Author Archives: Mrs Denholm

planning for our play

This week we have been continuing to develop our movement skills, are working on taking turns and sharing the resources. It was lovely to see the children developing their confidence as they participated in a different aiming practice at each station.

We spoke about our environment and what we are interested in adding or removing to reflect our interests. As a team we worked together to turn our home corner into a shop which will help us learn more about money. We now have a dinosaur land and new choices within our writing area to choose from.

We are continuing to work on our fine motor skills, this week threading colourful string around sticks and pine cones.

Drawing club continues to be a favourite time of the day with the focus on the ‘Pink Panther’ this week. The children have enjoyed watching some of the animations and have been very creative with new designs for an invention to clean up all of the mess he creates.

The children have been asked their views of the p1 garden and how we can develop this further. They made a mind map of their ideas and Mrs Dickie will be looking to help bring this to life.

 

Unfortunately IT problems are persisting and as a result I can’t seem to upload any photos (sorry…always the best bit, I know) As soon as the problem is fixed I’ll upload them.

Have a great weekend!

Mrs Denholm

fireworks, garden fun and brushing our teeth…

We have been working hard on learning our common words this week through various games.

We spoke about our experiences of Bonfire Night and how to stay safe around fireworks. We made some pictures using pastels and black paper and even made a collage poster where we all worked together to add some colour and design.

We started toothbrushing this week and explored the importance of looking after our teeth and regular trips to the dentist.

We made playdough this week trying to follow the instructions and patiently waiting our turn to give it a mix. We definitely need more practice as it was very runny but we persevered and got there in the end.

We are now independently working through our literacy and numeracy targets and Mrs Denholm has been so pleased to see everyone working together as well as on their own to learn through play.

We explored a growth mindset and the idea that when things are tricky we keep practising so we can get better at them. We tried to lift and move pom poms using chopsticks which was very tricky at first but had smiles all round when we experienced success.

We took our literacy learning out into the P1 garden this morning to practise our sounds and blending. We had good fun working as a team to identify sounds and read simple words.

Have a lovely weekend and I’ll see you all next week.

Mrs Denholm x

 

 

 

Autumn, Halloween and double numbers

Last week we embraced Autumn and the excitement of Halloween. We explored what happens during the season of Autumn and some of the treasures we find when out and about. We used some of these natural loose parts to make potions in our cauldron which became a superb spot for discussion between the children.

We moved our bodies in PE to music taking on the roles of zombies, spiders, bats and ghosts and used these characters to play some fun games.

We are developing our reading and writing skills nicely, now taking our time to sound out words as we read and write. We have started looking at sentence structure and creating simple sentences using some tricky words and by sounding out the rest.

We have practised doubling numbers to ten using ladybug spots to help as a visual and have been adding other numbers together within ten using the plus and equals sign.

Hopefully technical problems will be kept to a minimum from now on.

Many thanks

Mrs Denholm

phonics, patterns and data handling

We have had a busy few weeks in Primary 1 as we are now starting to use our knowledge of sounds to help us in our play and as we read and write.

We have been looking at repeating patterns in our environment and using a variety of resources to make our own patterns. We have enjoyed asking each other questions and gathering the results using tally marks. We have been able to talk about what we have found out using comparative language. We have continues to practise number formation and used subitising within our play to become more familiar with this concept.

We are still continuing to work on object control within our PE lessons, learning to move safely in a space and control the ball.

And here are a few snapshots of the children leading their own learning with their peers in the class…

Another great week!

Mrs Denholm x

Maths Week Scotland

This week we have celebrated Maths Week Scotland where we have spoken about the importance of numbers and maths within our daily lives and have used lots of stories to help us with our learning. We based many of our activities around the story Ten Terrible Dinosaurs which we enjoyed reading and acting out together. It supported us with counting backwards and recognise number names to ten.

We have played games, completed jigsaws, ordered numbers and used a number line to develop our understanding further. We all voted for our favourite dinosaur and completed a table using tally marks which we later turned into a pictogram.

We have practised writing our numbers starting at the correct point and enjoyed playing some number games on the ipads. Here are some pictures of our learning…

 

We were also very excited to welcome our buddies down to the class to listen to stories they had created. Here are some pictures of us with our buddies…

 

Have a lovely long weekend and I will see you all on Tuesday to hear about your adventures.

Love Mrs Denholm x

sounds, missing numbers and astronaut adventures…

This week we have started learning our first three sounds ‘s, a and t’ through jolly phonics. We now know a song to help us remember these sounds (which you can find online) an action for each sound and even started to blend these sounds together to make the words at and sat. We have started looking at reading books and took our time to refresh our knowledge on how to look after the book, different aspects of print concept and had a good go at predicting the story based on the picture clues.

We have continued to develop our number knowledge and have been working on identifying the missing numbers.

We are thoroughly enjoying our learning of all things space and have thought about some questions we would ask an astronaut if we were to meet one. Mrs Denholm is going to teach us a little more next week about the important job of an astronaut.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend and look forward to seeing everyone on Monday.

Mrs Denholm x

learning through space…

This week we have been thinking about the initial sounds of words. We thought carefully about the sound our names begin with and tried to find others in the class who had the same starting sound. We then played games to match and group the objects together by initial sound.

We continued to practise our rhyming words by making lists, listening to stories, identifying the odd one out and playing rhyming bingo and we worked hard to include lots of details into our black line drawings. 

We learnt the correct number formation for seven and eight using our number zoo animal stories to help us remember what they look like. We then tried to make our own giraffes (spotty seven) in our play.

In PE we travelled through space in our rockets with three astronauts allowed in each rocket. We raced and had to communicate with each other to change direction and alter our speed as needed. We developed our throwing and catching by trying to keep the ‘moon’ in the air and tried to throw shooting stars as far as we could through space.

We were super excited to get to work designing and building rockets out of junk materials. Thank you for all of your junk you have sent in. We will always gratefully put it to good use. The children have shown fantastic creativity and teamwork as they work hard to solve design challenges and support one another with cutting, sticking and balancing objects on top of each other. Next week we will continue to work on our designs.

We ended the week with ‘Fun Friday’ where we had some fun in the sun listening to a story in our garden and playing on the activity trail.

Have a lovely weekend in the sunshine. See you all next week!

Mrs Denholm x

 

Stories as a stimulus…

We have had another busy week practising our syllables and learning more about rhyme. We have been able to listen and clap the beat in 1, 2 and 3 syllable words and have been playing games to match rhyming pictures and the odd one out. We enjoyed reading Stickman to find lots of rhyming words in the text too.

We have been reading number stories about ticklish two, butterfly three and feathery four and have used the characters from these stories to help us with learning the correct number formation.

Our story of the week focused on the theme of difference and provided a good stimulus for discussion about the importance of being yourself. We all agreed life would be very dull if we were all exactly the same. Based on the story we designed our own underpants using different colours and designs and have displayed them on our story of the week display.

We worked on developing both our listening and fitness this week across PE with a variety of games where we worked individually and ass part of a team. It was great fun!

We are having a great time getting to know each other and are making new friends as we play. Here is a little snap of some of the learning taking place across the other areas.

Have a lovely weekend! See you all Monday.

Mrs Denholm x

A new adventure starts here…

Welcome to the P1a blog!

I have been super impressed with how well the children have settled and are embracing and learning the new routines of our class. We are working together to develop the environment based on interests as the children play and are learning more and more about each other.

This week we have been developing our listening skills through stories and by listening to the environment around us. We went on a listening walk around the school grounds and recorded our findings when we returned.

We enjoyed some warm up games of tig before taking part in relay races and practised throwing and catching a ball with a partner.

We have been counting forwards this week all the way to 100 and practising crossing the decades (29, 30…. 39, 40 etc).

We have explored number using playdough to practise number formation and numicon (the colourful resource with different number of holes in each) to build castles and talk about what numbers we used, how many of the same numbers we used, who had a taller/wider castle etc.

We explored directional language specifically forwards, left and right turns to programme the indi cars using the colourful mats within our instructions.

Creativity was flowing as the children drew self portraits of themselves for our class charter, which promotes their rights as well as other child led art and craft opportunities throughout the week.

The block area has been busy with children creating car garages and caves for dinosaurs to live in. Our babies have been well looked after in the home corner and lots of stories have been shared together.

Snack takes place at 1020am each day where the children gather on their carpet spots to enjoy their snack and listen to /watch a story or song.

 

I hope you all have a lovely weekend and look forward to seeing everyone on Monday morning.

Love Mrs Denholm x