Tag Archives: Jolly Phonics

Our First Full Week at School!

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Hello and a warm welcome back to Longhaugh Primary 1 Blog!

This was our first full week at school. We all did very well and settled into the lunch time and afternoon routines quickly. We have enjoyed staying at school for lunch and we are well and truly settled at Longhaugh Primary School.

    

We learned another 2 sounds this week, they are ‘n’ and ‘c’ ‘k’.

     

The action for ‘n’ is to put our arms out wide pretending to be an aeroplane and say, nnnnnnn. The action for ‘c’ is to click our fingers as if we were holding castanets and say, cccccc. The ‘k’ action is to wave one hand in the air pretending it is a kite flying in the sky. We practise singing our Jolly Phonics song for these sounds every day.

       

This week in numbers we learned the numbers ‘4’ and ‘5’. We read the number stories and sang 4 current buns,  5 little ducks and 5 little monkeys. We added the numbers 4 and 5 to our Teddy Bear washing line and practised writing the numbers on our whiteboards.

  

P1A, P1B and P1C all joined together to learn and talk about our class and school rules. Our teachers told us the way that Mr Munro and Mrs Jenkins would expect us to behave. To be kind to each other, to share and to take turns. They would be very disappointed if we were unkind to other pupils or used our hands or our feet to hurt other boys and girls. We agreed that  we would never be unkind or hurt each other.

Longhaugh Primary School has 4 houses that are named after castles in the local area. All our pupils belong to one of these houses. They are Mains, Broughty, Claypotts and Dudhope. We all found out what house we belong to and got a coloured badge to wear representing our new house. We were all very excited and are wearing our new badges with pride!

                 

As part of our topic, “We Belong to Longhaugh” and to help our work on pattern, we laid strips of green and blue paper in the pattern of our school tie and made a display for our corridor wall.

  

We painted our portraits with Mrs Lynch this week and they are displayed in our infant corridor. Don’t we all look splendid?

           

Our family and friends came into school to look around our classrooms and to see all the hard word we’ve been doing and to discover some of the activites we do and the routines we follow. We had a wonderful turnout and everyone was very pleased with our progress. Many people left lovely comments in our visitor books and Miss Simpson, Miss Bonnar, Mrs Weir and Mrs Lynch would like to thank all family and friends for making it a very successful afternoon.

  

We made our first visit to our Local library in Whitfield this week. We get to look at all the books and the librarian reads us a story. We will visit the library every Friday and we are looking forward to our next visit already!

Notices for parents:

Gym – P1A –Wednesday & Friday, P1B – Thursday and Friday, P1C – Wednesday and Thursday. Please ensure your child has a full gym kit in school.

Open Doors – Every  Thursday 3.00pm – 3.15pm. Come into class and let your child show you all the hard work they’ve been doing.

On the 7th of September there was an extra AGM of the Friends of Longhaugh (Parent Council). Unfortunately there was a disappointing turnout and there are still several vacant positions to be filled on the committee. It would be beneficial to the school if some of our new P1 parents were willing to donate some of their time and join our parent council group. It does some wonderful work and can help to make positive changes  for our children, school and local community. Please contact the school with you interest.

Settling In

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Hello and welcome to P1’s second blog of the new term! This is our last week of coming to school in the mornings only. We have all settled in very well at Longhaugh Primary and are looking forward to coming to school  full time from Monday!

This week we have learned 2 new sounds. Our new sounds are ‘i’ and ‘p’.      

          

We read the Jolly Phonics stories for ‘i’ and ‘p’ and sang the Jolly Phonics songs. We looked at our sounds table and all the objects that begin with ‘i’ and ‘p’. We then used our magic writing finger and then practised our sounds on our whiteboards.        

The action for ‘i’ is to put our hands to our face, on either side of our nose and wiggle our fingers, pretending they are the whiskers of Inky the Mouse. The action for ‘p’ is to put our finger to our mouth and pretend we are blowing out the candles on the pink, pig cake.

     

When we learn any new sound or number in P1 we always practise with our magic writing finger first before using our whiteboards. Our magic writing finger is very important and we always use it to ‘write’ in the air so we become familiar with the formation of any new sound and number.

We also talked about the number ‘3’. We read the number 3 story, sang 3 Little Speckled Frogs, put the number 3 on our number washing line, wrote the number 3 with our magic writing fingers and then practised our new number and the numbers we already know on our whiteboards.

  

We also learned about shape this week. We read a shape story and talked about all the shapes that are around us every day. We had feely bags filled with all different shapes and we had to say what shape it was by only touching and not peeking into the bag!

  

Our teachers read us the big book “The New Children.” We were then all given a small book of our own and our very own book markers and we followed the story using our markers as our teachers read the big book again. As soon as we have learned all the words that we are given home in our blue packet, we will be given our very own book to take home and read. Keep practising those words!

  

We also had lunch at school on Friday. This was a chance for us to eat in our dining hall so we could see where we sit and what we have to do before we all start full time next week. The cook makes a yummy lunch!

Several of our blog followers have told us that they are unable to leave a comment. We are aware of this and are trying hard to rectify this problem. Please bear with us and don’t let this setback put you off leaving comments, the children are looking forward to seeing all your positive comments when they look at our blog every week.

Notices for parents:

Gym – P1a (Wednesday & Friday), P1b (Thursday & Friday), P1c (Wednesday & Thursday). Please ensure you child has a full gym kit in school on these days.

Open Afternoon – Thursday 8th September at 1.30pm

Children will be at school for a full day from Monday 5th September.

School lunch menus have been issued, please discuss these with you child and help them make their lunch choice.

A Brand New P1!

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A very warm welcome to Longhaugh Primary 1’s very first blog of our new school year!

Our new term started on Wednesday 17th August 2011 and we welcomed 50 new P1 pupils to our school family. I’m sure you will agree from the photograph below they look very smart indeed!

We were all very excited to start the new term and are all looking forward to a brand new school year, ready to work hard. Our new P1’s were no exception and already they have settled into the routine of school very well.

We have learned 3 sounds already! ‘s’, ‘a’ and ‘t’. We have read the sounds stories, sung the songs, looked at the sounds tables in our classrooms and practised writing our new sounds on our white boards. As we learn more sounds we are looking forward to being able to make words. We are very excited about that!

As you can see from the pictures above, for every sound we learn we also learn an action. The action for ‘s’ is to move our hand like a snake and say ssssssssss. The action for ‘a’ is to pretend that ants are on our arm and we say a a a a a a ! The action for ‘t’ is to move our head from side to side as if we are watching a tennis match and say t t t t t t t .

We have also been looking at the numbers ‘1’ and ‘2’. We have read the number stories and sung number rhymes and songs. We sorted out the numbers on our number washing line and practised writing the numbers on our whiteboards.

We also worked on all our colours. We sorted and matched coloured objects into hoops and matched colour words written in coloured and black ink. We were all very good at this job!

Our topic for starting school is ‘We Belong to Longhaugh Primary School.’ We started this by walking around the school looking at all the rooms we will be using and meeting all the people who work and help us in the school. We took some photographs which we will be using later.

We went to the gym hall for the first time this week. As this was our first time we talked about being safe and not bumping into others. We moved around the hall in different ways, e.g., hopping, jumping and running. we made sure we were moving very carefully and when our teacher shouted STOP! We all found a good space of our own. As we all did this so well, we finished by having a game of tig.

Miss Simpson, Miss Bonnar, Mrs Weir, Mrs Lynch and all the boys and girls of P1 hope you enjoy and will continue to enjoy reading about all the activities and hard work that goes on at Longhaugh Primary School.

Please feel free to leave comments as the children are looking forward to looking at our blog every week!

Notices for Parents:

The Evening Telegraph photographer will be in school on Monday 29th August 2011.

Sample School Lunch – Friday 2nd September 2011 – Please complete invitation with your child’s choice for lunch and return it to school a.s.a.p.

Gym – Please ensure you child has a full gym kit (shorts, t shirt, gym shoes) in school next week.

All P1 pupils will be in school all day from Monday 5th September 2011.

Sensation Science Centre

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We have only a few weeks left of P1 and we still have lots of things to do!

No matter how busy we are though, we are still doing our words and sounds every day. We were also using the phonics BeeBot, games and the sounds bibs to make words.

We’re still working on subtraction to 10, but this week we started to work out our take away sums using the number in your head number line! How smart are we??

We were back out into our school garden again this week, weeding and generally trying to keep it neat and tidy. We also planted the pumpkin plants and the petunias that we didn’t manage to sell at our garden centre.

  

At the end of our plants topic we have been looking at our garden and how nice it’s now looking, and we thought it would be nice to brighten up the shelter in our playground which is just beside our garden. We discussed what would be a good design to paint in the shelter and we all got letters home to make sure we bring old clothes into school on painting days. Luckily, Mrs Lynch’s son is an art student so he is coming in to help us chalk the outline of our design on the shelter walls.

Finally this week we went on our trip to Dundee’s Sensation Science Centre. What fun we had! We were able to climb in a giant head and slide down the nose! We looked at models of inside our eyes, checked our balance, sniffed all sorts of very peculiar smells of plants and animals. As you can tell the exhibition downstairs was all about our senses.

  

  

  

 We then got a tour of the dinosaur exhibition and learned all about dinosaurs and how they lived and died millions of years ago. It was a fantastic day!

  

Notices for Parents 

Gym – Monday and Friday – Please ensure your child has full gym kit in school on these days.

Open Doors  – Every Wednesday at 3.00pm – 3.15pm

Homework – All words and sounds every night.

Whole School Camperdown Park trip – Friday 17th June.

Please ensure children are wearing old clothes on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for painting the shelter.

Sports Day

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Hello again and welcome back to Longhaugh Primary’s P1 Blog!

We’re still going over our words and sounds every day and continuing to practice making new and familiar words. This is important as we are writing short sentences all by ourselves. This week we read the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. We talked about all the things that Jack found at the top of the beanstalk. We had to use our imagination and write a sentence about what we would like to find.

  

         

We were working on our subtraction to 10 again this week, we used the number washing line, number rhymes and our butterfly subtraction bag.

  

We have been working with our P7 gaming partners on the playstation Eyepet game. This week we all went to the Assembly hall and made our own junk model Eyepet. There were lots of different and wonderful Eyepets constructed from all kinds of boxes, bottles, yoghurt tubs etc.

  

Here is a selection of the models made:

  

Thursday this week was our infant sports day. It was a little windy and some of our sacks blew away but we had lots of fun and we all enjoyed joining in all of the races. There was a running race, a three-legged race, a potato and spoon race, a sack race and a skipping race. Many congratulation to all of the winners!!

The sack race.

      

The three-legged race.

        

Notices for Parents 

Gym – Monday and Friday – Please ensure your child has full gym kit in school on these days.

Open Doors  – There will be no open doors this week. It will resume next week at the usual time.

Homework – All words and sounds every night.

Bean Experiment

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This week we have been extremely busy even though we’ve only been at school for 3 days due to the May holiday and the election.

We have been working hard on our 3 letter words again this week, using matching games, board games, bee bot mats and our phonic vests.

  

  

Our teachers introduced subtraction to us this week. We discussed that subtraction means take away and we looked at the sign (-). The butterfly bag was used for the first time. We were given leaves and 5 butterflies and we had to take some butterflies away and practice, with our teacher, writing the sums on the whiteboards. We also used our currant buns masks and sang the song.

  

As part of our Plants topic, we intend to open a garden centre (details to follow) and make and grow things to sell, just like a real garden centre. This week we made clay tea light holders. We had to make sure they were big enough to hold a candle. Next week we are going to paint them with Mrs Lynch.

We also did a bean experiment. We talked about what beans need to grow and we decided that they need sunlight and water. We had 4 jars and filled the jars with paper and cotton wool. We split into groups and one group put their beans in a jar and watered it and put it on the window sill where it could get light. Another group put their beans into a jar and put it on the window sill but didn’t give it any water. The third group put their beans in a jar, watered it but put it into a dark cupboard away from the light. The fourth group put their beans into a jar and gave it no water and put it into the dark cupboard. We’re going to see how many of the beans grow. We drew the picture and wrote what we thought would happen in our Thinking Books. 

  

  

In Mrs Lynch’s room the role play area is a pet Shop and we have been learning how to care for animals. There is also to be a gaming pod and this week we have just found out that we are going to have an Eye Pet. The P7’s are going to help us and we all have a learning partner.

   

 We are very excited! We start next week!

Gym – Monday and Friday – Please ensure your child has full gym kit in school on these days.

Open Doors – Every Wednesday – 3.00pm – 3.15pm

Homework – words and sounds every night.

Infant Sports afternoon will be on 1st June – details to follow

Royal Wedding

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This week we have been continuing to work hard on our addition to 10. We’ve been using our ‘number in our heads’ number lines and adding 1 more, 2 more and 3 more, remembering to start with the bigger number first.

We’ve also been continuing to practice our words and sounds and we’ve been learning and writing three letter words. To help us with this we have been playing matching games, using word lace cards, our word beebot mat and wearing our phonics bibs.

  

We started our new topic ‘plant’s this week. The new Garden Centre role play area opened and we talked about all the things plants need to grow strong and stay healthy. We found out that last years P1’s had visited a garden centre and we looked at the book they had made. We all agreed that we were really looking forward to learning all about plants and actually growing some plants ourselves!

We painted sunflowers to decorate the garden centre area. This was quite tricky as we had to press our brush down on to the paper to make it look like petals and move the paper round so we were painting in a circle. we had to concentrate hard!

  

As it is the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton on Friday we discussed what we knew about weddings and we looked at photos of the royal couple and other wedding pictures.

To celebrate the day we made a flag that we could wave, aslo we designed a special commemorative plate or a dress fit for a bride. We also had juice, biscuits and played some party games to get us in the wedding spirit!

  

  

Gym – Monday and Friday – Please ensure your child has full gym kit in school on these days.

Open Doors – Every Wednesday – 3.00pm – 3.15pm

Homework – words and sounds every night.

Infant Sports afternoon will be on 1st June – details to follow

Easter Craft

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Hello and welcome back to P1’s blog. We are all really glad to get back to school and back to working hard. We all had a lovely holiday and some of us were very busy and visited some very exciting places. We wrote about all the things  we did on our holidays in our thinking books.

   

We are at school only 4 days this week as we are on holiday on Friday to celebrate Good Friday. We have been discussing Easter, reading the Easter story and talking about how we celebrate Easter.

We made Easter cards with a daffodil on the front. We had to cut paper carefully to get the right shape and stick it on with glue.

   

our Easter cards

We also made chicks. This was an especially tricky job as we had to fold the paper backwards and forwards to make it look like concertinas. We had to concentrate hard to get this right! We then had to stick all our pieces together. We made such a good job our chicks are displayed in the Assembly Hall!

   

We’ve been revising all our sounds to make sure we still remember them after the spring break. We’ve also been looking at cvc words. We’ve been working with our play dough mats, bee bot mats and lace cards to make  and learn new and familiar words.

We’re continuing to work on our addition to 10. We’ve been using number lines and white boards and Luke came back to help us this week with his lily pads! We’ve also started a new number line this week. This special number line is to help us add and help us hold the big number in our head. As you can see the number really is in ‘our head!’

    

Gym – Monday and Friday – Please ensure your child has full gym kit in school on these days.

Open Doors – Every Wednesday – 3.00pm – 3.15pm

Homework – words and sounds every night.

Last Week of Term

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Hello again and welcome to Longhaugh Primary P1 blog!

We started this week by discussing our trip to Montrose Basin. We did two pieces of writing. On our first piece we wrote 2 sentences about the train journey to Montrose and what we saw from the train.

  

The second piece of writing was all about our time at Montrose Basin and all the things we found on the mud flats.

   

We continued with our topic of Grannies and Grandads this week. We looked at toys from the past and toys we play with today. We sorted the toys into hoops, one for toys from the past and one for toys we play with today. We discovered that some of the toys that our grandparents played with, we still play with today (skipping ropes, hoola hoops etc), so we had to have a third hoop filled with toys that were both old and new!

  

We played with some of the older toys and we had great fun. They are going to be in our classroom so we will have the chance to play with them again.

As it is Mother’s Day on Sunday we have been doing lots of craft activities. We painted our hands and put our hand prints on card with a very special poem on it.

   

We made love hearts out of clay and wrote ‘Mum’ on them. We then painted them with bright, glittery paint and put a ribbon on them.

  

On Friday we had a craft afternoon and Mrs Adams, Miss Simpson and Mrs Lynch helped us to make Easter pictures, Easter bonnets and Easter bunnies.

          Spring Lamb

          Easter Bunny

         Easter Bonnet

Although we’ve been very busy doing all sorts of craft we have still been working hard revising all our sounds and words, reading our reading books, continuing to work hard in our addition to 10 and revising our number doubles.

All of the children in P1, Mrs Adams, Miss Simpson and Mrs Lynch wish you all a very restful 2 week spring holiday and we look forward to seeing you all again on the week beginning 18th April!

Montrose Basin

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This week we have continued to revise all our sounds and all our words from our word wall.

In maths we are still working hard on our addition using cubes and divided circles. We were working on making stories of 8 and 9.

We all brought in our Grannies and Grandads booklets that we had been working on at home. Our Grandparents had helped us to fill them in telling us about all the things they liked when they were children.

We painted pictures of ourselves and also of our Grannies and Grandads. We hung them on our classroom wall showing when we were born and when our Grandparents were born.

        

On Friday we went on our trip to Montrose Basin. We were very excited and it was great fun to travel to Montrose on the train.

   Our driver and our conductor.

     

 We had quite a long walk to get to the wildlife centre but it was a lovely day and in no time at all we arrived.

  

We had our lunch first as we were all hungry!!

   

 We split into 2 groups and some of us went onto the sands and looked and dug for creatures. We found  crabs, shrimps and sand worms. We carefully lifted the rocks and seaweed to find the creatures hidden underneath.

     

We then swapped over and looked around the wildlife centre. We used the binoculars and telescopes to look at the birds and other animals that live at the basin.

  

We then walked back into Montrose and got our train back to Dundee. We were all tired but had a marvellous day out!

Notices for parents:

Gym – Every Monday and Friday – Please ensure your child has a full gym kit in school on these days.

Homework – Words and sounds every night.

Open Doors – Every Wednesday – 3.oopm to 3.15pm.