We have been very lucky to enjoy some lovely, sunny weather over the past couple of weeks. In class we have been discussing different types of weather and lots of us were keen to discuss thunder and lightning and tornadoes.

We kept a weather diary for a week and after reflecting on this, we wrote about our favourite type of weather. Thankfully no thunder and lightning or tornadoes were recorded in our diaries!

We have also been learning about electricity. We discussed what electricity is and how electricity works. We were able to identify items which use electricity and items which don’t by sorting them into two categories.

Some of us were able to describe different types of electricity and how various items are charged. We then discussed how to keep safe around electricity.

As part of our Technologies learning we used the Chromebooks to practise our mouse control skills. We had to use the mouse pad to move the dragon to his food. This meant clicking on the mouse pad and dragging our finger across at the same time. We found this quite tricky and will have another go in the next couple of weeks!

This term we are learning about living things. On Wednesday we discussed what we mean by a living thing and we compared these to non-living things.

We learned what livings things need to survive and how that can look different depending if the living thing is a human, animal or plant.

We then took our learning outdoors and went on a scavenger hunt searching for living and non-living things. To demonstrate our understanding we then had to identify the living things on our answer sheet.

Mrs Denholm has also been transforming our P1 garden with her Garden Club. She asked if P1A could move some of the bark that was delivered and there were many hard working volunteers.

There was also time for a little fun in the garden ☺️

This week we completed our castles and as you can see from our faces we are very proud of them indeed!

We’ve all worked very well within our groups and communicated well with each other. We’ve had to think about compromise and how to resolve something if we don’t all agree.

We put the finishing touches to our castles with some paint which took a lot longer than some of us thought!

Last week we celebrated Eid as a whole school. In class we have been learning about Eid with Mrs Dickie and the importance of Ramadan and Eid-al-Fitr to the Muslim religion.

In class, we had a go at some Arabic writing, created some Mehndi patterns and looked at the features of Mosques then coloured some pictures. One of us could even say some of the Arabic alphabet and enjoyed sharing it with others ☺️

This week we brought our learning about Food and Health to an end by making a fruit salad. We firstly discussed hygiene when preparing food and then discussed how to stay safe, particularly with a knife. We explored various ways we can cut food using the bridge and claw methods.

We each prepared our own fruit by chopping it and putting it into a cup then added some fruit juice.

This week we were extremely excited to get started with our castles.

On Monday we split into small groups and started designing our castle. We had to think about communicating with each other by sharing our ideas and opinions. We all added lots of detail to our designs and it was lovely to see added extras such as fireworks or a crowd of people in our drawings.

On Friday afternoon we started building our castles. We again had to think about talking to each other along with sharing resources. This is just the beginning and we will continue to work on our castles next week…

On Thursday afternoon we received a visit from our P6 buddies organised by Miss Lamb. The buddies had very kindly written us all a short story and we enjoyed listening to the buddies read their story to us, we even featured in the some of the stories! It was lovely to spend time with our buddies and we even enjoy a little play in our classroom before it was time for them to head back to class.

This week we enjoyed an afternoon of Scottish food tasting. We all had the option to try shortbread, oatcakes, vegetarian haggis, porridge and potato scone…yum!

Most of the us tried all of the foods, even if we were a little unsure. Shortbread was the clear favourite and there was a very mixed view amongst the class about the haggis We had a discussion afterwards about likes and dislikes and were encouraged to explain why we liked or disliked one of the foods, this really got us thinking about the taste!

The following day we collected data about our food tasting and used this to begin our learning about tally marks, We practised tally marks on our whiteboards and then completed the data from the food tasting on them.

On Friday, we displayed this data in a table using tally marks.

We have started learning about money and have chosen to turn our home corner into a shop. There was lots of excitement as we chose what our shop should sell and the most popular choice was toys.

On Thursday afternoon we split into small groups and each completed a different task for our shop. Some made the sign, some prepared opened and closed signs whilst others created the opening times. We also cut out and made labels with various prices to attach to the items we have for sale. P1a’s Toy Shop will be open and ready for customers on Monday !

Thursday was a very exciting day in P1A as we celebrated World Book Day. Many of us took part in the Book Swap and were delighted with the new books we took home.

We also enjoyed looking at the ‘Stories in a Jar/Box’ and working out what story they are representing. Well done to everyone for demonstrating so much creativity however a special well done to Cara and William who were winners from P1!

On Thursday morning we were beaten by the weather for PE so we stayed in the classroom and did some Yoga. We of course had to link this to World Book Day and our Yoga session was based on ‘We are Going on a Bear Hunt’.

We were extremely lucky to receive a visit from Mrs Syme who teaches P6. Mrs Syme is trained to deliver Bookbug Sessions and gave up her time to come and deliver one to us. She based it around our story of the week, The Gruffalo. We remembered lots of the songs from previous sessions we had attended at nursery or the library and all loved the very shiny lycra at the end!

In the afternoon, we listened to a story except Mrs Agnew didn’t tell us the title or the show us the front cover or pictures. We had to listen very carefully to the story because we were then tasked with choosing a title for the story and designing a front cover. Once we had completed this, we then had to retell part of the story in our own words. The story hasn’t been revealed yet…we will find out on Monday!

We also took part in a class competition to ‘Snap a Story Scene’. We chose Paper Dolls and went outside to take photos to see if other children at assembly could guess which story we were acting out. We were extremely enthusiastic about this and loved that our story was a secret!

Here we are creating four scenes from the story, Paper Dolls.

This week we started learning about the different states of water. Lots of us could explain that you can turn water from a liquid state to a solid state by making ice! We were all intrigued to find out that we could reverse that process by melting the ice to turn it back into a water!

We also discussed that we can turn water from a liquid to a gas and shared that they have seen this when the kettle has boiled at home and the steam rises out of it!

We took our learning into the garden and explored with water and ice!

The large cubes of ice didn’t last long.

We loved feeling how cold the ice was in our hands.

‘Look, it’s melting!’

We experimented with how quickly the ice slid down the tubes.

The ice was very slippy and hard to keep in our hands.

We used the ice in our ‘cooking’ and were very surprised that it stuck to a pan.

We also explored with water, moving it between various containers and pouring it down the tubes to see how far it would go.

Once all the excitement if the ice was over, some of us made a train with the crates. It was free to go on the train and everyone had a very lovely trip! Look at those happy faces 🙂

One of our ‘big questions’ about Scotland was ‘What are some Scottish words?’

Together we read ‘There was a Wee Lassie who swallowed a Midgie’ and found it very funny that we are also known as lassies and laddies!

We all know ‘Head, Shoulders. Knees and Toes’ but we didn’t know ‘Heid, Shudders, Knaps and Taes’.  We had lots of fun learning the words and doing the actions.

In small groups we then read some Scottish words and had to guess it’s meaning. There was lots of giggles and we were all very keen to find out the Scottish word for bottom.

This week we started our block of learning about painting. We started by exploring the colour wheel and discussed the primary colours we can mix to make secondary colours. We had a go at mixing blue and yellow and used these skills to paint some balloons in blue, yellow and green.

We then discussed the technique of blending and using this and our skill of mixing we created our own seascapes. We still need to add our fish to them!

On Friday, we mixed two different colours to make orange. We painted red, yellow and orange squares which we will turn into houses.

We also completed our learning for now about time by exploring time on a digital clock. We matched analogue and digital times together and then had a go at writing our own digital time on whiteboards by looking at an analogue clock.