We are really enjoying using our outdoor environment as much as possible to develop and extend our learning from within the classroom.

Here we are doing our daily ‘Fresh 15’. It is good to keep active and get some fresh air at the same time.  We are going to set some personal goals for fresh 15 this term.

We have been exploring the school garden looking for minibeasts and have found them in all sorts of places! Under logs, under stones, among the trees and in dark corners.  We were amazed at the different types of minibeasts we found too! We have also been thinking about why they live where they do and what they like to eat.

We explored the different kinds of leaves on the trees and saw that some had very prickly branches and some had smooth branches.   We asked lots of great questions and learnt lots of new vocabulary. We enjoyed a little bit of tree climbing too – just for fun!

We have enjoyed looking for lots of different kinds of flowers in the school garden.  We found lots of bluebells, primroses and daffodils. We noticed that we have a really big rhubarb patch in the school garden and some vegetables growing in the polytunnel.

Some children enjoyed collecting natural materials to make their own bug hotels.

We have had circle time games outside in the garden. It is so nice to have such a big space for active circle time games. We love the fine weather and getting outdoors!

As part of our minibeast topic we have been discussing minibeast habitats. We decided as a class to create a wormery. It was great fun and we were glad the sun was shining for us too!

Thanks to Gus for coming along and helping.

We had to find and collect worms.

We needed soil, sand and a dark box to put the worms.

We layered the soil and sand.

Our wormery was complete!

This term in Primary 1, our class topic will be Weather. We will be undertaking a range of activities including,

• Taking daily temperature readings and using information when making graphs.
• Measuring daily precipitation (rainfall).
• Learning about the seasons and how these link to the weather.
• Building an Antarctic weather station in the role play area.
• Talking about extreme weather, how to protect ourselves from the elements and making weather safety posters.
• Learning about evaporation and dancing to the Water Fycle Boogie
• Sorting clothing into whether groups.
• Learning about the 3 states of water and carrying out related experiments.
• Melting ice in the water tray and learning about arctic animals.
• Updating the daily calendar, talking about the weather of the day and learning the weather (les temps) in French.
• Reading factual books about weather and seasons.
• Using maps, atlases and Google Earth to learn about the weather in other countries.

Our focus for RME is Islam. We will be:

• Learning about the origins of Islam and the 5 main beliefs that Muslims live their life by.
• Designing prayer mats (shape focus)
• Learning about special books such as the Qur’an, the bible and other important books in our lives
• Learning about places of worship, including the church and the mosque.
• Building mosques from Lego and junk
• Experimenting with writing our names in Arabic
• Learning about special festivities in the Islamic calendar, such as Eid al-Adha, Eid ul-Fitr, Hajj and Ramadan
• Concluding out topic with a tasting banquets, making decorations, learning songs etc.

Photos of both topics will follow, as the term progresses.