We have really enjoyed our first week at school after the holidays. We have all settled back into class and enjoyed seeing and playing with our friends.

In Health and Wellbeing, we have continued to develop our understanding of growth mindset by learning about challenge. We now understand what it means to challenge ourselves in our learning and why that is important. We challenged our partner to copy a tower built out of lego. This was tricky as several factors had to be considered including number of blocks, colour and size. We have all agreed that we will try our best even if something seems quite tricky to start with.

We have been developing our understanding of doubles in Numeracy and Maths and enjoyed the game on the board which set us questions to be answered within a minute. It became very competitive but helped us learn our double facts to 20.

There was lots of imaginative play taking place this week as well as opportunities to develop fine motor skills through lego, cutting skills and colouring. We are all very glad to be back in P1.

The weather has provided some excellent outdoor fun this week. Not only did we have lots of fun and giggles jumping in puddles, we then thoroughly enjoyed snowball fights, making snow angels and snowmen in the school grounds. Who knows what the weather will hold for us next week…

We have had the best week in Primary 1 which started with our Nativity performance. The boys and girls were all absolutely amazing and worked so hard to learn and deliver their lines, as well as lots of lovely songs to share with you all. Here are some photos of our dress rehearsal for the P6 buddies in the audience and then the actual performance at the church.

We have since been busy getting ready for Christmas by making some salt dough crafts, cards, calendars and decorations which we will be able to take home soon. The boys and girls have been developing the skills of measuring, cutting, painting and drawing all whilst singing some merry little tunes.

Lots of other play has taken place which the children document themselves with the iPad. Here are a selection of their photos  this week…

We finished the week with our P1 Christmas party which was filled with some very impressive dance moves, party games and laughter.

We even had a very special visitor pop in to see us before we finished the week. There were lots of excited faces as Santa delivered a big bag of presents for us all.

Have a lovely weekend and I look forward to seeing you all on Monday morning for our last short week of the year.

Mrs Denholm x

This week, in Literacy and English, we have been learning the sounds qu, ou and oi through songs and stories. We have been working hard to make words using these sounds. We have been sequencing sentences from our reading books and creating our own helicopter stories which we have shared with our friends.

In Numeracy and Maths, we have continued to develop our understanding of money by adding coins together to work out the total amount.

Our imaginative area turned into a wrapping station with paper and sellotape EVERYWHERE! There were some interesting wrapping techniques, some deep levels of concentration and lots and lots of excitement as the children spoke about Christmas.

We finished the week with some Christmas themed yoga and a reflection on all of the fun activities we have taken part in this week.

I will hopefully see you all on Monday morning at 1115am for the Nativity performance (fingers crossed). Keep an eye on the weekly round up for any last minute updates regarding the performance.

Have a great weekend!

Mrs Denhom x

This week was very exciting in P1b. An elf was sent to us from Santa to check if we are making good choices and being kind to one another. He is going to stay with us until Christmas and we got to name him ourselves. After a class vote, we decided to call him Sparkles. He has been a little bit mischievous so far, trying to climb up the window blinds and being surrounded by the dinosaurs. (We wonder what he did to annoy them). He will fly back to the North Pole every night to let Santa know how we are doing.

To help us consolidate the sounds we have been learning, we played lots of games this week with our friends. We had to look carefully at the sounds the words contained in order to blend them together to read. Some of the games got quite competitive and it was fantastic to see how many words we are now able to read as a class. Mrs Denholm was very pleased.

In Numeracy and maths, we have been exploring the concept of addition using cubes and sorting circles to help us. The boys and girls have been working hard to record their ideas and solutions in different ways and recognising that there are many words used in addition such as add, and, makes, altogether , total etc.

We have also been exploring money each day and now recognise that money is used to buy items, there are a variety of coins that are worth different amounts and that can we put these coins together to make an amount. So far, we have explored making amounts with 1p, 2p and 5p.

The boys and girls are now very confident using the ipad to take their own photos when they are proud of something they have done in the class. Here are a selection of their photos for you to see.

Nativity practice continues to go well and we are beginning to look out our costumes to bring our performance to life. Not long to go now….

Wishing you all a great weekend!

Mrs Denholm

This week, we have made some yummy pizzas to develop our understanding of halves. We had to think carefully about where to split our toppings so we would have two equal parts. As we prepared our pizzas, we spoke about trying new foods and how our friends may eat different foods at home due to allergies or for cultural reasons. The boys and girls were very careful as they used the knives to chop their vegetables, creating a little bridge with their fingers for the knife to go under. The finished products looked great and I’ve been informed were very tasty.

In PE, we have moved on to rebound games and this week were working hard to develop the skill of throwing and catching,  controlling objects on a racquet and working with a partner to follow instructions.

Some of the Primary 6 children came down to talk to us about the work they have been carrying out as part of anti bullying week. They explained to us about the importance of being kind and asked us to reflect on times that someone has shown us kindness. They put us into groups and helped us to send a thank you note to somebody who been kind to us.

For our health and well being lesson this week, we spoke about Incy Wincy spider and how he had a growth mindset as he never gives up and keeps trying his best to get up the drainpipe. We discussed the importance of trying and what can stop you from trying and made some spiders that we will use to form a display for our next own personal targets that we would like to achieve.

Nativity preparations are well under way and the boys and girls are working hard to learn their lines and remember the words to the songs. We can’t wait to share it with all of you and are very excited by this already.

As always, I wish you all a lovely weekend and a well deserved rest.

Mrs Denholm

This week we have been busy celebrating Book Week Scotland. We enjoyed our walk to the library together and listened very carefully to the stories the librarian read to us, which we got to take home in our very own book bags.

We enjoyed listening to the stories so much that we have read them again together as a class. We voted on our favourite out of the three and the winner was ‘My First Book of Woodland Animals’. We discussed why creating spaces for nature is important when we were in our P1 garden and decided to build our very own bug hotel to welcome lots of bugs and insects into our garden. We collected lots of materials from the woodland and brought them up to the garden where we worked as a team to construct a very impressive three storey bug hotel. We even had some little visitors to the rooms before we returned indoors.

We took lots of time to visit our own class library this week and enjoyed reading a story with our friends.

We also took time to read One Button Benny by Alan Windram, a story about a robot who feels  different from the other robots. Based on this, we tried to design a vehicle that can move in different environments and has various special features. The designs were very creative and it was lovely to see the children working so well with a partner to develop their drawings and then bring them to life in the garden using the loose parts.

We continued our work on One Button Benny in our writing and decided it would be nice to create a sidekick fro Benny. We brought out the metal loose parts to help us with the design process and used our designs to help us add labels into our robot design writing lesson.

We finished the week by inviting our P6 buddies down to read to us.

Have a lovely weekend!

Mrs Denholm

It has been another busy week in Primary 1 with lots of learning and fun had by all. This week the boys and girls have been sorting, categorising, displaying on Carroll diagrams, using tally marks and carrying out surveys as part of their data handling. The children were also able to use Scratch Jr to add a background, characters and to code individual characters.

In Literacy and English, we looked at three new sounds z, w and ng and tried hard to blend sounds to make words using these sounds.

There were lots of yummy dishes being prepared in the outdoor kitchen and some tricky obstacle course under construction with the loose parts in the garden.

We have been able to show off all of the balances, jumps and rolls we have learnt in gymnastics as well as creative ways to travel along the apparatus.

Next week is Book Week Scotland and P1 will be focusing on the book ‘One Button Benny’ by Alan Windram. For this we will require some junk materials to help us design and create a robot to go alongside the story. If you are able to send in some junk on Monday that would be most helpful and will be put to good use.

I hope you all have a lovely, relaxing weekend and I look forward to seeing all of the children again on Monday morning.

Mrs Denholm

This week we have been busy learning about Diwali and what celebrations take place during this time. Some of our pupils were able to share their own experiences with the class which was lovely to hear. We made rangoli patterns out of 2D shapes and coloured pencils and created a display of our hand prints with patterns on them, which we have learnt is called mehndi.

We worked hard to develop our understanding of blending sounds together to make words like rat, mop and sun and shared our reading books together, taking turns to read aloud to one another in our groups.

We enjoyed our time in the P1 garden, exploring the loose parts. This week a mouse trap and obstacle course were created which the boys and girls had great fun designing and using.

As part of our Health and Wellbeing lesson, we were thinking about something that can be tricky to do like zipping our jackets. We had 4 volunteers wearing their jackets in a funny way and the class had to recognise what was wrong and how to fix it. We then talked to our shoulder partners about the best way to put our jackets on and zip them up, making sure the little handle is at the bottom before we begin. There have been lots of happy faces in the classroom this week when they have managed to zip up their own jackets for the playground.

There has been lots of creativity on show this week as a result of new resources being added to the imaginative area. The boys and girls have absolutely loved making their own games up, which in turn is developing a whole variety of skills including turn taking and language development as they share their own life experiences with one another. Here are a few pictures from within our play areas this week…

All of the pupils have their take home folders in their bags and I know they are very excited to share them with you. Please take time, if you can, to talk about what they have been learning and return the folder (with feedback sheet, writing jotter and maths workbook) on Monday to ensure work can continue in these.

Have a lovely weekend!

Mrs Denholm

This week in maths we were exploring numbers before, after and in between. The boys and girls worked hard to use this new terminology to ask and answer questions. We also explored pattern and were able to copy patterns of colour and shape indoors and out. Next week, we will work more on creating our own patterns as this was a little bit trickier.

We had great fun with the parachute which helps to develop our listening skills. We had to listen for our names and colours to swap positions when the parachute went up. There were lots of giggles when the parachute landed on our heads.

We had lots of spooky activities set up this week as we approach Halloween. The boys and girls showed off their creative sides as they made up potions in their writing, made their own skeletons and played at the tuff spot where they could bring their potions to life.

We were glad of the rainfall as it meant all of our pots and pans were full to the brim to play with in our outdoor kitchen. We built dens, made mud cookies and flower potions in our P1 garden. A reminder that outdoor clothing is needed on a Tuesday and Thursday.

And finally, some photos of all of the fun we are having in our play areas…

Have a lovely weekend!

Mrs Denholm

It was lovely to welcome the children back to school and hear all of their stories from the October week. Everyone was well rested and ready to learn. We moved onto gymnastics in our PE lessons and the boys and girls were more than delighted to show off how good they are at balancing and creating shapes with their bodies.

We spent our time outdoors in a series of challenges to help us talk about shape in the environment. The first was to see who could build the tallest tower which got quite competitive. The children showed great enthusiasm and determination to add another layer to their tower. We spoke about what shapes needed to stack, the edges and corners we could count and how easy the shapes would be to move.

The second challenge was to design a set of stairs using the knowledge you had gained about stacking. It proved quite tricky to begin with but after discussion within each group a solution was found in the end. We even tried out the stairs to check they were stable and secure.

We enjoyed reading our new books which we will take home for homework next week. Our tasks involved identifying the missing words and sequencing events and words in the stories. Mrs Denholm is very proud of how hard everyone is trying to sound out their words and recognise tricky words in the text.

I can’t quite believe it is the end of the week again. It has flew by, but we have managed to squeeze lots in, including work on the seasons, months of the year, blending cvc words, matching numbers to number names, adding and having lots of fun in the areas as we learn together. Here are some highlights from the week…

Have a lovely weekend!

Mrs Denholm x