During our online assembly last week Mrs Wilson set us all a challenge, to think about what we all are grateful for at school. Primary 1 shared their ideas today during circle time. Some of us were grateful for being able to share stories and have the chance to make things. All of us agreed though that at school, the most important thing they had to be grateful for was their friends and being able  to play with them in the classroom and in the playground.

Following on from Mrs Wilson’s Skipper assembly encouraging us to ‘look on the bright side’, we’ve been sharing our experiences of being at home the last few months and talking about different ways of seeing things. In circle time we talked about some of the things that we’re grateful for.

What a surprise Mrs Collins got today, there were  inky foot prints all over the book corner! It was Inky mouse. He came to school to tell us all about the “i” sound. We then made our own Inky the mouse to help us remember the “i” sound.

We have been using plasticine to create different faces. We talk about all the different parts of our face and how our face can show others how we are feeling.

A surprised face, look how the eyebrows are going up in an arch, the eyes are wide and the mouth is open.

Look at the different parts of the eyes in this face.

Primary 1 have been talking about the three magic words…..

WHO            WHERE        WHAT

in the story of the Gruffalo.

We shared  different words to describe the characters (WHO) and shared our ideas about how the    characters felt in the story.  We thought the mouse was very brave to stand up to the Gruffalo and clever to come up with a plan to trick the animals.

The story takes place in a wood (WHERE) and we used paint and tissue to make pictures and told Mrs Collins what you might see and hear as you strolled through the wood.

We retold the story together in the correct order thinking about the beginning, the middle and the end (WHAT).

In numeracy we played a Gruffalo dice game. Each number on the dice matched a part of the Gruffalo’s body. If you threw a 6 you drew a body, if you threw a 5 you drew his head, a 4 was his legs ……. it was great fun!

We having been thinking about words  with the “t” sound. Mrs Collins told us a funny story about a tennis match. We then made  our own Mr Tall to take home , drew tigers and practised writing the letter “t”.

Our next Skipper topic is ‘Look on the Bright Side’. Harvard University research on positive psychology shows that gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships. People feel and express gratitude in multiple ways.

What are you grateful for and how could you show it?

It’s been another busy week in Primary 2/1. We are continuing our Stickman topic – we finished our stick children for our display, made a story map of all the places the Stickman visited and wrote postcards from his adventures. We then developed our sequencing skills to give our friends instructions to get the stickman safely home to the family tree, avoiding all the obstacles!

As well as The Stickman we’ve been reading lots of stories, including It’s Not a Stick. We then worked together to be imaginative with our sticks, which are not sticks but a boat, a fire, noughts and crosses, a snowflake, a house for a mouse, a ladder, a gate, Peebles and many more!

We’ve also made a start on our phonics this week, looking at ‘s’ and ‘a’. In numeracy we’re counting out objects, working on recognising numbers and practising the correct number formation. We’ve also spent lots of time developing our fine motor skills with the plasticine and playdough.

Every day we’re having lots of chats about germs and the importance of handwashing. We’ve discussed how germs are spread and how they get into our bodies. We created our own germ monsters and have also carried out an experiment to see which bread goes mouldy first – the one we touched with clean hands and the one we touched with dirty hands. Watch this space!

I’m grateful for my house and family and my dog