A big thank you to the buddies who joined us today for our outdoor Easter activities even though it was very cold.
We had a great time taking part in the Easter Egg Hunt Quiz, Easter Egg races and playing croquet and quoits as you will see from the photos!
Since we started in P1 we have been practising our fine motor skills to make the muscles in our hands and fingers stronger. We do this in lots of different ways and in lots of different curricular areas. For example – using scissors for cutting, using the tweezers for picking things up, finger painting, threading things such as beads etc. The photos below show just some of these and the results of all this practice – look at how fantastic we are getting at handwriting!
In maths we are continuing to add and subtract numbers within 10 and one of our favourite activities at the moment is a Lego game where we have to add or take away bricks. The winner is the person with the largest tower.
Miss McDermott had bought a new book about Paddington Bear in London when she was there at the February weekend. We enjoyed listening to the story but lots of us hadn’t tried Paddington’s favourite snack – marmalade sandwiches.
With Mrs Smith’s help, we made a selection of different marmalade sandwiches and had a little tasting session. You will see from the photographs we had a visitor in the middle of the tasting session!  We then collected the data about our favourites and used this to create a chart. Miss McDermott also showed us how you can do this on the computer – much quicker!
This week was British Science Week and our focus was on different things that can be pushed and pulled. We linked this to our reading as we used a non fiction book to follow instructions and make a “bug” that worked by pulling the strings to make it move. We also practised our fine motor skills as we had to cut and thread.
Here are the powerpoint presentation and photographs of our stand at the recent Health and Wellbeing Showcase held in school. It was deliberately quite simple so that the children were able to talk about what they had been learning without any adult help. Thank you to everyone who came along, especially in the afternoon when the children were at the stand talking about their learning.
This term as well as learning about Scotland we have been learning about China too and as you will know this was the theme for our fantastic assembly.
We have watched a video about primary schools in China and we saw that the children painted their numbers and this was something that we wanted to try. However it wasn’t quite as easy as it looked on the video!
We also made a Chinese shape puzzle called a tangram. It is made of 7 pieces that fit together but can also be used to make lots of other shapes and silhouettes but they must not overlap. Even though we cut up our own puzzles – only 2 of us could put them back together again! We did all persevere though and didn’t give up or complain when we found it hard. We have been talking a lot about growth mindset and this task was a good example of having to keep trying different ways and think positively.
Below is a link to an online tangram puzzle that you can try.
http://www.abcya.com/tangrams.htm
         
This week our story writing also had a Chinese theme. We have noticed that lots of the stories we have been reading include dragons so decided to write our own dragon stories. At the start of our writing lessons we always share our ideas with our elbow partners for 5 minutes. We have a special cat timer to let us know when the 5 minutes is up and we then share our ideas with the rest of the class before we draw our pictures and write our stories.
You will be able to read more of our stories in our jotters at the Parents’ meetings in March.
This week we have been talking about what we think the internet is! (Please note – all of the children took part in the discussion but they did not all want to be filmed!)
We played some games with our buddies about staying safe when using the internet. The games included talking about things like not sharing passwords or logins and what to do if something pop ups on the screen and you don’t know what it is or don’t like it.  We have learned that we should always tell a grown up. Here are some photos of us playing the internet safety game with our buddies.
The buddies also helped us to play another game which was all about emotions – which as you will probably know is something else we are learning about this term. Hopefully we will now be able to play this game in the classroom with each other.
We are enjoying learning all about China and rehearsals are well underway for our assembly next week. Miss McDermott read a famous Chinese story all about the Monkey King.
In the story, the monkeys eat mangoes and collect them from the trees. Lots of us hadn’t seen or tried mango so today for a little treat we had mango for snack. Some of us helped Mrs Smith to cut up the mango ( and remembered our good handwashing skills first). We did a quick hands up survey and most of us seemed to enjoy it – just like the monkeys in the story!!!
Today we celebrated more of our fantastic Awesome Achievers. What a lot of fantastic achievements over the last few weeks. Well done everyone.
It has been another very busy week in P1a!
This week as part of our health and wellbeing curriculum we learned all about germs and the importance of washing our hands properly. Here is the video we watched and discussed in class – it’s got quite a catchy little song at the end too!
We practised washing our hands and singing the song and now that we are “germbusters” hopefully we will all stay healthy.
Well done to the boys and girls who sang the handwashing song as they washed their hands!
This week’s team challenge had a winter theme, At nursery, we had learned how water changed into ice when the temperature was really cold. Our challenge was to free a little dolphin from a block of ice without damaging it. We were not allowed to smash or chip the ice but we had lots of other good ideas as you will see from the photos. It was not quite as easy as we first thought!
And here is the winning team!
This term in PE we are practising throwing and catching. Our PE day is now Wednesday, however over the next 2 weeks we may need to use some of our hall time to practise for our assembly. Miss McDermott was very impressed with our throwing and catching skills already! If the weather is not too cold or wet we can hopefully practise this outside too.
We have been learning all about Scotland this week and have enjoyed lots of Scots stories, poems and songs. We made Saltire flags for our special Scottish celebration on Thursday.
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/home/myvideos/page:1/sort:date/format:video
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…
First Awesome Achievers of our New Year! Well done!
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!
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
You can see the cogs on our posters which will be in our profiles when we bring them home at the end of January.
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!
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!
Another assembly celebrating our recent of Awesome Achievers.
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