Last week Primary 1A were so busy preparing for our Nativity that Mrs Agnew forgot to post on our blog.

However in between practices we did have time to complete our Christmas craft for the school fair. We decorated cones with tissue paper and then adding sequins before to make them sparkle. We finished them off by cutting out stars and sticking them on the top. Thank you to those who came along to the stall and bought our beautiful trees!

We also coloured in a Nativity scene and then wrote an invitation to our grown ups, inviting them to our Nativity. We discussed what we need to include in an invitation and formed our invite together.

We have also been enjoying our Christmas Corner. We absolutely love decorating and redecorating the felt Christmas tree and having a go at writing our own Christmas cards. We are learning key words such as ‘to’ and ‘from’ and how to lay out a card.

When we started learning about animals, lots of us showed an interest in what animals eat and why they eat certain things. This week we learned about carnivores, herbivores and omnivores and the difference between them.

In small groups, we discussed what certain animals eat and then sorted them into one of the categories based on the information we had learned.

We have been absolutely loving our Junk Modelling area and the plan is to continue this until the Christmas holiday. Many of us have got extremely creative with the junk and it has developed helped with our drawing and cutting skills.

Super Geraldine the Giraffe

A boat

Working together to develop our drawing skills. There was a lot of time spent on this activity.

A mop

A vampire castle with a dungeon

On Friday, all three P1 classes visited the hall to see the stage which has now been built. It was very helpful for everyone to see where they would be performing their Nativity and we used this time to practise all of the songs together.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the Open Afternoons this week.

We have recently started learning about Animals and this week we linked our ‘Story of the Week’ to this learning. We have been enjoying Monkey Puzzle written by Julia Donaldson and the activities were related to the story.

We enjoyed solving riddles and drawing our answer.

Completing a cut and stick activity. We had to use our sound knowledge to help match the word to the correct picture.

Completing a puzzle by rolling the dice.

Our most anticipated activity was mask making. Lots of amazing masks were created!

We also just loved sharing our classroom with our visitors, especially the block area.

On Monday we walked to Mearns Library to mark Book Week Scotland.

We enjoyed some very funny stories, sang a few songs and were then gifted our Bookbug bags which we carried all the way back to school.

We discussed the stories further in class and also read the remaining book from our bags together.

Thank you to our parent helpers who came on the trip with us and also to Mearns Library for making our time there so enjoyable!

We recently started a new block of learning about Drawing. We explored different types of lines that we can draw including straight, wavy and zig zag and had a go at drawing these. We had to think carefully about our pencil control!

We then used what we had learned to design a t-shirt. This also put our scissor skills to the test as after we had drawn the outline of the t-shirt we had to cut it out.

We are learning to draw lines with different materials so took some chalk out to the playground and in pairs we drew some of the lines we had learned about. Some of us became very creative and drew giant hands, hedgehogs and rollercoasters and we were able to discuss the different lines we had drawn.

We will now used this learning to draw self-portraits and consider the different features we each have on our faces and what types of lines we can draw to capture these.

After drawing with chalk in the playground, we spent some time in the garden. These pictures capture how well we are playing and learning together, some great examples of team work!

Building sandcastles

Building a lava volcano

Looking after a worm

Making chicken soup

This week we have had lots of Halloween fun across the classroom which has been linked to the learning taking place in class.

We used the rice, which had lots of creepy crawlies through it, to further our understanding of volume and capacity.

We had a go at drawing spooky spiders and spider webs which encouraged us to think about our pencil control.

We explored the numbers on the balls in the witches’ cauldron.

We enjoyed reading various books about Halloween.

Plus some Halloween colouring in the creative area.

This week we also started learning about Symmetry. We used some paper shapes to help support our understanding by folding the paper to create a line of symmetry.

We then used the boards and coloured pegs to help create our own patterns with a line of symmetry.

It was lovely to welcome the children back after the October holiday. On Monday afternoon, we took part in Circle Time to share our favourite part of the holiday and enjoyed hearing what each other did. We then drew a picture of this in our writing jotter 🙂

This week, as part of our learning about Measurement, we were learning about Volume. We discussed the vocabulary we can use to describe the volume of liquid (or something else) in a container. We then explored various containers of different capacities and labelled them based on the vocabulary we had learned. This promoted lots of discussion and the sizes of the containers seemed to influence our decisions!

We then used the knowledge we had learned the following day to complete a game on the iPad. This tested our understanding of the vocabulary.

We were so excited to visit our P6 Buddies in their classroom. They very kindly showcased their recent learning about light to us and made this very fun and engaging!

In Literacy we have been working hard each week with our reading books. We discuss the front cover and the title and make a prediction based on this. We then look at the key words in the story and use these and the picture clues to support us when reading the sentences.

We have been developing our sound recognition by putting the picture on the correct sound that it begins with.

We worked with a partner to match the Pink Stage Common Words and helped each other with words that were tricky to read.

We have also been learning about making sounds. We have been exploring musical instruments and keeping the beat and have started to think about other sounds in the environment around us.

We listened to The Three Billy Goats Gruff on Musical Storyland and used the ‘trip trapping’ across the bridge to help keep the beat with the egg shakers.

Some of us continued this learning by creating a ‘band’ and keeping the beat together.

We then took our learning outdoors to the garden. We explored various sounds we could make with the materials in the garden.

At the end of Thursday there were lots of smiles as we look forward to the holiday. The girls were delighted they made three starfish from the sand 🙂

Thank you to all that visited our classroom on Tuesday for Pop in and Play. We hope you enjoyed exploring our classroom and completing the activities related to our story of the week, Supertato!

We were tying up Evil Pea by threading around him which helps develop our fine motor skills and we used our creativity in the block area by building a jail for Evil Pea. We also designed our own Super Potatoes and lots of us enjoyed printing with the vegetables.

We have been learning about ‘more than and less than’ in class and demonstrated this at the tuff spot. We could count out the potatoes to help us.

It was lovely to see the children enjoy the afternoon with the grown ups that could attend and a delight to see how proud they were of their classroom!

This week we had lots of fun in the sun exploring our P1 garden.

Making a flower pie.

It is a ‘lava canon’!

Looking after the bugs in the bug hotel.

As it was Maths Week Scotland we took our learning outdoors. We discussed the vocabulary used in measure such as longer and shorter. We then made our own tower with the cubes and use this to help us measure anything we could find in the garden. There was lots of discussion and comparing of sizes.

The highlight of the week was the Colour Run and throughout Thursday the excitement was definitely building! Here are our before and after pictures, we were delighted with how colourful and wet we were at the end and we were all full of smiles!