The highlight of this week has been World Book Day on Thursday. The bell rang at 10 o’clock and everyone in school stopped to read. We have been reading lots of books this week including some silly stories from The Stinky Cheese Man including Chicken Licken, the Princess and the Bowling Ball and Little Red Running Shorts. We then spent some time talking about our favourite stories.

After break we did some descriptive writing about the Stinky Cheese Man (an alternative of the Gingerbread Man story). In the afternoon we read another version of the Princess and the Pea and drew some fantastic pictures using oil pastels. We then painted them using watercolours before adding a little glitter for the crown. We learned lots about using these different materials, including how the pastels resist the paint.

At breaktime we did a book trail around the school, looking for characters from some well known picturebooks. We had lots of fun and found all the clues.

This week the children helped to write the blog. Here are some of their highlights of the week:

‘The book trail was exciting and everybody loved it!’ Isabella

‘I liked reading The Princess and the Pea’ Kyle

‘I liked reading The Stinky Cheese Man’ Leah

‘I loved subtracting’ Rowan

‘I liked painting’ Finlay B

‘I enjoyed reading A Child of Books’ Finlay D

Primary 1 have been having great fun  using coins to buy things in our class shop and cafe.

This week in primary 1 we have been watching the different birds visiting our new bird table. So far this week there has been robins, blackbirds, sparrows, blue tits, coal tits and chaffinches. The pigeons and wrens are enjoying the seed on the ground.

In primary 1 we were learning about the ar sound as in dark, park, farm, cart. The word shark has the sh sound and the ar sound.

It’s great to be back together in the classroom and see everybody again. We’ve had a lovely but tiring week.

We’ve been getting used to being back in the classroom and remembering our routines.  We’ve been talking lots about good listening skills and have been doing lots of activities to encourage us to work together.

In phonics we started the week learning the ‘sh’ sound, reading Julia Donaldson’s Sharing a Shell. We then used our plasticine to make our own friends sharing a shell.

Our second sound was ‘ar’ and a shark theme emerged. We have read lots of shark stories, learned lots of shark facts and even have a shark in our classroom! We  started an underwater shark scene and did some lovely black pen shark pictures which we labelled to help with our descriptive writing. We’ve also been doing lots of reading and word building each day.

In numeracy we’ve been focusing on subtraction, initially looking at the concept of subtraction and using concrete materials like skittles to help us. We’ve also set up a shop in the classroom to help us with our numeracy – we have to add up the cost of different items and then work out how much change we need!

We were delighted this week to have a bird table very kindly donated to us by local tradesman Mr Lee Darker. This fits in very well with our RSPB Wild Challenge.
We all gathered around the bird table this morning and Mrs Collins put a selection of treats out for the birds and explained all about the Wild Challenge. We’re very excited to get started.

We’re setting up bird hides in the classroom windows to see which birds we can spot – we’ve already seen a curious chaffinch!

To help us learn our sh sound we have been reading stories about sharks  and drawing them using our black pens. We built up a list  of words to describe sharks and then used these words to help us write a description of a shark. We had to try and write a colour sentence, a size sentence, a doing and feeling sentence. Before we wrote down our sentences we had to say them out loud, this helps us to include all the little helping words that link our ideas such as was, has, is.

It was lovely to be together again in school. We began our day by practising our letter formation and writing words with our sounds.

Our new sound today was “sh” and we were reading different “sh” words such as shop, shed, ship and fish. We listened to Nick Sharratt read his book The Shark in the Park on a Windy Day and started to make our own sharks.

In numeracy we were subtracting numbers and we did some dinosaur subtraction on the smartboard. 🦕

It was fun reading in our groups and sharing books with our friends.

Some of us played a game matching clowns on different cards to the clowns on our boards,  we had to listen very carefully to each other.

We enjoyed playing together in the playground and in the classroom.

Hello Primary 1!

We hope you’re well and have been enjoying the snow.

Next week’s tasks include junk modelling, so it would be a good idea to save your recycling. Any small boxes, tubes, crisp packets etc. can all be used.

Take care,

Mrs McGilp and Mrs Collins

Hello Primary 1!

We hope you’re all well. We’re so pleased to see how hard you’re working at home, do keep sending your emails showing us what you’re up to.

Here is a suggested timetable for next week. Remember this is entirely optional and if you prefer to do tasks in a different order that’s completely fine. Please email us if you have any questions.

Take care,
Mrs McGilp and Mrs Collins