Welcome to Primary 1, to all our existing and our new families.  What a busy session we have had so far.  We had a fantastic Halloween day on Tuesday 31st.   We took part in lots of activities based around Halloween and had a wonderful Halloween party in the afternoon arranged by our Parent Council.  The costumes were excellent, and every child left with a treat!   

We are working hard in literacy and are doing a great job of learning sounds. We have learned our first 6 sounds a, t, s, i, p, n and have been using this knowledge to blend and to read words.  We will continue to learn new sounds so we can build new words every week.  Common words are our words we learn every week and can be tricky.  Please use the sound cards and the common word cards to practise at home.  These are yours to keep, cut out and use as you wish.  We have started reading books and are enjoying taking these home to read with adults.   

In numeracy we have been learning to count and form our numbers to 10 correctly.  We have been learning numbers before, after and in between, it’s tricky so we will keep practising – keep challenging us at home by asking us questions!  We will be moving on to adding this session and we look forward to that.   In class we have lots of different activities that help us to learn and we enjoy the challenge of completing target tasks independently. 

We have been doing a science topic on living and growing.  We discussed living and non-living things then have looked at life cycles of insects and plants.  We currently have a wormery in our class with 12 worms that we dug up from our school grounds.  We are carefully watching the worms move around and dig tunnels throughout the wormery which is showing us how worms mix soil, fertilise it and allow air and water to penetrate it.  This creates healthy soil and when we have healthy soil plants can grow.  A fantastic learning experience!  We look forward to releasing our ‘class pets’ near the end of this month! 

We are busy rehearsing for our Nativity Show, ‘It’s a Party’.  We are learning the words and dance moves to the songs.  We will give out parts to all children and we look forward to entertaining everyone in December with our 2 nativity shows.   Look out for more information nearer the time.