Author Archives: Mrs Denholm

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.