We hope you are all safe and well.

Thank you again for our lovely flowers.

Have a look with your grown up at the home learning page on our blog. There are lots of ideas for learning to do at home.  We hope you will all take part in the Daffodil Challenge too.

Please keep us updated on what you’re doing by sharing your pictures and comments on the ‘Share my learning’ page, email us or even comment on this post to say hello.

We look forward to seeing what you’re up to,
Mrs McGilp and Mrs Lloyd

P1/2 have been thinking about the benefits of keeping active, following our Skipper assembly. We gathered data on our favourite activities and counted using tally marks. Then we made a bar graph and talked about the most and least popular activities.

We are learning about magnetic forces.

This is what we said…

‘We learned that magnets pick things up. They connect together and push away the magnets that are the same.’

‘Did you know the world is a magnet? If only one side was magnetic we would fall.’

‘They can stick to each other. There’s a magnetic force if you use the same side.’

‘If you use two magnets the wrong way it doesn’t stick together.’

We sorted materials into ‘magnetic’ and ‘non-magnetic’ and were able to name the materials.

We had a great day celebrating World Book Day and preparing our classroom door.  Our theme was the picturebook Dragon Post, where a little boy finds a dragon and writes lots of letters asking for advice.  Using the book as inspiration we wrote some fantastic letters asking how to look after our own dragon: to Edinburgh Zoo asking how to train it, to Forsyths asking for meat to feed it and to Mrs Wilson asking if we could keep it!

We also worked together to create a dragon, each person designing a scale to make a collage of its body.

We had lots of lovely comments and suggestions from visitors to our door, and had a great time visiting other classrooms to see their doors.

P1/2 enjoyed listening to ‘Dear Zoo’ by Rod Campbell. We painted all of the animals from the story and decorated our classroom door for World Book Day. Visitors enjoyed lifting the flaps to reveal the pets!

It has been a perfect week for P1 to look more at how water freezes and ice melts and to relate it to the frosty mornings and snowy weather! On Monday we did ice experiments, predicting and then testing to see whether salt, sugar or hot water melted the ice fastest.

We also worked in groups to make ice ornaments to hang in the playground. Hopefully the children managed to share these with you and tell you why they were melting.

Photographs by Ayla

Other highlights this week have been eating pancakes on Tuesday, learning to takeaway in maths and the ch sound in phonics. We are all excited for World Book Day next Thursday!

The class have been working hard with their addition up to 10, using concrete materials to help.  We used the numicon to build towers of 10, making some very sturdy towers!

We also enjoy playing with the Cuisenaire rods to see the different ways you can make 10 and the patterns you can make.

We’ve now set up our own mini ‘Kingsland Shop’ where we sort the food into different categories, write out shopping lists and use our addition skills to make sure we give the correct amount to the shopkeeper!

To continue to develop addition skills at home, the mental maths train game on Topmarks is one of our class favourites:

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/mental-maths-train

We’ve had a busy start to the term in Primary One. The children have all been very welcoming and helpful to the new teachers.

In phonics we’ve started our double sounds and have learned ai, oa and ie. The children have enjoyed making trains and boats and last week were very creative designing ties and coming up with ideas for some interesting (if not entirely appetising) pies.

In writing there have been lots of impressive black pen pictures and retelling of stories such as The Tobermory Cat, The Teeger that cam for his tea (Scots) and Nessie.

In numeracy we’re continuing with addition and the children have enjoyed using numicon and getting to grips with the Cuisenaire rods to show the different ways to make numbers to 10.  We’ve also started looking at money and are setting up a mini fruit and veg shop in the class.

We have all enjoyed the Scots topic, particularly the songs and poems and all the new words we’ve been learning.  We have also been learning about bagpipes, and created and labelled our own bagpipes. We were also lucky to have Mr Johnson come in to play for the two classes – although we were all surprised at how loud it was!

We’ve got an exciting few weeks ahead, we’ll be finishing our Scots topic this coming week and then moving on to ‘Super Science’.  We’ll keep the blog updated so please visit again soon.

ELC had a fantastic time today on our first Muddy Monday of the year! We explored the park and school grounds and found lots of places that reminded us of the story, including some long grass and lots of oozy mud! We even spotted a bear or two- luckily they were friendly! Thanks to the grown up helpers who came along to help today, we hope you had fun! Click on the pictures below to view our photo gallery.

We have had a wonderful week reading Christmas stories, making Christmas crafts, dancing at our party and finished off with a wonderful Christmas lunch.

Wishing everyone a wonderful and restful holiday 🎄