Welcome back!
We have all settled back into our school routines and are working hard to reach our learning goals during our school day. To begin our journey through 2024 we set some personal targets and talked about the ways that we can achieve these during our school day. We enjoyed wishing each other a Happy New Year and had a pretend Hogmanay celebration, complete with a countdown, fireworks, cannons, and singing/dancing. We made some New Year promises and talked about what a resolution is and whey we make these. Primary 1 and Mrs Stevenson are really looking forward to the months ahead and are raring to go!
Literacy
We have been working so hard to learn all our alphabet sounds in Primary 1. This week we covered our final letters and are now consolidating our learning. Our teacher would like to check that we know all of our alphabet sounds, what they sound like in words and what their names are. We are going to be working at home too to practise our sounds.
Our next step will be to learn some phoneme sounds, which we are also very excited about. We will hopefully be able to find our sounds in stories and recognise them when reading our books. When we are writing our wonderful sentences, we are trying hard to include capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. We have been learning about exclamation marks and question marks and have been spotting them in our reading too. Our next step will be trying to use these in our sentences too.
Our common word wall is becoming very full in the classroom and we are working hard every day to practise reading and writing our words. We can build sentences using them and spot them in books and when we use the internet in the classroom for our learning. At home we should continue to learn our common words, practise our sounds and reading to help us to keep up this great learning.
Mrs Stevenson has been delighted with the excellent listening and concentrating we have been doing during our literacy tasks. We really have gained some fantastic skills since joining the school. Well done Primary 1!
Numeracy
In Primary 1 we continue to extend our knowledge of numbers and we are now comfortable in reading, writing, counting and ordering numbers to 10. We are now extending our learning to 11-20. Some of our class can even use the 100 square and count with 3-digit numbers, fantastic! We have been practising adding and subtracting with numbers up to 10 and enjoy our daily challenges, like daily 10 and number of the day to help us to learn more. We like to talk about our mental strategies with our classmates and this can help us to share our great ideas and learn more about number.
This week we have been learning more about days of the week and calendars. We have learned how to tell o’clock times on analogue clocks and are looking forward to learning more about time during our maths activities. If we have a watch at home, we can wear it to school to help us to become more confident when reading clocks.
Interdisciplinary Learning
We have been learning all about Scotland this month. We looked at Scotland on a world map and discussed the different countries we could see. We couldn’t believe how much water surrounded our island. That brought us to our next investigation – Scottish lochs and trying to find out if Nessie is real or if it is a made-up story. We loved watching clips about Nessie, reading the story ‘There is no such thing as Nessie’, making our Wanted posters and writing Nessie stories. We made some 3D Nessie artwork that is displayed in our classroom.
We have explored Scottish artefacts and even held a real sporran, glengarry hat and a quaich. We learned about Scottish clans and tartan. Primary 1 thought this was great fun and asked lots of excellent questions. We hope that Mrs Stevenson’s dad gives her more artefacts to share soon.
To celebrate Robert Burns’ Day on the 25th of January we held a Burns celebration in the classroom. We learned all about the Scottish Poet’s life and heard some of his songs/poems. Our favourite was ‘Auld Lang Syne’ which we danced to after our shortbread.
