This week we celebrated Book Week Scotland. We were very excited to visit the library on Thursday morning and we all did so well walking to and from the library. We had a great time and found the Librarian and her ‘eyebrows of doom’ very funny. We joined in with some songs and enjoyed listening to two of the stories from our Bookbug Family Bag.

In the afternoon we joined our P6 Buddies who helped us to write a book review about one of the books we listened to at the library. We had to give it a score out of five and discuss our favourite part of the story and why we enjoyed that part so much. We also had to think of another ending for the story. We did this with the help of our Buddies who wrote down our wonderful ideas and helped with our drawings based on the book.

Our topic, The Zoo, is starting to come to an end. This week were learning about the different habitats on the animals who live in a zoo and considering how similar or different this is to a habitat in the wild. We explored various pictures and then wrote our thoughts down in our floorbook.

Yay, we have photos back 🙂

As part of our class topic, The Zoo, we have been learning about the role of the Zookeeper. We watched a short video which explained the importance of a Zookeeper and the different jobs they may do within the zoo. We then discussed what we had learned and listed the importance jobs of a Zookeeper.

We then imagined ourselves as Zookeepers. We drew a picture of ourselves carrying out a job of the zookeeper and then some of us had a go at writing an explanation of what we were doing in the picture.

The following day we took out learning further by acting our the role of a Zookeeper. We took it in turns to act out a job and we had to guess what they were doing. We had to consider the size of the animal we were looking after and also what their habitat might look like.

Feeding the something very small                         Petting a tiger

Stroking a giraffe

Looking after something that is long and yellow

Cleaning an animal’s habitat

In PE we have completed our block of learning on Fitness and Object Control. On Thursday we brought this learning together and considered different ways we are moving our bodies with an object.

We rolled a ball around the cone with our hands and then tried dribbling it with our feet. Some of us found it tricky to stop the ball so we discussed different ways we could do this to ensure we didn’t lose control of the ball. We then balanced the bean bag on our head and different parts of our body. We have done this before but this time we were able to move a lot quicker whilst still balancing the bean bag.

We experienced some technical difficulties with uploading photos onto the blog last week and this still seems to the case this week so apologies, there are no photos 🙁

Over the past couple of weeks we have been learning about Drawing, specifically line drawing. We have discussed the different types of lines we can draw and what they are called. We had a go at drawing a variety of lines and then designed a t-shirt using the skills we have learned. This week we drew a portrait of ourselves and focusing on the different features of our faces and the types of lines we would need to include in our portrait, e.g. a curved line for eyebrows and a wavy line for hair.

As part of our topic, The Zoo, we wanted to learn about animals that can camouflage. We discussed different types of animals who camouflage and also why they camouflage. We then chose the pattern on an animal who can camouflage and painted that twice. This let us cut out our animal and glue it onto the pattern showing how it can’t be seen against its background.

We have also been learning about the seasons and are beginning to develop our understanding of what happens in each season. There has been lots of discussion and it has been lovely hearing stories about playing with leaves and collecting them.

We have also been practising the months of the year and are doing this through song and sorting the months. We will continue to revisit the vocabulary and progress onto the days of the week and Time, learning o’clock.

Hopefully our blog will be back to normal next week and we can share some photos of the amazing experiences happening in P1B!

It was lovely to welcome everyone back after the holiday and we enjoyed sharing what we did during the break. It was clear everyone was excited to see each other and it didn’t take long for the exploring and learning to begin.

We have started learning about shape and this week we were able to identify and describe 2D shapes. We completed various activities within our workbook and sorted the shapes on the board. Some of us loved being able to spot the trickier 2D shapes and this prompted a discussion around shapes with various numbers of sides. We will use this learning as a platform to progress onto 3D objects.

Before the holiday we were reading One Button Benny with Miss Regan and Miss Daly. We completed some lovely activities around this book including designing your own robot. This week we got to put our cardboard tubes to good use and made our own One Button Benny. We used a variety of materials and could make him anyway we chose. There were lots of sticky fingers by the end!

This week we have been learning about pattern. We have discussed where we see patterns around us including in clothes and on buildings and also explored the various patterns on animals.

We showed that we were able to copy a pattern whether it was based on colour only or colour and shape.

We will continue to explore this next week when we create our own patterns and discuss how animals use their pattern to camouflage themselves.

We have started learning more about The Zoo and this week we chose an animal that we would like to paint for our display. We used pictures, books and some of the toy animals to help us add the finer details to our art work.

We then took this learning and independently started drawing other animals in the creative area.

We are becoming more and more independent in our play also and continue to enjoy exploring the various areas in the room.

Mrs Agnew managed to capture this moment where we are pretending we are on a flight and are listening to the safety briefing before take off 🙂

This week we have been celebrating Maths Week Scotland and think about all things number! Our main skill was counting backwards from 10 and to help us with this we read the story ‘Ten Terrible Dinosaurs’. The story got us thinking about what actually happens when we count backwards and to help us understand this we acted out the story with some dinosaurs from our class.

We used ten frames to further our understanding. We filled the ten frame with counters and took one counter away at a time. We also placed a certain number of counters in our ten frame and discussed strategies we could use to make a different amount. We have been learning the terms ‘1 more’ and 1 less’.

We then worked with a partner to build towers with the multilink cubes. We started by building a tower with 10 cubes, then 9 and so on. We could see the towers getting smaller each time. Some of us counted our towers or measured them against another one to check they were correct.

We also explored counting backwards with Numicon and some number lines in our tuff spot.

We demonstrated our understanding of counting backwards from ten by completing an activity where we had to fill in the missing numbers. Some of us found this quite challenging as we had to really think about which number was missing.

We ended our week using the iPads to correctly order the numbers on the caterpillar, backwards of course!

As much as we loved celebrating Maths Week Scotland the highlight of our week was a visit from our buddies. The buddies had written their own non-fiction books as part of their learning and wanted to share them with us. We loved spending time with them!

This week we chose our new topic in class. We have all shown a keen interest in lots of different animals including pets. We discussed our interests together and have chosen The Zoo as our new topic. We have each drawn a picture of something we would like to learn about a particular animals and stuck this into our ‘Big Book’ which we will create together as we explore The Zoo.

This week we have learned three new sounds, ‘i’, ‘p’ and ‘n’.

We are continuously revisiting the previous sounds learned and have been doing this through various activities in class. Everyday we listen to a story and a song associated with the sound and learn a new action. We have also been practising writing each sound we have learned.

We have enjoyed taking the writing we’ve been learning and experimenting with it in our play.

We have continued learning about different ways to move our body and keep fit in PE. This week we had a different activity to complete at different stations in the PE hall.

We had to complete a star jump then a tuck jump continuously for one minute.

Using our feet and bottoms only we had to row our boat across the floor. This was very sore on our legs!

We balanced along the benches.

And rolled across the floor, either in the shape of a barrel or as a sausage.

This week we have been learning the sounds ‘s’ ‘a’ and ‘t’.

We been sorting pictures based on the sound they start with and have enjoyed finding the clues in class to help us work out which sound we will be learning. Next week we will learn another three sounds 🙂

We have also been focussing on our number formation and practised writing the number on a whiteboard on the carpet before completing our individual target.

In Health and Wellbeing we are learning about a Growth Mindset. We discussed things that we find hard and how our response to finding something hard can actually help us get better at it. Mrs Agnew had forgotten how to put her jacket on and asked for the help of P1B. Together we worked out that my jacket was inside out and how we could fix that and how to put the jacket on properly and zip it up.

We then had a go ourselves and it was lovely to see so many of our friends helping if our zip was stuck or we found it a little tricky!

We have been exploring the construction area and resources more and more and this week lots of us demonstrated creativity through out buildings and structures.

“I made the Eiffel Tower.”

“This is a world destroyer.”

“I made Stick Man.”

“Look at my Haribo train I made.”

Off to the beach with matching necklaces 🙂

We have had a wonderful week in P1B and all of the children have very much adjusted to the routine of the school day. We are beginning to discuss what we would like in the areas of our classroom and also what we would like to learn about…watch this space!

On Monday we managed to avoid the rain and enjoyed PE in the MUGA. We are learning about Fitness and different ways we can move our body to help keep us fit.

We enjoyed exploring different ways we could move the hula hoop with our bodies.

We then practised throwing balls into the hoops. We started off with the hoops quite close to us but then made it trickier by moving them further away.

We finished off the lesson by thinking about balancing. We moved around the MUGA and had to stay on the white line.

On Thursday in the hall, we are practising our object control. The objects we used were bean bags. We had to find different parts of our bodies that the bean bags would stay on and then challenged ourselves to moving around the hall with the bean bag balanced.

On Friday in class, we played a game were we balanced the bean bags on our hands and passed it from to the person next to us. When the music stopped, if we had the bean bag we had to run round the circle. It turned into a lovely team building exercise as we all cheered the person on who was running.

In writing we are focusing on adding detail to our drawings. This week we are thinking about our hands. We completed our drawings based on a sentence and had to think about where our hands are and what they are doing in the picture.

On Friday when we were tidying up we all loved the song that much we started dancing once our classroom was tidy. Look at all those happy faces!

We have had a wonderful week in P1B and have enjoyed lots of painting, exploring and learning.

We drew a self-portrait and then created a colourful background for it by painting different coloured shapes.

Our self-portraits are now proudly displayed in our classroom.

We have been reading The Colour Monster and discussing each of the emotions from the story. We have learned what each of these emotions might look like and how we respond if we are feeling a particular one. We painted our own Colour Monster the colour of how we were feeling at that time. Next week, we will be thinking of a time we felt a particular emotion and drawing a picture of it.

In Literacy we have enjoyed the story ‘Spinderella’ by Julia Donaldson. Mrs Agnew read part of the story and we had to use our imagination to predict was happened next. We drew our predictions in our Literacy jotters and then shared our predictions with the class.

In Numeracy and Maths we have been doing lots of different activities to help with our number recognition. We used the number fans for the first time and enjoyed searching through the fan for a number.

We have continued to explore our classroom areas and enjoyed being creative and curious!