We have been enjoying the better weather this week and even managed to get outside to the P1 garden on Friday afternoon. We loved having the choice to explore outside or in the classroom and have our fingers crossed for more sunny days.

On Thursday the whole school participated in Meta Moments, organised by Miss Brodie and Miss Tenby. We had lots of visitors who have a range of different jobs and they spoke to us about the Meta-skills they use to do their job.

In Primary 1, we firstly listened to Dr. Eilidh tell us about the skills she uses in the hospital. Dr Eilidh uses the skills of communicating to speak to both her patients and her colleagues and the skill of collaborating as it is important she works alongside others  to ensure her patients get better.

Dr Eilidh also brough her stethoscopes in for us to try and there were some very amazed faces when we could hear our own, or others, heart beats.

     

We then enjoyed a visit from Alan Potter who is an artist. Alan shared that he uses the skill of creativity in his job as an artist every day. He has to think carefully about how he can turn his customer’s ideas into reality and what materials he can use. He brought the smaller models of some very large sculptures that he has previously made which we really enjoyed exploring. Alan also uses the skills of curiosity as he is often curious if something will go to plan. He shared the important message that it’s ok if things don’t work out and he just tries again.

Earlier on in the week we had a go at some number problem solving. In small groups, we read the word problem and then had to think about what we needed to do in order to solve it. We worked effectively  together and used our whiteboards to write down any working we thought would help.

This week we celebrated World Book Day.

We received a visit from some P7s who had written and illustrated some beautiful stories. It was a pleasure to listen to their stories and see the hard work that had went into them.

     

     

     

     

     

      

We then read a story together in class and created a story map to show our understanding of ‘Norman the Slug with the Slug with the Silly Shell.

In the afternoon, Mrs Agnew read us another story but this time she hid the front cover. We had to pretend we were illustrators and design a new front cover for the book. The title of the book was ‘Freddie and the Fairy’. Some of us thought Freddie was an animal and some of us thought he was a boy. The mystery was revealed at the end of the day.

 

We had a very successful trip to the Summerlee Museum on Monday. The trip linked in with our topic about The Past and the workshop, titled ‘When Gran was a Girl’ focused on exploring items from the past. We all had an amazing time and enjoyed each of the different parts of the museum there was to explore.

We started off by visiting the Miner’s Cottages. The cottages show what living conditions were like in the past. There were many cottages to explore and they started from around the 1840s to the 1980s. We could see a big difference as we moved from cottage to cottage!

     

     

     

We then went for a walk along the canal which led us to the park.

We spent quite a while exploring the park and had lots of fun, especially on the pyramid climbing frame.

     

     

Before lunch, we had time to explore the different areas of the museum. There was lots to see and do…

     

The final part of our day was the workshop. We were first shown three items from the past, a record player, camera and telephone and discussed what item our grown ups now use today that do all three things these items did.

We were then invited to explore the three stations. One was a green grocer’s and this allowed us to discuss where food was bought from in the past.

Another station consisted of toys from the past such as skipping ropes, a cup and ball and a hoop and stick.

     

     

Probably the most fun of all was the washing station. We had to scrub the clothes to make them clean, then dry them using the wringer and then hang them to dry. We had to be very strong to turn the handle on the wringer!

     

     

     

The last part of our afternoon was learning some moves from the 60s. We learned three different dance moves and got to perform them with some music. We even got to dress up in some outfits from the 60s!

     

      

Thank you to our parent helpers who came along to the trip and also to those who offered their time, we couldn’t have done it without you 🙂

 

 

Thank you to everyone who brought in an item from the past to share with the class. It was so lovely to hear about each of the special items and the history of them. We very much took ownership of our presentations and loved showing the items to our audience.

Whilst presenting we had to consider our audience by making sure we faced them and used a clear voice. As part of the audience we had to look, listen and show respect to the person who was presenting. We all did a great job!

   

    

     

     

     

     

     

     

This week we completed our last painting. We mixed the colours red and yellow together to make orange. We used these colours and the skill of blending to create a sunset. Next week we will add some birds to finish off our artwork.

Look out for our display showing all of our hard work in the corridor next week!

We have been focusing on functional writing over the past couple of weeks and linking this to our Food and Health topic. This week we wrote a set of instructions explaining the steps needed to brush your teeth properly.

There are lots and lots of photos this week because we have just had so much fun and excitement!

On Wednesday and Thursday our grown ups came to our Open Afternoon. We have been learning about The Past and have shown a particular interest in toys and games from the past. We learned about different games and how old they are, some were even 2000 years old!

To prepare for our open afternoons we made a cup and ball game. We decorated our own cups, attached the string and then made the ball with kitchen foil. We found it tricky to get the ball into the cup and had to learn to give it a good swing!

 

Thank you to the grown ups who attended our open afternoon. We loved having you in to visit and hope you enjoyed playing the games we had prepared.

On Thursday we had a lovely surprise! The Fire Service came to visit us with their fire engine. We learned what it is like to be a fire fighter and also what we should do if there was a fire. We were able to explore the fire engine and learned about the different equipment they have on the engine. The most exciting part was holding the hose, there were many excited faces and even a few trying to secretly soak themselves with the hose!

Thank you very much to Mrs Denholm’s husband and his crew for bringing the fire engine to Crookfur.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

    

On Friday we celebrated Valentine’s Day by thinking about kind compliments we could say to each other. We could take a heart to someone in the class if we felt it was a complement we wanted to give them.

We also had the option to make a Valentine’s Card for someone special.

It was not just Valentine’s Day on Friday but also BREAK THE RULES DAY!

We were so excited to break the rules and show each other what we were wearing and share the rules we had broken with each other.

Mrs Agnew, Mrs Denholm and Mrs Wotherspoon got a little mixed up about the message and wore school uniform, silly us!

In PE this term we are learning about Rebound Games. This involves thinking about how we move our body and control it and also using a variety of equipment. This week we explored this with tennis racquets and tennis balls. The main focus was controlling the tennis ball either with our hands or with the racquet.

We started getting used to controlling the ball by rolling it to our partner and back. Some of us realised we had to give it more of a push and others realised they had pushed the ball too hard.

We then used the racquets to do the same thing.

It was then time to work on our own and really focus on holding the racquet properly and then balance the tennis ball on the racquet, this was tricky, especially when we started moving too.

We completed this lesson by moving the ball around the Muga with the tennis racquet. We again had to think about the amount of power we were using to ensure the ball rolled but didn’t roll too far away.

We have continued with our block of learning about painting and over the past couple of weeks have made a Seascape. We stuck with blue and yellow to make green and had a go at blending the colours to make it look like the sea. We then drew and cut out fish to add to the Seascape and are looking forward to creating a display with our amazing art work very soon!

On Monday we linked our writing with our Health and Wellbeing topic, Food and Health. We shared with each other what our favourite food is and what we like about it so much. We then put this information into a sentence or two. We are becoming more independent when writing and use sound mats and common word mats to support us plus our own phonological knowledge.

We have continued exploring money and this week we had to match the coin to the amount. We did this in a fun way by building a tower with the cups. The cups had the amount written on them and we had to match that to the picture of the tower with the coins. We enjoyed the challenge!

We don’t use money very often now, so we also discussed different ways to pay for items in a shop and what we see our grown ups use.

We have started a block of learning about painting. The focus is colour mixing and developing the knowledge of the colour wheel to support us with this. This week we mixed blue and yellow to make green and painted our own picture of blue, yellow and green balloons.

Giraffes Can’t Dance…oh yes they can! P1B can also do lots of amazing things and we shared this with each other at the beginning of the week during a Circle Time. We used this as our context for writing and we each wrote a sentence or two about something we are proud of that we can do.

We then created the front cover of the book by gradually mixing blue and white together to create a moon effect and drew our own giraffe to glue onto our beautiful backgrounds. We had to use our cutting skills to cut neatly around our giraffes!

This week we started learning about money. In small groups we explored different coins and looked at their size, shape and colour. We learned the value of each coin and then put these in order starting from the smallest. Lots of us put the coins in order by size but this prompted an interesting discussion and together we were able to put the coins in the correct order by their value.

    

     

We continued our learning about Food and Health by looking at The Eatwell Guide. We learned about the different food groups and why each one is important and how it helps our body to stay healthy. In pairs, we then sorted the foods into the correct food group.

On Monday morning there were lots of excited faces (and some tired faces) coming into class. It was so lovely to hear what each other did during the holiday and most were keen to share what they had been gifted during the break.

We started off the week by writing about what we did during the holiday and were encouraged to think about our favourite thing that we did. We are really starting to consider our sentence structure when writing and thinking about capital letters, full stops and finger spaces.

In Literacy we have been practising all sounds that we have learned so far, rhyming, having a go at writing sentences and focusing a lot on common words.

We also started a new topic this week, The Past. We started by discussing what the past actually is and shared ideas such as the dinosaurs lived in the past and woolly mammoths are from the past along with Mary and Joseph. We then thought about our own past and shared with each other memories that have happened in our past. Mrs Agnew shared some examples of her past to help us with this.

We then drew a picture of something that has happened in our past and it was a joy to listen to important events that has happened in each other’s lives.

On Thursday we did our PE lesson in the classroom. It was so cold outside so we picked a Yoga session about a polar bear in the snow. We discussed the importance of Yoga and some of us found it challenging to hold the more difficult poses.

We needed a good rest afterwards!

To show how creative we are and get us thinking about ourselves as artists we read the story ‘The Dot’. We were then given a piece of paper with a black dot in the middle and were asked to turn the dot into anything we wanted. Some of us really used our imaginative and turned the black dot into something wonderful. We have proudly displayed these in our classroom.

The New Year has got us thinking about how we can keep our bodies healthy. We have started learning about Food and Health as part of our learning around Health and Wellbeing. This week we discussed the different ways we can keep our bodies healthy and then drew a picture of doing this. We already knew lots of ways to keep healthy such as eating vegetables, resting and sleeping, drinking milk and water and exercising!

 

 

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.