This week in P2/1 we’ve been working around the weather to get the garden ready for our planting. We’ve been weeding, talking about what plants need to grow and have discussed what we might plant. We’re continuing to look after the wormery and the compost bin and are looking forward to getting some compost to help our plants.

In our greenhouses on the classroom window we’ve been excited to see that many of our mange tout seeds have now germinated! We will now plant these in the garden where (we hope) some might be ready before the end of term.

We’ve had lots of play in the classroom this week. The children turned the building blocks into our very own cinema. They made tickets and designed posters and were very excited when Mrs Ward joined us to watch a short film we had made.

In literacy this week we learned the ‘th’ sound. We linked this to stories with three in them, in particular the three little pigs, or our class favourite The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig. In our writing on Thursday we re-wrote the story in our own words, first describing the big bad pig and then writing about how he tried to blow the houses down. The houses were a little different to the traditional tale, being made of bricks, concrete and metal bars and chains, and the big bad pig needed the help of a sledgehammer, a pneumatic drill and some dynamite! We then had great fun working together to make a collage of each house and then retelling the story to make into a film for our class cinema. The children negotiated the roles and supported each other to remember their lines.

We’re continuing with our problem solving each week – this time the challenge was to make the longest marble run they could with just ten pieces. The children did a brilliant job of taking turns, listening to everyone’s ideas and working together to find the best way forward.

This week each group has to build a marble run. They have to build the longest marble run they can using only 10 pieces of run out of a possible 20. They have to begin by measuring and comparing the different pieces before fitting them together.

Primary 1 are continuing to watch the different birds visiting the bird table, it is always very busy with chaffinches, coal tits, robins, sparrows, great tits and blue tits. We also have a lot of pigeons and a blackbird! The oyster catchers are back on the school roof hopefully getting ready to lay their eggs.

Today we were being creative in our play, the girls made this beautiful bird out of the linking elephants!

Last week we had to work together, in our group, to sort a set of  flowers. We decided to sort them in height order. We had to talk together about which was the longest and then the shortest. After comparing the flowers we arranged them.

We have been using our coins to make different amounts of money. Today we played a money game with our partner, we had to guess what coin our partner had by asking them different questions such as what colour is it? Is it round?

Primary 1 spent some time weeding in the garden this afternoon, getting it ready for planting.

Primary 1 and P2/1 have been putting their banana skins and apple cores into the compost bin. The dinner ladies have been giving us their fruit and veg peelings to put in our bin.

Enjoying healthy snacks at playtime!

The compost bin is filling up!

We’ve had a lovely sunny week back.  We’ve been looking at the ‘oa’ sound this week. On Monday we made plasticine boats and then tested to see whether they would float. Only three boats floated and we looked at what they had in common – thin walls, sides to hold air in and water out, no holes and a large surface area or a big bottom! We then tried again on Tuesday when many more boats floated.

Also for the ‘oa’ sound we’re writing a three part story about a goat with a new coat. We’re making up the story together. First the goat is walking through the forest in his new coat. Then he meets a pheasant with a twisted ankle! We’ll finish the final instalment next week. Today we made plasticine coats for goats, using tools to help us.

For the next part of our RSPB Wild Challenge we’ve started planting and composting. We’ve been saving our fruit peels and collecting the vegetable peels for the kitchen to feed to the worms in our compost bins. For our planting, first we are germinating seeds in the classroom in our makeshift green houses. We’re hoping the shoots will start sprouting soon. Next week we will start planting seeds in our school garden.

In numeracy this block we’ve moved on to money – looking at the different coins and adding them up. We’ve set up a book shop in the classroom to practise addition and subtraction when we’re paying for books and getting the correct change.

Some of the children’s highlight’s this week have been:

‘Writing the goat in the coat story.’

‘Reading the story about the fox who fixes things.’

‘Watching the assembly.’

‘Making the boats.’

This week primary 1 have been building words with en in them, we came up with lots of words like hen, pen, men, then, when, end, send and friend.

Primary 1 and P2/1 continued with their RSPB wild challenge today by setting up their compost bin. We hope to make rich compost to put on the plants we are going to grow  in the school garden. We added some soil, worms, apples cores and  some veggie peelings into the compost bin to get us started. We spoke to the dinner ladies who are going to give us vegetable peelings from the school lunches to add to the bin.

Today we went to check on the worms 🪱 in the wormery, we fed them some banana skins and used teabags! The worms were very lively, we were careful not to keep the lid off for too long as we didn’t want the worms to get to warm in the bright sunlight.