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.

 

 

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!