We have all had a wonderful last week of term full of lots of excitement and chat about Christmas!

We have spent some of the week making some beautiful art pieces and we hope you enjoy these at home. We all created a calendar to to gift to someone at home and used this to discuss the different seasons of the year. We painted a tree and then used different coloured tissue paper to represent each of the seasons.

We have also been learning about symmetry and where we might see symmetry in the world around us. To help us understand what is meant by symmetry we painted half a Christmas tree and then folded the paper resulting in a full Christmas tree. We have also coloured a Christmas crown and had to think carefully about the colour of each of the jewels.

The highlight of this week was the Christmas Party. We started off with lots of dancing and some party games such as Corners and Musical Statues.

We then enjoyed a game of Pass the Parcel.

After our snack we were treated to a visit from a very special person. We waited patiently for him to arrive and then sang Jingle Bells very loudly so he could hear us.

We enjoyed listening to Santa tell us about his busiest day of the year and were then so excited to open our present from him.

We ended our party with a picture around the Christmas tree.

Merry Christmas to you all.

This week the children performed their Nativity titled ‘A Miracle in Town’ to many of our parents and carers. Thank you to all who came to see the performance and for cheering the children on. I can’t tell you how happy they were when they returned to school and they particularly loved the bus journey 🙂

They worked so so hard and showed an immense amount of patience during each rehearsal. Thank you also to the grown ups who practised their lines at home, making them feel more confident and excited about performing. They were all superstars and made me extremely proud, I even had a tear in my eye at the end.

I hope you enjoy these photos.

Mrs Agnew x

The Narrators

The Angels

Mary and Joseph

The Innkeepers (and a few other roles) and the Innkeepers wife (also our star)

The shepherds

The Three Kings and King Herod

The Camels

In Literacy each week we focus on a range of skills and our targets are based on developing these skills.

We have been playing games to help us learn common words. We had to put the counter on the common word we heard.

We have also been developing our reading skills through matching the word to the picture. We had to sound out and blend the word and then find the picture that matched it.

We are learning to write through Drawing Club. This week our writing was based on Superworm. We read the story and begun the week by drawing Superworm. We have also drawn his super base and then today we drew a monster coming to town to get Superman. This is allowing us to think about the character in a story, the setting and also an adventure could take place. We are all working really hard to write some words or a sentence based on our drawing.

Over the past couple of weeks we have been discussing what we would like in the play areas. Some suggestions were a restaurant, a cosy corner, softer and larger blocks, a colour chart, Junk Modelling and a rocket ship. We are gradually introducing all of the ideas to the areas. Here we are exploring some of this…

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.