour and the correct number to the correct hoop! Trickier than it looks!

We also cut strips of paper very carefully and glued them together to make the number ‘4’.

We also went outside to do some investigating and see how many ‘number’ things we could find. We think we did very well indeed. We found 1 bin and 1 tree. We found 2 arrows on 2 doors and 2 stones. We found 3 trees and 3 coloured spots on the playground. We found 4 picnic benches and 4 boys and girls. We are wonderful number detectives!

We also painted our portraits with Mrs Lynch this week. We had to think about the colour of our hair and our eyes and put our features all in the right place. They will be going up in our corridor wall and everyone will know who we all are in P1!

Notices for parents:

Gym – Please ensure that your child has a full gym kit in school.

Your child has been given a blue homework packet, please ensure your child brings this to school every day.

A photographer from the Evening Telephraph will visit school on Monday 27.08.12, please ensure your child is wearing a shirt and tie.

There will be a sample school dinner on Friday 31.08.12, please return the slip with your child’s dinner choice.

Primary 1 will be in a full school day, finishing at 3.15pm from Monday 3rd September 2012.