In class we have all been working extremely hard by practising our single sounds, diagraphs and common words. We do lots of different activities to help us learn these.

We play common word splat to see how quickly we can find the common word.

We practise reading, tracing and writing each common word.

We complete read, write and draw activities to help us learn CVC words, CVCC words and words with digraphs.

To support our reading, we read with Mrs Agnew, read with each other and also read independently. We can record our reading on a talking tin which Mrs Agnew then listens to.

We also show that we understand what we have read in various ways. We have started using story maps to show our understanding. We draw a picture for each part of the story.

Thank you to all of our parents and carers who attended our open afternoons last week. We were very excited to have you in our classroom and share some of our learning with you.

Over the past few weeks we have been demonstrating more and more creativity in class. We are always keen to have our creations photographed and celebrated.

I made a purse and it opens and shuts.

I made a snowman with the playdough. It’s nose is like a carrot.

It’s a house. You can go inside it and I put bricks around it and there is a smaller house on top of it. I had some help with it too.

I made a picture with sprinkles. I out the gems on top of the buttons.

I got the animals ready to make funny faces at them.

I made my name from lots of different loose parts.

We made a tent, it was made from sticks and the crates.

I made a bridge that went from the building to the table.

It’s an exercise home for bugs.

Oh yes they can!

For the past couple of weeks we have been reading Giraffes Can’t Dance. We learned how Gerald was laughed at by his friends in the jungle for being a terrible dancer. However, Gerald quickly learned that his dancing wasn’t so bad at all and ended up believing he was a good dancer.

We have used the story to discuss what we can do In P1B and what we feel confident doing. We have also touched upon kindness and discussed how Gerald’s friends in the jungle could have supported him better instead of laughing at him.

We created a beautiful display together as a class. We painted the background, cut the grass and each wrote our ‘I can…’ statements. We then drew a giraffe and cut it out to add to the display.

We are also learning about music in class, in particular keeping the beat. As Gerald learned to dance to his own music, we decided to make our own musical shakers and had fun with them, moving to the music in any way it made us feel. We will use these during music to help with our beat keeping!

Over the past few weeks we have been learning about painting. We have been focusing on mixing colours and started off by talking about the colour wheel and all of the different colours which can be made from the three primary colours.

We mixed blue and yellow to make green. We painted some blue balloons, then yellow balloons then made our own green balloons. With crayon we added some string to the balloons.

We then used these skills to paint a seascape and learned to blend the colours.

We drew and cut out fish to add to our seascapes.

We then moved onto more colour mixing. We mixed red and yellow to make orange. We painted red squares, yellow squares and then mixed both colours to make our own orange squares.

We completed these by adding doors, windows, roofs and chimneys to the squares using similar coloured crayons.

We have one more lesson to complete where we will be painting a sunset sky using our mixing and blending skills.

This week we completed our learning about Time by discussing the seasons and the months of the year. We started by sharing the name of the seasons, what events happen in each season and the weather. The weather we have experienced this week certainly let us know that we are in the season of winter!

We identified the season on the mat and then matched the pictures to the season.

We then drew a picture to represent each season.

We discussed how many months of the year there are and then related them to ourselves by going into groups based on the month of our birthdays. We then put the months into the correct order as a whole class and discussed various events that happen in some months.

In pairs, we used our reading skills to put the months of the year in order and also used the song we have learned to help with this!

We have had a lovely start to 2024 and have enjoyed our first week back. We have shared with each other what we did over the Christmas break with our families and wrote about our favourite part during Writing on Monday.

It was also time for an updated class photo so we went outside and pulled some funny faces 🙂

This week we have been learning about Time. We discussed why clocks are important, different types of clocks and also the different features of clocks. We enjoyed sharing the types of clocks we have in our house. We practised making the time on our own clocks, writing the time and drawing the time.

We enjoyed a memory matching games which involved identifying the time on the analogue clocks.

The highlight of the week has been the Indi Cars. We used the cars to help develop our coding skills. The car only moves when it is on a tile and each tile gives the car a different instruction. We explored what each of the tiles do and then used our problem solving skills to correctly position the tiles to create a sequence for the car to follow.

We have had the most amazing week and our classroom has been full of excitement and smiles as we look forward to the Christmas break.

We started off our week performing our Nativity to our lovely grown ups. Mrs Agnew said we all did such an amazing job and we are all superstars.

On Tuesday, some P7s came to visit our classroom and complete some Christmas crafts with us. We had the choice of a Christmas tree or a reindeer. For both we had to draw round our own hand and then decorate it with pom poms.

We also completed our Christmas bauble and our snow pictures in class and created our beautiful snowmen cards.

On Thursday we were all dressed to impressed and look amazing in our party clothes. There was lots of dancing, singing and party games and we then enjoyed a small snack. Our dance moves were too fast to get any photos 🙂

We also received a visit from a very special person and were delighted to open our gifts from Santa!

We ended our week having a relaxed morning if Christmas colouring and then spent the afternoon enjoying Toy Story.

On Wednesday we were learning about the displacement of water with Miss Hutchison by exploring the principle of Archimedes.

Before exploring outside, we watched a short video which explained the theory and then tested this outside using our own bodies in the water along with a range of objects.

We found that the more items that were placed in the water, the higher the level of the water got.

For Numeracy some of us have recently been focusing on addition and some of us have been thinking about numbers to 10 and beyond. We have been learning lots of strategies to help us count and have been thinking of different ways we can make numbers within 10.

We have also been learning about Measurement and Fractions. This week we have been thinking about weight and using the vocabulary heavier and lighter. We have compared the weight of lots of different objects in the classroom and estimated which one we thought was heavier or lighter. We then tested this using the scales.

We then created our own picture of scales in our jotters and drew an item that was heavier and lighter to show our understanding of the vocabulary (Mrs Agnew forgot to take pictures of this).

We have also been thinking about fractions. We used the playdough to show an item being cut into smaller parts. We then had to try and cut it into smaller parts but ensure they were of an equal size. We were able to demonstrate a half and some of us could even cut our playdough into quarters, making sure each part was equal.

Last week we shared lots of learning about our class topic, Transport. This week we wanted to learn what a plane needs to fly. After watching a short video we were able to identify that a plane needs wings and an engine to fly and thrust to lift it off the ground. The shape of the wings and the way the air moves around the wings helps to keep it in the sky.

We created our own gliders in class using a paper straw and paper. We demonstrated what happens to each of these items as they are individually thrown up in the air. We then demonstrated how the paper (which we made into circles and attached to the straw) helped the glider stay up for longer due to the air flow.

Here we are testing out of gliders…

Our current class topic is Transport which was chosen by the children and is based on many interests the children have already demonstrated within class.

We shared what we already know about transport with each other and then discussed what we would like to learn. We are very interested in learning about what powers different types of transport along with how to become a bus or train driver. We have also shown an interest in tractors and how emergency vehicles work.

We discussed the different types of transport that we know of and drew what kind of transport we would love to travel in, there were caravans, racing cars, double decker buses and even submarines!

We have learned what powers a car and used this knowledge and our imaginations to design our own Supercars. Our Supercars could do absolutely anything we wanted them too. We wrote about our Supercars during Literacy and thought of words we could use to describe them.

We watched a video which explained the main ways in which trains are powered. We were all amazed to learn that there are still steam trains in operation.

We then used clay to create a bridge for our trains in class. The bridge had to go over water and had to hold the weight of our train. We worked in small teams to do this and had to communicate and cooperate with each other in order to make a successful bridge.

We were all very proud of our final designs!

We still have lots more that we would like to learn about transport!