Happy New Year to you all! I hope you had a very enjoyable festive break with your families.

In Primary 1 we are ready for a new year of learning!! Please have a look at the information below to see what we will be focusing on in each subject.

Literacy

Phonics – We will learn the remaining letter sounds of the alphabet this term while improving our word building skills.

Spelling – Now that we can read and write our sounds, we will be writing as many words as we can! Some of our common words cannot be sounded out so we have to practise the spelling of these in lots of different ways to help us remember the letter order.

Writing – We are continuing to develop our skills in describing this term as well as having a go at writing some words and sentences by ourselves.

Letter formation and hand writing will continue to be a focus to allow us to showcase our spelling skills with ease.

Reading – Now that we are starting to use worded texts, we will be developing our word attack skills, remembering to use our letter sounds to help us with unfamiliar words, while looking for our common words too.

We will also be developing our comprehension skills by answering questions about our texts. This term we will be looking at Traditional Tales, discussing character traits and sequencing the main events of the stories.

 

Numeracy

During our Mental Maths sessions, we will continue to practise counting forwards and backwards. We will also be seeing how quickly we can respond to more and less questions.

We will continue to focus on our addition skills, partitioning the quantities to 10 and learning the different ways to make each number. We will also be learning about the doubling and halving of quantities.

Towards the end of term, we will be exploring “Money”, initially brainstorming our ideas about when and how we use it. We will be introduced to all the coins up to £2, ensuring we can correctly identify these and as our addition skills develop, we will combine these coins to “pay” for goods in our class shop.

Through our topic work, we will also be exploring Data Handling; sorting a variety of objects into groups and recording and displaying the information that we have gathered.

Health & Well-Being (HWB)

Now that we have learned how to “Do Turtle” when things are becoming stressful, we are going to be problem solving for Twiggle and his friends by helping them overcome difficult friendship scenarios. We are confident we have the necessary knowledge and strategies to help them!

In other areas of HWB, we are considering the impact of physical activity on our bodies and identifying the physical changes we feel after a period of exercise.

We will also be discussing the importance of personal hygiene; reinforcing our tooth brushing and handwashing techniques.

As part of our “Shops and Shopping” topic, we will be looking at the range of food that can be bought in our local shops and investigating where it comes from. We will also have some taster sessions, ensuring we are mindful of food hygiene and safety when preparing our snacks.

During our PE sessions we will be completing a block of gymnastics, reinforcing the skills from last term while incorporating these into sequenced movements.

We will then introduce racquet skills, looking at how we hold and use a racquet before introducing ball control.

Fun fitness will be our final topic, developing each child’s personal level of speed, agility, stamina and strength through fun activities and exercises.

THANK YOU ONCE AGAIN FOR TAKING ALL EARRINGS OUT FOR GYM DAYS ON MONDAYS AND THURSDAYS.

RE

The first half of the term will focus on the Holy Family and how life would have been for Jesus as He grew up in Nazareth with Mary and Joseph. We will talk about the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist and revisit our own

As we move towards Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent, we will talk about the meaning of this special time. During Lent we will take part in special prayer and reflection times to prepare ourselves for the special celebration of Easter.

 

IDL (Topic)

Our first topic this term will be “Materials”. We will be exploring and identifying a range of materials, thinking about what they could best be used for and why. We will be investigating which materials float and sink then using our findings to help us build a boat.

Shops and Shopping will be our other topic this term. We will investigate the shops and businesses in our local community and consider the different jobs and roles that people can do. This will help inform our aspirations about the types of jobs we would like to do which we will express through a variety of role play activities.

Our shopping baskets will be FULL in our class shop as we become familiar with the act of exchanging money for an item.

Expressive Arts

Our art, music and drama will be linked in with our topics once again this term. Art and music will have an appreciation element with the children giving their responses to specific artwork and pieces of music.

Within music the children will be identifying various percussion instruments and using these to keep a steady beat.

We cannot wait to get started!

Mrs Duff and Mrs Strachan