Look who came to visit us this week! After a huge amount of debate and finally a vote, we named our Class Elf Elfie! He’s already been up to mischief. I wonder what he’ll do next week?

Our new phonics sounds this week were sh, ch and th and we had a special visit during one of our Literacy lessons from Ms Rodriguez who is  our QIO responsible for early years. She was so impressed with our classroom environment and how well the children manage their own learning. Everyone was so excited to show her around and tell her about everything we have been learning in P1 so far.

In Maths we have been learning the words for numbers.

In PE this week, we were working on our racket skills. We started balancing bean bags on rackets, but were quickly able to move onto tennis balls, we could bounce and catch them on the rackets and even pass them to our classmates.

Here are some more pictures of the amazing learning in class this week!

And finally I leave you with this picture – it made me smile and as Mrs Slorach said at the time, this just shows  how keen the children are to get into class and start learning!

The secret is finally out, we are able to perform our Nativity in front of a live audience this year and we are all beyond excited. I have sent home lines this week and would really appreciate if you could practise these at home. We are spending as much time as we can in class rehearsing and it makes such a difference if the children are confident in what they are to say, then all of the other components like when to say it and where to say it will hopefully all fall into place!

This week, we were able to use our fraction knowledge when we made pizzas – we halved tomatoes and mushrooms, some of the bits of pepper were quartered and everyone made sure that the whole base was covered in tomato.

In literacy, we continue to learn new sounds (this week was y and x), develop our knowledge of the common words and use all of our new reading skills in a variety of activities.

In the areas, we continue to consolidate our learning through play –

Our Growth Mindset activity this week was based around Incy Wincy Spider – we talked about not giving up and then the children created their own spider and then pledged something that they are going to try really hard to achieve. I’m sure you’ll be delighted to hear that there will be a lot of room tidying, bike riding, sewing and knitting being worked on at home over the coming months!

As the weather has turned really cold, just a wee reminder to send the children in with jackets, hats and gloves, they are always outdoors for playtime and at lunch break unless the weather makes it unsafe to do so.

I hope everyone has a great weekend!

This week we have been celebrating Scottish Book Week across the school.

Our allocated STEMaStory was One Button Benny. The children created a friend for Benny using the metal loose parts.

In our writing lesson this week, we wrote about the friend for Benny that we created, giving him or her a name and describing them.

Outdoors, we created vehicles for Benny to travel in when he could not use his Boost Button.

On Wednesday, we walked to the library where we listened to the BookBag books and then voted on our favourite – we gave them 6 votes each so couldn’t choose our favourite, we just love all stories in P1a!

Today we jpined the author and illustrator Debi Gliori for a live drawing lesson. We learned to use graphite pencils to create penguins. Then we listened to Debi Gliori reading one of her stories.

We love spending time with our P6 Buddies and we were so excited when our buddies came to read to us today.

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I hope you have enjoyed this special Book Week edition of our blog and look forward to catching up with all the news on Monday.

This week in Primary One, the children in P1A have made me so proud. They all observed the minute silence for Remembrance Day and were able to explain why it is important for us all to stay quiet at the same time.

In maths, we have been investigating money.

In Literacy, we have been sound and word detectives, looking for our target words in a range of books.

We also tried a new reading position, some of us thought it was comfier and some of us prefer to sit with legs in a basket.

Our creative juices were flowing when we designed our own poppies.

Here are a few more pictures of this week’s learning.

Next week is Scottish Book Week, we have our trip to the library on Wednesday and lots of fun, book based activities to complete in class. We also have a book based STEM activity planned so if anyone has any boxes or cartons that we can save from recycling, please just send them into class and we will make good use of them.

It has been another busy week, but we all still found the time to relax, whether that was when “watching” the football or enjoying a spa break!

I hope everyone has a fabulous weekend! I look forward to all the Monday morning news.

As you will see on Twitter (and possible heard in the playground!) P1A became environmental campaigners this week. We have been learning about the Polar Bears who live on Hudson Bay in Canada and how Global Warming is melting the ice that they travel across to find food.

We have been investigating the properties of water using lots of ice in our water tank – we have worked out how to get  bits of ice to  stick together and we’ve even made ice bridges, just like the ones we researched online.

We created habitats for the arctic animals – we know that Polar Bears and penguins do not live in the same place and we used the globe to track the routes that the Polar Bears take to head north.

For Diwali we have been making Rangoli Patterns, we learned that Rangoli Patterns are used to welcome visitors and so we made some outdoors in the playground to welcome our grown ups at the end of the day.

In literacy, we continue to learn new sounds and build words with the sounds that we know.

In Maths we are building our number knowledge using a range of different activities.

Miss Bishop has been teaching us to code using Scratch.

We have enjoyed being outdoors where we are learning to work collaboratively.

Our buildings in the construction area are becoming more detailed and elaborate all of the time.

This week we have introduced Learning Targets in our classroom – so just in case anyone has been hearing about blue and red people and wondering what we have been up to, this is our new target board. During some lessons, the children are set a task for them to complete independently. Once they have completed their task, they take their little person off the board. This is one of the steps towards building independent learners who are managing their own learning. It is very early days with this, but so far the children have been doing a fantastic job.

The take home folders came home today – please take the time to look through this with your child, fill out the form at the front and then please return the jotter and workbook (s) with the form in the folder on Monday. The worksheets should be kept at home.

Have a great weekend and I look forward to catching up with everyone in our Parent’s Night conversations next week.

There have been some really spooky goings on in P1a this week.

Helped hugely by the new P1 play doh station!

In literacy we have been learning our new sounds ai, j and oa and developing our reading skills using all of the sounds we have learned so far.

In maths we have been learning to sequence the Months of the Year and further developing our knowledge of the seasons and days of the week.

Outdoors we were displaying our excellent gardening skills to prepare the garden for winter.

And we have still had lots of time for developing our taught skills through our play.

We’ve had another busy week. Thanks to everyone who has returned the profile books, these are now filling up with lots of learning experiences. We are now keeping the welly boots in the cloakroom so that the children can wear them on really wet days, like today. Can I just remind everyone that the weather is really changeable just now and it is really helpful if the children all have a rain jacket even when the weather is fine in the mornings (also, a wee change of clothes in school bags is useful for when accidents happen or when wee feet get soaked outdoors – or indoors at the water station!)

Have a great weekend!

I hope everyone had a great holiday week. It has been so lovely to welcome everyone back and  hear all of their stories.

This week in PE we have been working on ball skills, everyone loves using the blue bobbly balls!

We have been learning and working with our new sounds l,f & b.

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And we have been completing lots of activities to help us remember all of the sounds that we have been learning.

In writing, we have been creating story journeys.

And we have all now “written” a helicopter story so we have been putting them into our special profile books and illustrating them.

We continue to investigate Seasons in maths and have been discovering so much about weight, size, ordering and balance using the pumpkins, conkers and leaves in our Autumn display.

We took our maths learning outdoors, to investigate patterns.

And in the creative area, we created our own STEM challenges with the peas and sticks.

Here are a few more pictures of some of out learning from this week.

I hope everyone is managing to access our Google Classroom for homework information, any issues, please contact me through the school office.

I’m still waiting for a few Profile Books to be returned, we are now using these in class, so I’d really appreciate if they could be returned as soon as possible.

Thanks to everyone who has sent in wellies, our shelf in the welly shed is nearly full. I’m still missing a few pairs though, and we will be starting to investigate more outdoors really soon. I don’t want any school shoes getting ruined in the muddy woodland, so it would be great if all of the children had their wellies in school.

Have a great weekend!

It has been Scottish Maths Week this week and we have been extending our maths learning in so many different ways. We learned how to make a symmeTREE using items we found outdoors. We were going to create it in the garden, but the rain was so heavy that it was getting washed away, so we brought it into the classroom.

We had to make sure that we found two of each leave so that we could place them either side of our tree trunk.

We further explored symmetry using beads, buttons and paper shapes.

We made numbers using our Lego and number lines using pasta

We worked together to complete maths puzzles

And here are just a few pictures of what has been happening in the play areas this week.

I hope everyone has a fabulous weekend and look forward to another great week of learning.

There was so much excitement in P1a this week with the arrival of our first Storyworld Reading Books. These will be sent home for you to enjoy as part of out homework starting next week.

We have been sequencing the story, building the sentences and drawing the story.

Our Numeracy and Maths focuses have been 2D Shape and subitising.

We have learned three new sounds this week.

Miss Bishop was teaching us about position and direction using the BeeBots.

We have been exploring nature outdoors.

In our creative area, we were investigating the texture of oobleck (sorry for any cornflour covered uniforms!)

The sand area has prompted so much discussion about measuring volume.

These three little stars have been conducting investigations and solving “crimes” in the classroom!

The construction area has been filled with so many fabulous buildings – and some gym equipment!

We have had the metal loose parts out again, this time to create houses for our Junk DNA people.

I hope everyone has a fabulous holiday weekend and look forward to hearing all about everyone’s adventures next week.

This week we have had special visitors in the school who came to see our classroom and observe our learning.  They were so impressed with the way the children led their own learning, followed the rules of the classroom and engaged in all of their learning tasks. It was so nice to show off how well everyone has settled in to school life in such a short period of time.

We have completed the first set of Jolly Phonics sounds SATPIN and the children have been building and blending words. They are all so keen to start reading books and we will start to explore Storyworld next week.

We have been further developing our phonological awareness learning about word boundaries.

Miss Bishop taught us about algorithms and how to code using the BeeBots.

In PE we have been learning about basic rolls in gymnastics in the gym hall and developing our ball skills outdoors in the MUGA.

In Maths, we continue to investigate number and also 2D Shape – we went outdoors on a shape hunt and have been learning about the properties of various shapes building on our learning about bee hive hexagons last week.

We have been talking about our classroom areas and how to improve them – the children have some great ideas, although I’m not sure how a swimming pool in the role play would work!

We had an outdoors STEM challenge to create a den. Three teams competed and then it was so lovely to see the children decide to make one bit den for them all to go inside.

The building skills also continue to develop in the construction area.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.