Mrs Fitzsimmons P1 gw08fitzsimmonsvicto@ea.dumgal.sch.uk
Sharing the learning with P5
This week we invited P5 to come and look at the gardens we created, sing a health song we have been practicing and also share our learning of French fruits and our smoothies we drew. P5 also sang us a song in Spanish! We all had a great time.
Visit to Dalbeattie Garden Centre
Last week we had a great time visiting Dalbeattie Garden Centre as part of our topic work. We walked there and back and spent time looking at all the different plants as well as looking around the shop! We were then treated to juice and biscuits on the patio seating area. We would like to thank the garden centre for having us and the refreshments!
Art, Craft and Design
We painted our final piece for the art competition last week by finger painting colourful flowers. The winner of the P1 art competition will be announced at the end of term assembly.
We also worked in pairs to plan, design and then create our own miniature gardens in a pizza box using lots of different materials!! Mrs Fitzsimmons was very impressed with all of our creative ideas and loved our hot tubs, swimming pools and toffee trees! We will be presenting these to each other and to another class next week.
Football with Queen of the South
We had our first training session with a coach from Queen of the South following the success of Finlay in P5 winning the competition to design the new strip. We loved it and the sun was shining!
Art
We have been very busy working on several skills for the P1 art competition. We looked at the work of Monet and made our own lily pad by blending paint and creating tissue flowers.
Visiting the allotment
As we have been learning about plants we looked round the upper school allotment and the variety of things that have been planted by Mr Caldow and the Eco Group with Mrs Howie.
Numeracy Work
We are learning to recognise, count, write, sequence and order numbers to 20 (and beyond) in class and have been playing lots of games to support this. The children have also been given some numbers to 20 homework activities to practice.
Open area learning
We are very lucky to have a huge open area to play in with so many great resources. We love playing together with our friends and recently the block play and puppet theatre have been very popular! Mrs Fitzsimmons has been very impressed with the constructions we have made and the stories behind them.
Reading
We work very hard learning to read in class and we also enjoy listening to and sharing stories. The nursery joined us recently to enjoy the ‘Rainbow Fish’ story as part of our transition work. We can also be seen reading with our student, Miss Torrance who will be with us for 7 weeks this term from the University.
I.C.T
We have been learning how to open a saved file from our documents folder, edit it and then resave. We have also been enjoying playing on Sumdog and other games to support our learning in class.
Outdoor Learning through Topic Work
We enjoyed collecting flowers in the schools grounds and working with a partner to create our own ‘real’ vase of flowers!
Plants and Flowers
We have been learning about plants in our topic work. We have labelled their parts and identified some common flowers. We planted our own sunflowers…which grew! We wrote a recount of the steps we took and we have also written a recount about ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Next we are going to set up an experiment to investigate conditions of growth. We have also been busy creating flower pictures and collages in art which are very colourful.
We have been outside in the sun looking for flowers to draw.
Open area -Learning through play
We love playing in our open area together! Lately we have enjoyed our new dressing up unit which we are building up costumes for including puppets and also our new block play. We would be happy for any donations of dressing up outfits you no longer use if you are having a clear out! We have also been working on our position and movement skills using the Code and Go Mouse.
Weekly Round Up!
21.4.24 – This week we have been learning about living, non living and once living things and went to identify these in the playground. Back in class we worked in pairs and sorted various pictures into these 3 categories and explained our answers. We have also been learning about symmetry and were creating our own butterflies with loose parts which we took photos of on our i-pads. In gym we practiced ball control with hockey sticks and in ICT we designed our own flower using shape, line and fill tool in Paint. We enjoyed working with our P7 helpers on the laptops.
We would like to say ‘thank you’ to Stewarty Tyres for delivering these tyres for our outside classroom and and also to Castle Douglas Tesco for giving us a palette and some baskets.
Welcome back!
I hope everyone had a great Easter holidays! We were very happy to be back and see all of our friends. P1 had a busy week and were working hard in lots of curricular areas! We wrote about our senses in Spring, learned the story of 10, practiced ‘sliding’ in gym, practiced our reading in pairs, cut out and made some bright Tulip pictures and practiced lots of skills in our open area!!
Number
17.3.24 -We continue to work on our addition and subtraction skills and strategies. We are very good at organising ourselves to play games to practice our skills! We have also been enjoying playing number games on Sumdog (log ins have been sent home for children to play at home) and this week we we also worked in pairs to help the Scarecrow with his sums!
Music
We have been working on keeping the beat and rhythm work in music through our Charanga scheme of work. We also listen to and appreciate different styles of music (and have a dance to it!) and the last few weeks we have been learning to play along to some familiar songs on the glockenspiels. We will continue with this next term!
Sharing our Learning
We often work in pairs and groups and enjoy sharing our learning. Here we are sharing our books on World Book Day, our stories about dinosaurs and also working on a Health task relating to the Eatwell Plate.
Open area activities
Here are just a few photos of the learning that has been taking place in our free play and teacher initiated tasks in our open area over the last 2 weeks.
Numeracy
We are learning our addition stories to 10 and have been working in groups with the Numicon to find as many ways as possible to make a number. Here we are finding ways to make 6. We are also looking at doubles, near doubles, the switch and add strategy when working out addition sums and also the link between addition and subtraction.
P.E. Ball Skills
In gym we are working on our ball skills which will include striking and hitting the ball with a small bat and lots of partner work.
Healthy Eating
We are learning about healthy eating and the importance of eating a balanced diet including 7 portions of fruit and vegetables a day! We really enjoyed trying out some new fruits and making our very own fruit kebab which we ate!!
P.E. – Gymnastics
We have now completed our block working on the apparatus in gymnastics. Mrs Fitzsimmons was very impressed with our linking moves in our last session where we demonstrated different balances and rolls. Thank you for the photos Mrs Gray.
Expressive Arts
This week we have been enjoying listening to Katie Morag stories as part of our learning comparing Coll with Dalbeattie and discussing ‘What is an island?’ We loved painted pictures of Katie Morag and next week we will be writing a description. We also enjoyed our music time where we were working on our rhythm and learning to sing new songs – one about brushing our teeth which tied in very well as we had a visit from Angela from Childsmile.
Health
7.2.24 We have been learning how important it is to look after teeth in class and we also had a visit from Childsmile. Angela demonstrated how to carefully brush our teeth and talked about how much sugar there is in certain sweets and drinks.
Outdoor Counting and Team Work 2.2.24
P1 worked well with their partners to create a counting grid using shells. Well done everyone. Some good counting and number formation.
PE – Gymnastics
22.1.24 We have just started a block on gymnastics . We have been learning and practicing our different rolls and balances plus using the apparatus safely to climb and jump from.
Number
We have been learning to identify all coins up to £2 and also began counting totals up to 10p. We have enjoyed some games on the computer. If you would like to play the games the link is below. Choose from ‘Sorting one coin’, ‘Sorting two coins’ and Ordering 1p to 20p’. Next we shall be learning more about subtraction.
https://www.topmarks.co.uk/money/coins-game
In the open area we have enjoyed designing our own tartan, making Highland Cows, painting thistles, building a tall tower with 3D shapes then drawing our design and a Scottish themed hunt among other things!
Science
In class we have been learning about Winter as a season. We are also learning about the properties of water and how we use it every day! In pairs we investigated ice balloons – brrr! We watched them float in water like icebergs, added colouring to look closely at the patterns inside and then added some salt and observed how the ice melted and related this to the grit on our roads. Afterwards we put our ice balloons in the playground to see if they would still be there in the morning…….
Term 3 – Welcome back!
It was great to hear all the holiday news and welcome the children back! We had a busy week and worked hard as always! We had our last ball skills lesson in gym as next week we will be starting a block of gymnastics. We also printed some winter scenes and made a calendar which we took home.
Merry Christmas from P1!
P1 and P2 Christmas Party!
The children had a great time dancing, playing games, singing, eating chocolates and lots of prizes were won!
It’s Christmas!!!!
We do love a bit of art and craft in P1 and we also like helpers coming from P6/7 to work with us! We really enjoyed making our snow globes using our handprints.
Weekly Round Up!
8.12.23 This week we practiced our ball skills in the gym including playing corners to demonstrate moves , drew some cute chalk bears in art, used Paint to draw bears in ICT and we continue to practice our addition skills. We also made some paper chains to decorate our open area!
Science and Technology
We were inspired to make our own domino runs and build structures in groups after watching some world record domino runs! Mrs Fitzsimmons was most impressed with our team work and creativity!
Computing and free play!
We have been having great fun with our large construction in the open area building many different things together from mansions, to dens to boats!
24.11.23 This week we learned about logging onto the laptops and experimented drawing in Paint. We will be exploring this a lot more in the future. We had some great P6/7 helpers who also played some games with us in the open area.
Story writing with Minion Dave
We love story writing in P1 and had the help of Minion Dave last week to write a description! He was a bit naughty at times but so funny!!
Numeracy – Problem Solving
17.11.23 We worked in pairs to dress the bear! We had to use 3 colours and discover how many different ways we could dress the bear using them and then record our answers.
Rights Respecting Schools
14.11.23 Following on from our discussion last week about ‘respect’ and how we show this, today we looked at Article 7 The Right to a Name and Nationality. We had great fun using loose parts to create our name! Mrs Fitzsimmons was extremely impressed by our ideas and also how we helped each other. Brilliant working!
Science
This term we will be learning about forces, electricity and a little bit about energy. We began by playing with lots of toys investigating ‘what made them work’ and discussed what they do when they work e.g. produce light, sound. We will be learning more about ‘push’ and ‘pull’ in particular.
P.E.
6.11.23 In gym we have been practicing our under and over arm throwing. We always exit the lesson by telling Mrs Gray something we have enjoyed learning or what we have improved upon. We continue to have gym with Mrs Gray on a Monday and Mrs Fitzsimmons on a Thursday.
In class we also love our Cosmic Yoga!
I.C.T. within our play
In the open area we have been learning to take photos on an i-pad. We put our ‘pause card’ beside our work so we know who the great work belongs to! We can also use the cards by putting them beside our work and then returning to it later in the day. Our next target is to learn to load our games independently by using QR codes. We have also been experimenting with the Code and Go Mice and we enjoyed free painting.
Numeracy
We continue to practice our numbers to 10, counting to 30 and mental addition to 5. We have been applying our skills of counting and subitising (knowing how many without counting) and co-operation by playing various games. Mrs Fitzsimmons is very pleased with how well we organise ourselves with resources and tidy them away!
Halloween
This week we had lots of opportunities to practice our skills in and out of the class with activities related to Halloween which included a Halloween Hunt in the open area, mask making activity, Halloween word building and in class we made bats and pumpkins where we experimented drawing lots of different lines.
We continue to practice our number skills daily, we were also blending cvc words and we wrote a description about Bailey (Mrs Fitzsimmons’ dog). He was most impressed with our stories and pictures of him.
Road Safety
31.10.23 Welcome back! This week P1 learned about road safety and being safe and seen at night. We practiced crossing the road several times with Mrs Widdowson at the traffic lights and and talked about other safe places to cross a road.
Numeracy – Information Handling
The last week of term we had an introduction to Information Handling and worked together to display information in different ways. First of all we created a graph to show all our foot sizes in class. We got into groups of the same shoe size and then we drew round and cut out our ‘foot’! Each size had a different colour so we could clearly see once they were glued down. We discovered looking at the graph this was a much easier way to find out how many of each size there were! After this we sorted lots of different objects in groups. We sorted by colour to begin with and then were asked to sort the items a different way. After some discussion we then sorted by size, shape and type. Last of all we created a ‘rings to sort’ poster with a partner. We had to decide what to sort e.g. Transport how many different types to have and how many in each ring. Mrs Fitzsimmons quizzed us on each of our posters!
…….in other areas!
Following on from our visit from PC Blacklock we interviewed one of our janitors, Mrs Widdowson all about her job and how she helps us too! We then recalled some of her jobs and wrote a list.
We have been working very hard on our drawings this term and in particular ‘the body’. As you can see we are very happy with our work and we loved looking back at our pictures to see how much we have improved!
As a school we are working on the Stephen Graham writing approach. We have been looking at the ‘description bubble’ each week to orally describe a character from a story we have read. This week we chose ‘Hairy McClary’ as we love these funny rhyming stories.
Learning in class
We are always very busy in P1 learning in our classroom and open area. Here are just a few of the activities we have been doing recently including number on the Activboard, 2D shape building, sand and water play, dancing in Fun 31, writing cvc words on our magnetic boards and sharing our super story writing. We enjoyed watching a video that Mr Fitzsimmons made for us about the ear as we have been talking about our senses. We also have our very own opticians with lots of resources kindly given to us by Frances Dunne Eyecare!
Health and Wellbeing
In class we have been learning about people who help us in school and today we had a visit from PC Blacklock! She told us all about the role of the police and how they help us. We enjoyed asking her questions and looking at all the equipment on her vest. She is looking forward to you all saying ‘hello’ when you see her down the street!
Home Learning – Thursday 28th September
*Please continue to choose from the ‘Activity options for every day’. If you are short of time perhaps just do Task Board 9 and practice your sounds with the flashcards.
*Maths Week Scotland Activity:-
https://www.mathsweek.scot/families/activities (please scroll down to find the ‘Number Fun with Lego‘ video and again you may need to highlight, copy and paste in the search bar)
*BBC Bitesize – What are the parts of the human body. There is a video, activity and quiz you could do. (again you will need to put the link in the search bar). Ask your child about ‘Fred the skeleton’ we had in class! https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/z6882hv/articles/z3cyn9q
*PE: – We usually have gym on a Thursday. If you go to Mrs Gray’s home learning page there are lots of P1-3 videos you could join in with her.
*If you would like to listen to another ‘Little Princess’ story click the link below.
If you would like to send me an e-mail about how you are getting on it would be lovely to hear from you! I look forward to seeing you all on Friday!
Home Learning -Wednesday 27th September
*Please continue to choose from the ‘Activity options for every day’.
*Practice your ‘d’ letter formation – see clip to watch below.
*Maths Week Scotland activity:-
https://www.mathsweek.scot/news/maths-outdoors-scavenger-shape-hunt
(you may need to highlight, copy and paste in the search bar)
*Click the link to watch a ‘Little Princess’ story we have been enjoying in class.
Home Learning
Activity options for every day:-
*Numeracy – Task Board 9. Instructions on the sheet.
*Practice formation of numbers. See ‘Zoo’ character sheet.
*Count out objects to match the number from 1-10 e.g. buttons, lego, sweets, pens.
*Literacy – cut up the sounds sheet to make a set of flashcards. Ask your child to say the sound, sing the song, do the action and say something beginning with the sound.
*Pablo the banana Fairtrade booklet.
*Early Level STEM activities posted by Mrs Duncan (pick and choose).
Here are some links to the songs for each letter we have covered if you would like your child to sing along!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdQe5Op1fU8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMUo6dxfUek
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOiNSTsIvfA
Tasks for Tuesday 26th September
*Complete the ‘d’ page in the sound booklet.
*Maths Week Scotland Idea :-
https://www.mathsweek.scot/news/how-to-play-trash
(you may need to highlight, copy and paste the link into the search bar)
Health and Wellbeing
Today we had a lovely visit from Miss Clendinning and Miss Rodger with baby Thomas and Ava! We learned all about looking after a baby and asked lots of questions and decided the babies are very cute!
