This week we launched our new topic Into Space. We had so many questions after our trip to the Planetarium about our Solar System, constellations and Planet Earth. We now have our inflatable solar system in our classroom and this morning we even had some little stars to keep the planets company!

In literacy this week we have been focusing on Common Words, reading them, spelling them, using them in sentences and finding them in books. We have been developing our blending and segmenting skills and using our sounds and alphabet skills.

In maths we have been investigating money and continuing our numeracy learning by identifying odd and even numbers.

It was really cold outdoors this week, but our storytelling was fabulous.

Here are some more pictures of this week’s learning.

Our creative skills have developed so well this year that we are now creating 3D shapes using paper – this is our house complete with furniture inside, the creators shared their learning with the class and they are now busy making a garden for their house.

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

We have been celebrating reading all of this week!

Each stage of the school was given an author to study and we were delighted to be asked to look at the books and illustrations of Nick Sharratt. We read a pile of his books, took part in a live read and draw along where we learned how to draw sea creatures like the ones in our favourite books.

We linked our maths and literacy lessons by conducting a survey. We had four books that none of us had read before and chose our favourite just looking at the front cover and the blurb. We used this information to practise our data handling skills and then we read the books properly and found that our favourite changed.

We spent time with the P7s who have written children’s books and were really keen to share them with us.

We continued our Nick Sharratt learning through the book Pants.

With the arrival of Spring, we not have some (very temporary) class pets. We collected frog spawn from the Capel Burn and we are observing to see them hatch and form into tadpoles and froglets – as soon as they have legs we will return them to the burn!

This week in Numeracy we have been investigating more and less in number. We had a whole class game of Play Your Cards Right!

Beyond number, we have been learning about 3D shape.

We spent a very muddy afternoon (sorry!) in the Woodland looking for signs of Spring.

We have been gifted a load of cardboard tubes. So far this week, they have been (amongst other things) listening devices, hockey sticks, measuring devices and car ramps. 

Here are some more pictures of this week’s learning including baking, sewing, metal loose parts, some phantom broken limbs, a huge cardboard box and a bubble wrap river.

We have been celebrating  St Valentine’s Day in P1a by creating hearts in the woodland, investigating symmetry using hearts, reading about the Boogie Monster falling in love and writing about what Love is…

In Numeracy, we have been revising and working with number bonds using the numicon and ping pong balls – it really challenged our communication skills when we played Number Bonds Ping Pong Match!

We further developed our symmetry skills by creating challenging colour block patterns.

In literacy, we have been matching alphabet letter names with our sounds and consolidating our digraph learning.

In PE we have been learning about rebound games using balls and rackets.

Here are some more pictures of this week and last week’s  learning.

I hope everyone has a great weekend and look forward to next week’s learning.

This week we completed the first of our Science Centre Learning Lab lessons investigating Camouflage. We discussed how and why animals hide in the wild and then we created our own minibeasts and designed their camouflage so that they could hide on a range of backgrounds.                           

In literacy, we completed all of the Jolly Phonics sound progression Set 7, we will now consolidate our sounds learning using the sounds we have learned in a variety of ways. We continue to enjoy reading the Big Cat books in class and have been challenging ourselves with more complex texts.

In Maths we have been using the deins materials to investigate creating numbers using our place value skills.

We have also be learning about ordinal numbers by racing cars down ramps and recording the results.

Our writing task this week was retelling the story of The Gingerbread Man focusing on the beginning, middle and end. We acted out the story to help us with this before putting pen to paper.

Here are some more pictures from this week.

We had such a fun trip to Glasgow Science Centre this week. In the morning we explored all three of the levels in small groups. I did my best to capture all of the children, but as I’m sure you can imagine, the groups scattered and so the photos are predominantly of the group that was with me and the ipad!

Thanks so much to our parent helpers who did an amazing job of keeping track of their little charges – the term “herding cats” was used on more than one occasion!

The afternoon was much calmer with a trip to the Planetarium where we learned about the Sun and the Moon and visited Mars to see what the Mars Rover was up to.

I have completed the GSC learning lab Tiny Forests teacher training and over the next few weeks we will be working through the lessons, learning about sustainability, our planet and how to look after it. There are even some activities for the children to try at home and this can all be shared with the Science Centre Education Dept too.

As we were not in school on Wednesday to mark Burns’ Night, we spent Thursday learning some Scots using the book Neeps and Tatties – a book about the Neep tribe and the Tattie tribe who don’t get along until a wise haggis comes to visit and shows them how well they go together. We acted out part of the story with The Gruffalo playing the part of the haggis.

We then chose some words to act out and were able to share our learning with the lower school at this morning’s assembly.

So, another busy week in P1a. I hope everyone has a great weekend and look forward to next week.

This week in literacy we have been developing our story telling skills. We have completed another round of Helicopter stories and illustrated them. These will now be merged together to create our Helicopter Stories Book Volume 2.

Through play we have been investigating and recreating classic tales, this week our focus story was Rapunzel. We used the costumes outdoors to help us with our story telling.

In Maths this week we were learning about fractions. We we halving and quartering shapes and finding half of amounts.

In PE we have started a new block of Rebound Games.

Here are some more pictures of our learning.

Happy New Year! It has been so lovely to get back into our school routine.

This week in maths we have been working on our subitising skills – finding patterns in amounts to help us count more efficiently.

We started our new Mini Topic based around the RSPB Big Birdwatch. First we identified the birds that are commonly found in our playground and then we conducted a survey. We were using our  tally marks and classification skills.

We worked together to gather all of the information together and then we created bar graphs to display our findings.

In Literacy this week, we have been learning about the sh sound and our story of the week was The Three Little Pigs. We retold the story in a variety of ways and wrote story maps to show that we could sequence.

Here are some more pictures of this week’s learning.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.

It has been so cold this week! We had previously tried to freeze bubbles without success as it just wasn’t cold enough, but this week gave us  the perfect conditions for bubble freezing and there was so much excitement when we actually succeeded.

We have been learning about money in Numeracy and Maths and our shop was always very busy.

We learned about the ch sound, read our books and through practical activities developed our knowledge of the common words.

Here are some more pictures of this week’s learning.

We have been practising our nativity so hard and cannot wait to perform it for you on Monday.

This week outdoors we were investigating the story shed. We dressed up and retold favourite stories – we didn’t use the stage area though preferring to take our storytelling round to the large loose parts area, the mud kitchen and the sand pit.

In literacy, we have been practising our Kung Fu Punctuation, looking for punctuation in our reading books and favourite library books, we have been developing our predicting and sequencing skills and blending our sounds to create words.

In Numeracy and Maths we have been skip counting, finding missing numbers, subitising and using our developing mental maths skills to solve real life problems. We have been working with money and this really helped us at the present room this morning when we were working out the difference between £1 and £2 coins.

Here are some more pictures of this week’s learning, featuring our brand new Mini Me’s, maybe you can spot them in the pictures!