When chatting about our new topic, the children have been discussing the size of the sun, moon and stars and that they all look so tiny.  We did an experiment outside to show that as things get further away, they appear smaller, which is why the sun, moon and stars look so small.  We used two paper plates and checked at the beginning of the experiment that they were exactly the same size. Mirren then walked further and further away from Jayden and we noticed that the paper plate Mirren was holding appeared much smaller!

We have started with our second topic of this term, Space and on Friday we read a story called Back to Earth with a Bump! During our class literacy time we worked in co-operative learning groups to make our own story map and we each had a job to do in our group.  We wore a sticker to remind us of what our special job was and we worked very well to carry out our jobs. We are looking forward to doing more special jobs in our groups!

Lui celebrated his 5th birthday yesterday and today in class we sang Happy Birthday to him and he told us all about his birthday party, it sounds like great fun! Happy Birthday Lui!

For the next 5 weeks we are focusing on gymnastics in our gym time and today we started with learning how to balance and hold our bodies in different shapes on the floor and on apparatus.

We also learned how to do some stretch positions in gymnastics and learned the special names these stretches have – tuck, pike, straddle, front and back support.  We then worked around the various stations developing our gymnastic positions.

We took advantage of the lovely weather and used the outdoor classroom for our numeracy lesson. We used the big Numicon pieces and worked together to solve addition problems.

This term we have been learning about Scotland and China,  we have been comparing some Scottish and Chinese traditions and on Wednesday afternoon we tasted some traditional foods from both countries.  We really enjoyed this and after some practise we managed to use chopsticks to eat the noodles!

This morning Primary One had a visit from the Hilton hotel, they brought pancakes with them and we got to decorate them. It was lots of fun and we used jam, chocolate spread, strawberries and chocolate treats to decorate our pancakes. Thank you very much to the lovely ladies from the Hilton!

We have been learning about Chinese New Year and we listened to a story that told us all about the Chinese zodiac animals and that each year the animal changes at the beginning of the Chinese New Year. We used our date of birth to find out what animal we are and in our class most of us were born in the year of the dragon, Weronika was born in the year of the rabbit and Lui and Wyatt were born in the year of the snake.

Today some of the class took part in the first gymnastics session. The club will be run on a Monday lunchtime and the boys and girls were very excited about it this morning! They all worked very hard during the session and are very much looking forward to the next one.

This term we have continued to learn all about addition and we have been learning how to write our own addition number sentences. We are doing very well with this and have been using lots of different fun activities during our numeracy time. We have started using a chilli challenge when selecting addition cards and we have enjoyed choosing the ‘hot’ chillies to challenge ourselves!

The chilli challenge has three different tubs and these are labelled mild (one chilli), spicy (two chillies) and hot (three chillies), the boys and girls can choose their own number sentence from either of the three tubs and they know that if they start on mild and think they want to try a bigger number they can pick from the spicy or hot tub. The children have responded well to this and it has been lovely seeing so many of them challenging themselves. Well done!