Is October really over already?!  Suddenly the pumpkins are gone and thoughts have turned to winter and all the fun it may bring, including the P1-3 nativity performance for which rehearsals have already begun.  We can’t wait to welcome you all and hope you enjoy the show.

Everyone has done incredibly well in recognising the single sounds and digraphs (two letter sounds) that have been taught.  We will continue to reinforce these in class and will soon start working on blending sounds together as well as looking at rime.  We are busy learning to use the sounds we are confident with to make words and develop our independent writing skills.  Halloween brought lots of fun where we played with lots of yucky ingredients such as goblin guts, fish eyeballs and zombie blood to create our own bubbling potions.  Afterwards we had a go at writing ingredients for our own potions that did all sorts of wonderful or horrible things!  Having a fun experience first of all helps us think of good ideas for writing.  One windy day we went for a walk around the school.  Our hair was blowing everywhere, leaves were flying all around and trees were dancing.  This led to some fantastic report writing.

“I liked making up the ingredients for my own potion that turned slugs into bats!”  Ana

“I added zombie blood, children’s bones and tears from naughty children to the potion.”  Amina

We are continuing to use our Communication Code to help us have group discussions where everyone listens well to others and shares their ideas.  As we get better at this we will start to show whether we agree or disagree with the ideas of others.

Through our active learning, we have been developing our understanding of shape properties.  Using a bag of shapes, we have been testing our friends by describing the shape, telling them how many sides and corners it has, for them to have a guess at what it could be.  We are getting better and better at it and are even working with pentagons, hexagons and octagons now.

“I liked it when I described my shape and Jonathan guessed it!  It was a circle with one looping side.”  kaitlin

We’ve also been investigating addition through our play, using classroom materials such as dice, buttons, rekenreks (like an abacus) and building blocks to make adding stories.  We are learning how to say an adding story and exploring different ways of writing it down.

“Harry, Thom and I were making adding stories using the rekenreks and number lines.  We made ten add ten is twenty.”  Josh

Through our People Who Help Us focus, we have created some artwork to show the different jobs people do and how they help us.  We thoroughly enjoyed our visit from PC Traynor who told us all about his uniform and how it helps him, including his baton which surprisingly doubled up as a microphone?!  We’re not entirely sure if this is true though…  During his visit, Easa had his legs bound to stop him running away and Miss Stead was arrested!  We are looking forward to a visit from our local crossing patrol officer soon and finding out more about his job.

“I would like to have a turn at holding the lollipop man’s sign.”  Easa

Our role-play corner has evolved as we have learned about People Who Help Us too.  After consultations lead by Lyla, it was decided we would create a children’s hospital and that it would include a cinema room, just like the one at the Hospital for Children in Glasgow, which some of us have spent time in.  Currently showing is The Greatest Showman, Lego Ninjago and Moana.  Lots of children were also keen to try being police officers so we plan to compile a role-play box of items to allow this too.   Do you have anything that we could use?

“I’m excited to dress as a police officer and take baddies to jail!”  Poppy

Recently we have enjoyed using the large outdoor building blocks.  There have been obstacle courses with balance beams and stages for performing on (The Greatest Showman of course) through to giant broomsticks with room for all!  During these activities we work on our teamwork skills by learning to cooperate and accommodate the ideas of others as well as sharing resources and working towards a common outcome.

“Next we could build a spooky castle with the blocks.”  Amina

Having developed an understanding of our school values, we are now very excited to be earning house points to try to win an extended break each week!  If we get caught being respectful, kind, friendly, inclusive, determined or honest we are rewarded with one or more points from adults throughout the school and playground.

“We have house tokens so we can have fun and get extra playtimes and make the school more fun.”  Harry

We have been so busy already in primary 1A having fun, learning and most importantly making new friends.  We are now familiar with our class routines and have been finding out about our school values of Respect, Kindness, Friendship, Honesty, Inclusivity and Determination.  We have discussed what these values mean and how we can demonstrate them.  Some of us have already received nominations for awards for showing our school values!

‘We were learning about Honesty through the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf,’ Blair & Jonathan.

We have learned lots of letter sounds and are about to start learning double letter sounds too.  Keep practising at home with us to help us remember our sounds, find them in books and hear them in words.  We are starting to recognise the beginning, middle and end sounds in words we hear and are working towards having a go at sounding out words to help us write on our own.

‘We’ve been learning to read tricky words and I spotted the word the when I was reading a book in the book corner!’ Thom

Some of us have chosen library books to take home to enjoy and soon we will be taking home reading books to work on at home with you.  We will be working on identifying clues in the stories that help us guess what might happen next, describing the characters and remembering the main events in order.

Through our Numeracy work we have been developing our skills in counting forwards and backwards and from different starting points, identifying numbers before, after and in between as well as practising careful counting of quantities.  We will soon develop our number skills by exploring addition and subtraction using Numicon and other practical materials.  One day we explored our playground and hunted for shapes.  We were amazed at how many we found!  This helped us name 2D shapes and describe their properties.

‘One of the signs on the school building was a rectangle shapes.  It needs to be a bit longer than a square to be a rectangle.’  Sophie S

Next we will look at 3D shape names and properties.  Another fun activity was using the Beebots to practise using directional language by programming them to move forwards, backwards, turn left and turn right.  Our next challenge will be to give directions to a friend on the playground grid to help them reach the treasure!

Mrs McCausland has introduced us to the computer room where we have learned to log on and use drawing software to create increasingly detailed pictures.  We are going to start working on typing simple words, then short sentences to complement our drawings.

Our Science work this term will focus on our senses where we will learn to identify each sense and explain how it helps us to describe the world around us.  We are looking forward to some fun experiments.

‘I want to learn more about the wee spots on your tongue that help us taste things.’  Ana

Our Big Picture Planning focus is currently Our Local Area.  We have already named lots of people who help us in and around our homes.  We are hoping to have some visitors in soon to tell us more about what they do and how they can help us.  We have discovered that many of our family member have jobs that involve helping others and are excited to hear more about the details of what they do.  As we come up with more ideas and questions about what we would like to investigate, we will plan more activities and learning experiences related to Giffnock.

We have lots and lots of creative people in our class!  Straight away we decided that our role play area should be a Party House.  Some of us set to work immediately decorating it with banners, streamers and notices.  We then got the idea to bake cakes for the parties and this led to us transforming it into Giffnock Bakery where a wide selection of yummy treats are created daily.  We are using our Literacy and Numeracy skills to create advertising signs and price lists, take orders, serve customers, pay money and give change and come up with some amazing recipes.

‘I like baking fun cakes and I take a picture of them so we can show our customers what they can buy.’  Iris.

Our outdoor learning has been lots of fun.  We have visited the trim trail a number of times and have made all sorts of discoveries!  Some children have mastered the monkey bars and the climbing net.  Some have been having cook-outs in the mud kitchen.  On our recent visit dinosaur footprints and bones were discovered while digging!  Ribbon was used to section off the excavation area for further investigation by the archaeologists.  Meanwhile, others were busy planting seeds by a little puddle which was used to wet the ground to help them grow.

Many children told us why they would like to Class Representatives on our school Pupil Groups.  Everyone spoke brilliantly and we voted on who we thought should get each position.  Our successful pupils who will represent the class on the Rights Respecting Schools group, Pupil Council, Eco Committee and Sports Committee were Iris, Ethan, Dimitra and Jonathan.  Well done all!

Welcome to blogs.glowscotland.org.uk – East Renfrewshire. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!