We have made it to the final week of the term! I hope you are all looking forward to a well deserved rest with your family and hopefully we will enjoy some good weather too!

This week in Literacy and English, we have worked hard to read our storyworld books and discuss the text. We have been skimming and scanning to locate key information and have enjoyed some games and activities within the play areas to help develop our spelling skills.

We enjoyed our time in the garden this Thursday, hunting for Easter words, making music and crafting Easter chicks in the sun.

The pupils had another great week leading their own learning in the play areas with many interesting discussions, imaginative games and creativity on display, as the children played.

Happy Easter everyone! See you all on the 19th!

Mrs Denholm x

This week in maths we have been looking at the properties of 2D shape. This has involved sorting and classifying the shapes according to specific criteria, making 2d shape patterns on snakes and designing monsters, using the shapes as templates for parts of the body.

In PE, we put our throwing and catching skills to the test whilst trying to score goals for our teams. We will continue to work on creating some space to make / receive a pass and communicating with each other before passing the ball.

We have thoroughly enjoyed the good weather and enjoyed playing in the glorious sunshine on Thursday in the garden.

There have been lots of budding designers in the block area in this week, with the buildings becoming more complex and detailed as the weeks go on. The finished designs really are quite spectacular!

Have a wonderful weekend and I will see you all next week.

Mrs Denholm x

This week we have been celebrating British Science Week at school and the theme this year has been growth.

During maths, we discussed how our bodies can grow at different rates  and used comparative language to describe our heights in relation to one another.

We worked in our groups to order our bodies from tallest to shortest.

We measured each other using string and then investigated what items in the room were shorter and longer than our bodies.

We had great fun drawing around our bodies too to see who was tallest in the class.

In the garden, we discussed how seeds can support humans and animals by producing oxygen. We decided we could make our own bird feeders using recycled toilet roll tubes, lard and sunflower seeds. It was very messy but lots of fun was had as the boys and girls worked together to cover the tube and get as many seeds as possible to stick. We hung them on the fence for the birds to come and enjoy when they get hungry.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend and enjoy the good weather. Long may it continue.

I look forward to seeing everyone next week, well rested and ready to learn.

Mrs Denholm x

This week we have been learning about healthy eating and the five different food groups that contribute to a balanced diet. The pupils were able to design a healthy lunch using foods from each of these groups and discuss their choices with their partner.

In PE, we had some very competitive lessons to develop our awareness of space, making decisions about when to move and when to defend your space and coping with winning and losing. The pupils had to defend their own cone from being knocked over by a ball being rolled towards it. They also had to try and knock over other people’s cones when they could. There was lots of excitement and determination to protect their cones at all costs!

We have started to look at the order of the alphabet paying attention to what the capital letters and matching lowercase letters look like.

We have been learning our next alternative sound which is igh. We now know that igh and ie can make the long i sound.

This week we were celebrating World Book Day. There was lots of excitement as the teddies came to school. They had a great day having a tour of the classroom and joining in as we completed our work.  We listened to our story of the week ‘Ravi’s Roar’ which helped us to explore what different emotions would look like. In the afternoon we completed a book scavenger hunt, had a teddy bear’s picnic with snacks and music and read another story together.

As always, lots of fun was had in the play areas with the boys and girls leading their own learning. This week that involved dressing up as they took on roles around the house, creating menus with supermarket brochures and building some fantastic models.

It was lovely having the chance to speak with you all and seeing your faces at our online appointments this week. It was so nice to be able to share just how well the pupils are progressing and how proud I am of each and every one of them.

I am very much looking forward to a relaxing weekend and I hope you are too.

See you Monday!

Mrs Denholm x

This week our story of the week was ‘Bears make the best reading buddies’. We enjoyed the story so much that we decided to add some of our own fluffy friends to the library area so we could read to them. It has been a great success and the library has never been so popular!

There have been opportunities to improve our cutting skills, explore line through art and design, create fierce battles in dinosaur land, practise number formation, build and communicate with friends as we play.

To help support our writing, we made jam sandwiches to help us think of the order our instructions should go. Mrs Denholm was very impressed with our spreading and cutting skills.

We of course made time to have a good old play in the snow with snowmen creations and snowball fights in the muga.

We have been identifying patterns within a 100 square and identifying numbers before and after using the language of more than and less than. Some tricky challenges were set for the pupils to solve, which they did so with great determination.

We ended the week with a little dance in the hall as we pretended we were toy shoulders, marching along to the beat of the music forwards, backwards and on the spot.

As we were celebrating International Mother tongue Languages Week, I have uploaded a video of the pupils singing and using British Sign Language for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on our Google Classroom (where I post the homework instructions). The boys and girls worked hard to learn the sign language to go along with the words and were very excited to be recorded and watch themselves in the video. Please if you have time, have a look at this wonderful achievement.

I hope you all have a lovely, relaxing weekend and I look forward to another week of fun filled learning next week.

Thanks

Mrs Denholm x

This week our art lesson was inspired by our investigation into force. We used a push force to blow air through the straw to move the paint on the page.

We have been working hard on addition and subtraction calculations this week and are starting to explore the link between the two.

We have been looking at different ways to make the long a sound and so far have learnt about ai and ay. We know that ai mainly comes in the middle of a word whilst ay is kept for the end. We worked independently and with with a partner to try make some words that Mrs Denholm called out as well as some of our own.

We had fun in the play areas reading, drawing, building and making up new games with friends.

We played in the garden and tried hard in relay races where we were trying to work as a team to communicate, balance and work together to finish each race first.

Have a lovely weekend!

Mrs Denholm x

This week we have been learning all about force. We now recognise that an object needs a force in order to move. We have explored pushing and pulling through a variety of activities and this has helped deepen our understanding.

We had races with the toy cars and balls and then used non standard units to measure the distance our objects moved.

We started to think about the gradient could affect the movement of an object and discovered that the steeper the gradient, the faster the object will travel.

I hope you all enjoy your weekend together and I look forward to seeing you all on Monday morning.

Mrs Denholm

It has been another busy week in P1. The boys and girls wanted to change our small world area to sea creatures, so we used some blue material for the water and decorated our under the sea background to help us in our play.

There have been lots of fantastic buildings and creations in the block area this week with a movie theatre, castle and motorway being built.

Lots of creativity on show during our weekly dance lesson. This week the boys and girls had to think of all of the ways they could move their body using an imaginary ball. It was of no surprise how inventive their moves were with some imaginary throwing and catching, slam dunkin and spinning really fast whilst dribbling on display for the audience.

We are continuing to develop our understanding of money specifically ordering the value of coins, creating amounts using a specific number of coins and adding and subtracting with money.

We finished our week making some ‘midgie shortbread’ which was inspired by our story of the week ‘There was a wee lassie who swallowed a midgie’. It was a class effort to select and mix our ingredients before rolling them out to make our shortbread shapes. The classroom smells amazing and the recipe was a huge success!

Have a lovely weekend!

Mrs Denholm x

This week, we continued the story of Supertato to help us with our writing. We explored the idea that all stories have five key elements: character, setting, problem, action and resolution. This helped us to break the story down and develop our understanding further. After discussing the story in detail we tried our very own story map, where we retell the story using pictures, paying particular attention to the order of events and the way the story flows on the page. It was a huge success and the boys and girls were delighted to talk about their storymaps with their peers.

We had a busy week in Numeracy and Maths learning about number bonds to 10 (2numbers that add together to make 10). We really enjoyed the timed game to match the numbers together. We tried to make amounts to buy toys in the shop and explored a variety of ways to facts to make the same number. We also had time to subtract using a variety of language such as 2 less than 4 and take 3 from 5.

We enjoyed our time in the garden this week particularly using the ice in our play. We painted ice blocks and made some ice cream in the mud kitchen.

Lots of creativity was on show again this week in our play areas with huge castles being built, elaborate designs on the pin boards, volcanoes erupting on the animals and words being drawn in the sand. As always, it is a delight to see the pupils playing so kindly with each other and interesting to see the ideas they come up with the materials provided, as they lead their own learning.

Have a great weekend!

Mrs Denholm

We had lots of fun outdoors this week in our garden exploring and playing with our friends. There was some yummy vegetable soup being made in the mud kitchen and some dinosaurs trying to escape the lava in the sandpit.

This term, we are taking some time to move our bodies through dance. Today we moved our bodies in different ways thinking of wide, thin, high and low shapes that we could practice and move a streamer through the air. There were some very impressive moves on show.

We have developed some of the play areas within our class this week to take into account the children’s interests. The imaginative area has been very busy with costumes being made out of fabric and pegs and fancy dress props to act out games and stories. We designed a new playdough table using crates from our outdoor area and enjoyed adding herbs to the dough to make some interesting smells.

A reminder that all children require outdoor waterproof clothing on a Thursday, as we spend a good amount of time outdoors on this day. We are also outdoors for a little bit on a Tuesday but wellies and a jacket are suffice on this day. Hopefully that will mean a little less luggage being carried to school each day.

Enjoy your weekend!

Mrs Denholm x