What a fantastic Festive Friday! We made the Christmas cards and gift bags for our community project today. They look great!

This week we have created festive polar bears in art – the focus was on creating patterns with different lines.

We have been learning about Newport – we learned facts about the River Tay and we are able to locate Newport on a map of Scotland.

We have continued our learning on questions and focused on pausing at punctuation during our reading sessions.

We had a visitor this week…Gumdrop the elf has come to stay for a few weeks. He wants to change his ways and be a helpful elf. We wrote about what he has been up to in our writing lesson this week.

We have decided to arrange a ‘Santa Dash’ in the last week of term. We created posters in pairs and shared our idea with all the other classes. We hope everyone wears their Christmas jumpers and maybe a festive hat or headband.

 

We have been learning about alphabetical order this week and have been looking at picture dictionaries and index pages in non-fiction books. We will continue to explore this next week as some children are ready to look at the second letter to put words in order.

In Maths we have been learning about Carrol Diagrams and Bar Charts. During outdoor learning today we filled in a Carrol Diagram of information we found in the playground. Everyone did an amazing job!

In PE we are continuing to work on our ball skills – in particular throwing and catching. We are hoping to feel confident enough to play a game.

We are learning a variety of dances in pairs, groups and as a whole class. Today we learned a set dance called the “Runaway Train” which was fast but we all got the hang of it after a few goes.

We have been exploring compass directions and we are starting to look at different maps.

As part of our Health and Wellbeing learning we have been exploring similarities and differences. We have been using the words unique and diversity.

We have made posters about our hobbies and next week we will present them to the class.

One of the highlights this week was having a visit from the Dundee Science Centre. We learned all about the different organs in our body.

We sang a fun song called “Use Your Imagination” which we will continue to work on, adding instruments and singing in parts.

We have been learning about vowels and consonants this week as the P1 pupils have been blending some of their sounds to read and write CVC words.

We wrote a procedure text on “How to make a sandwich”. We wrote the instructions in the correct order and started each one with a bossy verb.

We have been learning to use an empty number line to help us add and subtract numbers. We can also put a number in our head and add or subtract a number from it.

We have learned about the skeleton – we know it protects the organs, helps us move and holds us up. Next, we will be learning about the different bones and organs in our body.

We created our own skeletons out of natural resources during our Outdoor Learning session this week.

We took part in four Skills Academy sessions this week. We were able to chose from Games, Lego, Printing and Animation. We all had a fantastic time working with pupils from different classes.

 

Following our interest in Harvest and Scarecrows we created lovely scarecrow faces using paper sculpture skills.

Our written work has also been based on our class scarecrow, Charlie. We have described him and next week we will write about his secret. I look forward to reading all the wonderful ideas!

During our Outdoor Learning session this week we all became squirrels. Moving with speed and agility, balancing, leaping and collecting nuts and leaves for our dray.

In literacy this week we have been reading Percy the Park Keeper stories and we have learned about compound words.

This week we have been learning about foxes and badgers as part of our Woodland Animals theme. The pupils have been really engaged and are looking forward to learning about owls next week.

In Maths, we have continued our recognition of 2D and 3D shapes. Matching, sequencing and making patterns.

The pupils are looking forward to starting Wake-up Shake-up after the holidays. The Health and Well-being committee taught them the first dance today and we all really enjoyed it.

We had our first House competition today – Messy Bedroom. Pupils from all four houses took part and really enjoyed themselves.

 

Literacy

Our book of the week this week has been “The Scarecrow’s Wedding”. We have enjoyed learning about verbs while using this book. In writing, we learned about Kenning Poems. Everyone chose an animal to write short clues about to form their Kenning poem. Great fun 🙂

Numeracy

We have been learning about addition and subtraction fact families. We have explored 2D and 3D shapes, learning to describe them using their properties (faces, edges and vertices/corners)

Outdoor Learning

We completed our wind socks this week and had great fun testing the wind direction. It was interesting to see the areas of the playground that felt more sheltered.

Topic

We learned about hedgehogs, their diet and their habitat. We enjoyed watching a short documentary on them and shared our favourite facts with each other.

French

We are becoming more confident counting to ten (P1) and twenty (P2). We are looking forward to creating a ChatterPix next week where we can speak French and show our skills.

After reading “The Ugly Five” we decided to go on a class safari around the school grounds. We found pictures of the different animals in the story and ticked them off on our lists. It was great fun 🙂

 

Outdoor Learning

We had a very windy day on Thursday so we started making wind socks. These will be finished next week. We spoke about all the ways we know the wind is there and how we can tell which direction the air is moving.

Literacy

We have been learning about nouns. We are very good at identifying different nouns within stories and sentences. We can even use our learning from last week to describe a noun using different adjectives. Our writing lesson was on “Signs of Autumn”.

Topic

Lots of our stories this week were about red squirrels and other woodland creatures. This has led to an increased interest in them. We watched a short documentary on red squirrels and shared some facts about them. We will go on to look at other woodland creatures and we will explore their habitat and what they eat.

Health and Wellbeing

We have been continuing with relay games, strategy games and we played some parachute games. Everyone listened very well to the instructions and rules of new games and we are all becoming more aware of the space around us. We have continued to discuss feelings and how we get from a 5 to a lower number on our 5-point scale.

Numeracy/Maths

We have continued to count in sequences, find missing numbers, explore numbers that come before after and in-between. We have started learning about fact families. For example, 13+4=17, 4+13=17. We will continue this next week and include subtraction too. All pupils have been exploring the properties of 2D and 3D shape.

French

We have continued to learn the numbers to twenty in French. Children can say their name and ask what your name is in French. We have explored how to ask how someone how they are. They like that the replies are all different.

Free Flow Play

It has been great observing the children play in the classroom. This week there has been a lot of interest in the large number tiles, in the home corner, with the play dough and in creating “silly sentences”. I have seen examples of role play, working cooperatively, compromise and creativity.

 

 

This week we have been learning about adjectives. We have been describing snakes, classroom objects, safari animals and even disgusting sandwiches 🙂  Two books we have been focusing on this week have been “The Ugly Five” and “The Disgusting Sandwich”. Both were huge hits with the pupils.

We have been learning about the 5-point scale this week and matching our emotions to the different levels. We can discuss what each of the numbers would look and feel like for us.

In Numeracy we have been learning about odd and even numbers, how to sequence numbers and how to add or subtract 10 from any two digit number using the columns of a hundred square. In Maths we have been learning about the properties of 2D and 3D shape.

P1 pupils have started thinking about the words they can make with the sounds they have learned so far. Perhaps they can show you at home with the letters in their homework folders 🙂

In PE we have been playing strategy games that make everyone aware of the space around them and give them the opportunity to make quick decisions. A skill that they will be able to use when we start playing team games.

We have been learning about France – focusing mainly on what the flag looks like and learning some facts about the Eiffel Tower.

P1/2 is going to be running the Chocolate Tombola at the Summer Fair – we will be making posters and arranging chocolate collections next week.

 

 

Our book this week has been “The Day the Crayon’s Made Friends”. Everyone enjoyed getting daily letters from the crayons telling us what they enjoyed about our class. We used it as inspiration for our Writing lesson on Thursday.

In Maths/Numeracy we have been sequencing numbers, using hundreds, tens and ones to make representation of two and three digit numbers and learning about probability. In Mental Maths we have been counting forwards and backwards in ones, twos, fives and tens. We have enjoyed playing “Unlucky Number 13” and “Squeeze”.

We have been exploring emotions as part of our Establishment Phase. Everyone chose a colour that best represents each emotion for them. We will continue working on this next week by looking at our 5-point scale.

In French, we have been counting to 10, asking “What is your name?” and saying “My name is…”

For outdoor learning P2 pupils have been taking rubbings of different textures. We started with leaves and moved on to different areas of the playground. We were able to discuss the different textures using interesting adjectives. P1 pupils picked apples with their buddies and are planning on making apple juice next week.

In PE, we have been taking part in different run-around games that increase our heartrate, improve our spatial awareness and help us to follow new rules. We have also improved our skipping, jumping, hopping, running and balancing through fun relay races.

We continued our learning about secondary colours by making a lovely umbrella piece of art with mixed media. Everyone had to concentrate hard on their painting, cutting and gluing skills.

Please could everyone bring a spare pair of socks and shoes or wellies on a Thursday from now on to make sure our Outdoor Learning can continue as the weather begins to turn.

Thank you!

 

Welcome to P1/2 everyone!

We have had a fantastic first week back. Everyone has enjoyed exploring the classroom over the last few days with the farm toys, the dough, the writing table and the home corner proving very popular.

We enjoyed reading Zog together. We matched some rhyming words and described how Zog felt at different parts of the story.

We drew pictures of ourselves and of our family. Everyone was able to share at least two facts about their family.

Number splat was a huge success – pupils were able to show their understanding of missing numbers and patterns within a number square.

We learned a song about our School Vision “Work together, learn together and be the best we can be”. Perhaps some of them can remember it…

Work together, learn together,

Be the best, we can be,

This is our Vision, this is our Vision,

Sing with me, sing with me.

We have been reading stories to help us understand our School Values too. This week we have been focusing on Kind and Honest.

P1 pupils took part in outdoor learning with their buddies while P2 pupils enjoyed a colour matching activity outside.

We took our carpet spots into the hall for some circle games. Everyone had to listen well to follow the instructions of the Drama games.

Today we had gym. We played some fun run around games to get us used to following new rules, moving safely and taking turns.

Three pupils have been given the chance to be a “Lucky Duck” so far. Everyone will get the chance to do this as we have a new Lucky Duck every day 🙂

I hope you all have a fantastic weekend and I look forward to seeing everyone back again on Monday 🙂

 

We hope that you enjoy sharing the learning that is happening in P1/2 at Newport Primary School.