Author: Mrs Kennedy

On Monday morning some of us made new play dough.  We followed the recipe, using cups and a table spoons to measure the ingredients. We put lavender from Mrs Kennedy’s garden in it to make it smell nice and it worked! We have had lovely squashy, nice smelling dough all week.  I wonder what other smells we could try?

We began the week learning the ‘a’ sound.  We are very good at the ‘Ants on my Arm’ song and action.  I’m sure we could sing it if you ask us.  We practised writing ‘a’ in lots of different multi-sensory ways.

On Wednesday we introduced the ‘t’ sound and started using magnetic letters to help us to build and read words.  We made ‘at’ by listening for the sounds, counting how many sounds we needed and then finding the right letters.  We also practised reading the word, sounding out and then blending the sounds together.

On Tuesday we had PE in the hall.  We have been learning how to move around the hall safely, sharing the space and making sure our ‘bubbles’ don’t pop if we go too close to another person.  We traveled in lots of different ways – walking, running, hopping, skipping and galloping.  We also practised  basic moves too – throwing bean bags and balls, balancing on a beam and jumping over hurdles.

We have been working with number 3 this week, singing number songs to begin to think about counting  up and down and one more, one less. 3 is quite a tricky number to write so we have been practising in lots of different ways and went outside to write 3s all over the playground with chalk.

On Friday we had our first visit to the library.  Mrs Manlove gave us a very warm welcome and we enjoyed choosing and reading our books.  We are looking forward to visiting each week.

As always we have been busing playing this week. Here are a selection of pictures of what we have been up to:

 

Enjoy your weekend.

From Mrs Kennedy and P1B x

Hello,  the end of another very busy week!  On Monday we had a lot of cardboard (packaging from our new easel).  The children decided to turn it into a pirate ship – complete with a plank!  I was very impressed with their ideas and at how well they worked together on it.

We have been doing some work on number formation this week, beginning with 0, 1 and 2.  The children have tried forming the numbers through different activities. This has also been very good practise for working independently.

   

Gregor and Roslyn had a great chat about which ‘2’ Gregor had written best, it was a lovely conversation and Roslyn was very encouraging and positive 🙂

For the time being we will concentrate on number work from Monday to Wednesday and on Thursdays we will look at ‘outer maths’ – shape, measure, data handling, etc.  This week we explored 3D shape, beginning to learn their names and their properties – corners, edges, faces.  Can they roll? Why? Why not? As well as working out how best to fit them together.  We also looked at these shapes in our environment, identifying many as common objects – balls, oranges, tin food cans, cereal boxes, etc.

We have also been doing a lot of listening this week, identifying sounds in the environment and then sequences of these sounds as we prepare to learn the sounds of the alphabet and begin to make simple words. We have also had music with Mrs Bain and PE with Mrs Kennedy in the hall.  At the moment we are just changing shoes and taking jumpers off as we build up to changing into our complete PE kit!  Yesterday we created a list of rules for our classroom.  We thought about why rules are important, what it might be like with no rules and what rules would be best to help our class to be a nice place and to help us to learn.  We had lots of good suggestions.

As always, we have a lot of play in the different areas around the classroom and outside.  These are set up with specific learning intentions in mind.  This helps greatly with social skills, problem solving, decision making and many other important areas of development.

Matthew was helping me to work out how to fix the shelf that keeps falling down.  He had some great suggestions and was exactly right in working out what we needed to do to stop it happening again.  Thank you!

I’m looking forward to seeing many of you at the curriculum evening on Thursday.

Have a lovely weekend.  P1B and Mrs Kennedy

They say time flies when you’re having fun, that has certainly been true for the 2016/17 school year.   I’m unbelievably proud of every one of the children, they have all worked extremely hard and played hard too! They’ve been kind to each other and have supported each other throughout.  They have also made me laugh every day! I’ve had such a fun year.  Thank you too to their supportive parents, they are a credit to you.

Here are some photos of what we’ve been up to in the last few days of the year:

‘Springfield’s Got Talent’

Last few pictures from our Tess’ Diary talks.

  

Sports Day.

Teddy Bear’s picnic with our buddies.

Sharing the books we wrote with our friends in P1A and P1/2.

Games in our room during the party.  We then went to P1/2 for a cartoon and snack and P1A for some dancing!

Final class photo 🙂

Have a wonderful holiday everyone.  See you in August.

Love Mrs Kennedy X

Hello.  Unfortunately, due to the weather we didn’t make it along to the rugby club for the book festival on Monday, instead, we have been authors this week, making preparations to write our own books by creating a character and a setting. We can also use very good describing words to write about them. We have also drawn pictures to plan our story outline and next week we will write our books and design the front cover. We have really used our imaginations and the characters we have created are very interesting with some good storylines. I’m really looking forward to reading the finished books.

Here we are working with a partner to identifying the setting in some of our reading books, drawing and writing about our characters and settings and taking part in describing word activities:

In numeracy, we began the week learning about fractions. Mrs Kennedy had a packet of sweeties and she had to keep sharing them out as more people visited her house! We were very good at halving them, then quartering them. We are also very good at doing this with pizza and cake too!

We had a really good PE session on Monday with Mr Stewart. We did Better Movers and Thinkers, we had to move and think at the same time, this really helps us with our movement as well as our thinking skills as we really had to focus on what we had to do, filtering out what was going on around us as we concentrated hard. We all had a great time and Mr Stewart is coming back next week to do more of this with us, we’re really looking forward to it.

 

 

 

Later in the week we started to learn about time, learning o’clock and half past on analogue and digital clocks. We also looked at how time affects our lives, why it is important to be able to tell the time and what we do at certain times in the day. We have had good fun playing with clocks and we went outside on Friday to make a human clock. We were very good at finding out where the hands should go. We also had Abby from P6 with us, she was a great help too!

Again, three excellent class talks about Tess’ adventures. She even got some birthday cake this week!  Well done to Clara, Daniel and Noah.

Finally, we have also had visits from the Dogs Trust and Scottish SPCA.  Rachel from The Dogs Trust brought Ben the dog with her and we learned how to look after him and what to do if we meet dogs in our community.

We hope you have a good weekend. From P1B and Mrs Kennedy

Hello, what a full week this has been! We began the week with a visit from three Police Officers – Heather, Leo and Liam. They gave a very informative talk and we asked them lots of questions. They even let us go into their Police van and press the siren, what a great way to start the week.

We have a new yoga resource and Mrs Kennedy has been on a course to help her to teach yoga to children. We tried it out during PE this week and we had good fun trying the proper yoga positions. It was quite tricky and we had to use lots of muscles, it was also relaxing and we had nice music on and practised being calm and breathing deeply.

In maths, we have been looking at capacity and symmetry.  We had fun playing in the water with measuring equipment and using cubes to fill objects around the classroom.  We were also learning how to estimate before we investigated.

Looking at our butterflies inspired our symmetry lessons.

Our topic ‘Our Local Community’ really stepped up a gear this week.  We had a meeting to decide what we would like to learn about our community, then worked in groups to write our plans. Lots of children want to learn more about local services – the Leisure Centre, shops and landmarks, and people who work locally – police, firefighters, vets, nurses.

    

We also discussed what we could turn our role play area into.  After a vote it was decided that we would make it into the Leisure Centre. We have worked hard making signs and gathering resources.  So far we’ve had great fun playing in it.  There are lots of swimming lessons taking place and they are very efficient at asking for people with a certain colour of band to leave the pool when their time is up.

It is lovely to see how eager and confident the children are at talking in front of an audience.  So far, they have all loved talking to the class about what Tess got up to at their house.  Three more excellent talks this week.

On Friday, we released the butterflies.  It has been nice having them in the classroom but it was also good to release them into their natural habitat.  We will be keeping an eye out for them flying around Springfield.

We hope you have a good weekend, from P1B and Mrs Kennedy

Thank you again to those who came to our assembly.  We are lucky to have such supportive parents. The children are, quite rightly, very pleased with themselves for putting on two fantastic shows this morning. I am very proud of them too, they have indeed grown a huge amount this year, in every sense of the word 🙂

We have had three more very good talks about what Tess has been up to on her adventures.  All the children have been very confident and have spoken well.  I’m afraid to say, the snoring is persisting.  We’re looking forward to hearing what she gets up to next week.

We have been seeking shade the past couple of days, yesterday we went into the outdoor classroom to get some fresh air.

Our caterpillars are all in their cocoons and I think the warm weather may speed up their hatching.  They have now been transferred to the butterfly net with leaves and oranges in case they hatch over the weekend.

Have a lovely weekend.  From P1B and Mrs Kennedy

 

Hello, this week we have been watching closely as our caterpillars grow, right before our eyes it seems! They are very active and are certainly getting very big, I won’t be surprised if they are in their cocoons when we return on Monday.

   

We have been looking at capital letters this week, learning to recognise and write capital letters and when to use them.  We had a lot of fun as we explored their different shapes, we have been painting, drawing in sand,  writing capital letter graffiti, playing snap and pairs, magnetic letters, driving cars around capital letter race tracks, using lego bricks and pegs as we match the capital letter to the lowercase letter,  and lots more.

 

We have also been looking at different genres of writing, trying instructions and persuasive writing this week.  We wrote instructions on how to wash your hands and we made anti-litters posters for a competition run by Burgh Beautiful.  This tied in well with our Local Community focus as we discussed all the nice places in Linlithgow and what happens when people leave litter. The winning entries will be displayed on the High Street. The children really thought about their designs and followed the instructions to keep them simple and bright with a clear message.  These are just a very small sample (due to photo no. restrictions) but they were all very good 🙂

In maths, we have been using subtraction to work out ‘how many more?’ when comparing amounts.  At the end of the week we did some weighing, using balance scales. We weighed objects around the classroom, including Noah’s shoe, and counted to see how many cubes it would take to balance the scales.  The shoe took 75 cubes!  We have also been looking at kitchen scales, practising how to weigh by reading the dial and seeing how many grams they weigh.  We were so busy I forgot to take any pictures, sorry.

Tess, our traveling ted has visited Imogen and Lauren’s houses this week, she had had a great time, however, we have discovered that she snores!  The girls did a super job of telling us what she has been up to.

We are continuing to look after the tubs outside, making sure they get lots of water in this warm weather.

We have also been busy with our assembly preparations, continuing to make props and practise our words and songs.  We’re all really looking forward to seeing you next Friday.  Have a good weekend.

Primary 1B and Mrs Kennedy x