Here we are making the most of the lovely weather on Friday, we took chalk outside and wrote our sounds/numbers and drew some pictures.  We also used the outdoor equipment to practise our balancing and co-ordination, this was quite tricky on some of the equipment!

The boys and girls had so much fun learning about germs and why it is so important to wash our hands, that we decided to do another experiment to find out how dirty our hands were.  We cut a potato into four parts and we had a discussion about where we think would be dirty  – the class decided we should rub the potato on our hands, on the floor and outside.  The fourth part we put straight into the bag and Mrs Paton wore gloves to stop any germs rubbing onto it.

Here we are with the four parts of the potato in sealed bags and we will look at these in a week to find out if anything has happened!

This term we are learning how to stay clean and healthy and we started with learning why it is so important to wash our hands throughout the day.  We did some experiments to find out how quickly germs can spread from our hands. We rubbed different colours of glitter into our hands, then we all shook hands and we were amazed to see that after we did this we all had three different colours of glitter on our hands! The glitter was spreading from hand to hand, just like germs do.

We then washed our hands to find out why it is so important to use soap, one group washed their hands with cold water, one with warm water and one with warm water and soap. The boys and girls found that both groups that washed without soap still had glitter on their hands but the group that used soap noticed all the glitter had gone!

Our last experiment showed us what the soap does to the germs, we used pepper as our germs and we sprinkled some pepper into a bowl of water.  We then put our finger in the water and nothing happened, but when we put soap on our finger then put it in the water, the ‘germs’ bounced to the side of the bowl! We were amazed by this and had lots of fun doing these experiments.

This week in literacy we are continuing with learning more of our sounds. We are learning three new sounds a week and we also work on developing various skills such as blending our sounds, fine motor control and letter formation. We really enjoyed writing sounds and words in shaving foam!

Today, along with Primary 2 and 3, we had a Fire Safety talk from firefighters from Blackness Fire Station.  We learned how to stay safe on Bonfire Night and also how to keep our pets safe as it can be very dangerous for them too.  We really enjoyed this and even got the chance to ask some questions at the end.

During the holidays we had another birthday in our class, Weronika turned 6 and today she picked a card from the class and told us all about her exciting birthday presents! She got a pet rabbit for her birthday and is enjoying looking after it.