All posts by Miss McDermott

Having lots of fun teaching and learning with P2/1!

Global Citizenship, Music, P1, Scottish Culture

P1a Scottish Celebrations – 25th January

January 26, 2018 Miss McDermott Leave a comment

This afternoon we got dressed up in tartan and held our very own special Scottish celebration. We have learned how Scottish people all over the world remember Robert Burns today by holding Burns suppers. So we did something rather similar! We had lots of Scottish music, Miss McDermott read the Selkirk Grace, Mrs Ritchie read the toast to the haggis (crisps) and we even had written our own toasts to the laddies and lassies! After our haggis crisps and shortbread snack we had lots of dancing which you can see on the video clips! Happy Burns Day everyone!

https://vimeo.com/252784962

http://https://vimeo.com/252795275

https://vimeo.com/252796532

https://vimeo.com/252795344

https://vimeo.com/252796191

https://vimeo.com/home/myvideos/page:1/sort:date/format:video

Health and Wellbeing, Library, Mathematics, Numeracy, P1

This week in P1a!

January 19, 2018 Miss McDermott 1 Comment

This week in P1a we have been learning about staying safe near electricity. We made posters to show things that you plug in to the mains and things that use batteries and then we talked about staying safe. We looked at a special safety website and tried to spot all the things that might be dangerous in the different rooms of the house – here is the link so that you can have a look too.

http://www.switchedonkids.org.uk/

As well as learning about money in maths we are still practising addition. We are getting so good that we are now doing mental maths and playing bingo using the whiteboards. The prize is a dojo point and getting to do the funky chicken!

Wednesday is our day for visiting the school library so we were very excited to finally go and do this. We need to try hard and remember to bring the books back next Wednesday so that we can choose a different one.

You might have read on last week’s blog that we are learning all about emotions and feeling this term. Our first team challenge of 2018 was to make posters with faces showing different emotions and here are the results…

Literacy, P1

Hats off to P1a!

January 18, 2018 Miss McDermott Leave a comment

Before Christmas we read a story all about Kipper trying on different hats and Miss McDermott brought in lots of different hats for us to try on. We then drew pictures of ourselves wearing the hats and wrote a sentence about the hat we liked best.

However with all the excitement of Christmas Miss McDermott forgot that she had taken all these lovely photos …

So here they are!

And here is just some of our super writing and pictures!

Health and Wellbeing, Mathematics, P1

Happy New Year from P1a!

January 12, 2018 Miss McDermott Leave a comment

Miss McDermott and Mrs Smith were delighted to see P1a back safely after the holidays and as ever we have had a busy week!

This term in maths as well as continuing our number work we are also learning about recognising and using money. We have been talking about how grown ups often use debit cards as opposed to cash so we made our own debit cards for using with our Chip and Pin machine (which was kindly donated by Present Time in Bathgate!) We have been sorting coins and playing lots of games as well trying to make different amounts of money. This is quite tricky and something we will need to keep practising!

In health and wellbeing our focus for this term is emotions. We enjoyed listening to a story about Betty and the Yeti and discussing how the Yeti felt and why. All the classes in school are learning about the emotions “cogs” and in P1 we are learning about three cogs in particular. These are

emotion words
triggers
body sensations

You can see the cogs on our posters which will be in our profiles when we bring them home at the end of January.

Christmas in P1a!

December 21, 2017 Miss McDermott Leave a comment

It’s not just the teacher in P1a that likes wearing Christmas hats and headbands – it seems that the boys and girls quite like it too!

Uncategorized

P1 Christmas Party

December 21, 2017 Miss McDermott Leave a comment

This afternoon both classes were very excited to have our Christmas party. We all looked super in our party clothes and enjoyed dancing and playing games together in the hall with Mrs Ritchie as the DJ! We had made our own place mats with our names on them for snack but thank you to our Pupil Support Workers for laminating them and setting out and tidying up the tables and to Mrs Malone who also came along to help out.

We had also written to Santa inviting him to our party so you can imagine how excited we were when he popped in to say hello and give us a little gift just before Christmas.

We hope you enjoy looking at all our fantastic photographs!

Art, Creativity, P1, P6, P7, Religious and Moral Education

A very busy day for P1a!

December 19, 2017 Miss McDermott Leave a comment

This morning we were very excited to visit the P7 Christmas market which was raising money for the PJ foundation. We loved looking at all the stalls and admiring the lovely things that the P7 children had made. Lots of goodies were bought and the Grinch nerf gun challenge was very popular too! Well done P7 – you made a super effort and hopefully have raised lots of money too!

Later we had a special Christmas craft afternoon with our P6a buddies back in our own classroom. Everyone learned about the story of the Christingle and made one using an orange, red ribbon, a small candle, some cocktail sticks and dried fruit.

Below are some lovely pictures of us making lots of different Christmassy things with the buddies!

Literacy, P1, P7

P1a Book Week Scotland

November 30, 2017 Miss McDermott Leave a comment

Today we had our special book week show and tell and as our P6 buddies are at school camp we were joined by some buddies from P7. We enjoyed telling each other about our favourite books and the buddies even read some of them to us.

We were very excited to take home the Bookbug bags today. Miss McDermott has read 2 of the stories in class as they both have a baby theme and we have been learning about babies!) ~ The Fourth Bonniest Baby in Dundee and Little Owl’s Egg. Next week after we have read the other book Gorilla Loves Vanilla we are going to vote in The Bookbug Picture Book Prize.

Below are some photos of us taking part in today’s show and tell.

Community, Library, Literacy, Outdoor Learning, P1

P1a go out and about!

November 29, 2017 Miss McDermott Leave a comment

Here are some photographs of P1a out and about this week. Thank you very much to all the mums who kindly came along with us despite the cold weather! Your help is much appreciated.

As part of our Percy the Park Keeper topic we visited Beecraigs on Tuesday morning and took part in several activities with the rangers. These included a scavenger hunt, making animal homes and learning about the animals that live in the park.

As part of our Book Week Scotland activities on Wednesday afternoon we visited Linlithgow Library. As well as listening to a story we enjoyed looking at and reading lots of different books. Lots of us have taken books home to read which we will be able to return to the new library within the new partnership centre.

Outdoor Learning, P1, P6

More Hallowe’en activities in P1a!

November 7, 2017 Miss McDermott Leave a comment

As part of our Hallowe’en activities we read the story Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper.

Then as part of our Health and Wellbeing learning about handling and trying new foods we made and tasted our very own pumpkin soup. Everyone tried it although not everyone liked it!

Thank you to the girls who kindly washed and dried all the dishes when we had finished.

Later in the week we took part in a special outdoor team challenge with our buddies in P6a. We had to make skeletons using sticks and stones and leaves. It was a lovely sunny afternoon and we all enjoyed being outside. Miss McDermott, Mrs Smith and Mrs Marshall were very impressed with the finished skeletons – what do you think?

Uncategorized

P1a Hallowe’en Activity Afternoon

October 31, 2017 Miss McDermott Leave a comment

A big thank you to all the grown ups who came in to the classroom to join us this afternoon. The boys and girls loved having you and your help was much appreciated!

The activities included traditional Hallowe’en things such as dooking for apples but also playing games like pin the nose on the witch and a skeleton dice game. We did some craft activities too – making trick or treat bags and bats and also decorating gingerbread pumpkins. One slightly more unusual activity was the science “space rocks” where we had to drip vinegar on to the rocks to see what happened…

Music, P1, P6

Last week of our first term in P1a!

October 24, 2017 Miss McDermott Leave a comment

It’s hard to believe that we have now completed our first term in Primary 1 at LPS. We’ve been doing lots of learning across all curricular areas – here is just a little look at the last week of term!

This week’ s sound was “r”. We enjoyed reading the story Robot Rumpus and making our own robots for team challenge. The focus for this week’s challenge was to share resources and we were allowed to swap with each other and to use the swap box! Miss McDermott is very pleased at how well we are working in teams .

Well done to everyone for taking part in Show and Tell this week. There were lots of interesting things and we were able to practise our talking and listening skills including asking and answering questions. Two of the most popular items were the space rock and the pea pods – both of which caused lots of excitement for quite different reasons!

We were delighted to be joined by our P6a buddies this week who had chosen some poems to share with us. (Originally we planned to do this on National Poetry Day which was on the 28 September however there were several other things on in school that day!) In particular we were listening and talking about rhyming words in poems as this is something we have been doing as part of our literacy learning.

We are just about at the end of our fairy tales topic but we’ve enjoyed doing some drama activities about the Three Little Pigs and have been amazed at how quickly our beanstalks have grown. We have been very keen to compare the size of them even though they were all planted on the same day! We’ve also been practising our drawing skills – look at these fantastic big bad wolves!

Over the past few weeks we have been learning a lovely autumn song with Mrs McWhirter, our music specialist. We hope you enjoy watching us perform it!

https://vimeo.com/237935724

A busy week in P1a!

October 6, 2017 Miss McDermott Leave a comment

This has been our final week learning about Jack and the Beanstalk and with the help of Mrs Smith we have planted our own magic beans! We have been looking at some information books to find out what plants need but now we will just have to be patient and watch our little seeds carefully to see if they grow.

As you may have seen on Twitter we enjoyed a visit from Mrs Vorster who brought along her Scottish harps. We particularly enjoyed clapping, singing and even dancing along to the music as you can you see on these short video clips!

http://https://vimeo.com/237090833

http://https://vimeo.com/237090765

We are continuing to learn our Jolly Phonics sounds and are making good progress in blending these using the magnetic boards and letters. This week our new sounds were “e” and “h”. We read lots of Elmer the elephant stories and created a lovely display of our work outside our classroom .

The team challenge was all about “h” as we had to make hedgehog houses – outdoors of course!

Mr Ross and Mr Fagin our school janitors also popped into P1a this week to tell us all about the jobs that they do in the school. They also asked if we could help them by not dropping litter in the playground and by not filling the sinks in the toilets up with water and letting them overflow!

Exciting week next week – our first show and tell! Please remember to check the letter and try hard to make sure children bring item on correct day. Please speak to me (or Mrs Smith) if your child is worried or upset about this at all – it should be a nice fun way for us to end our first term in P1!