Author: Mrs Kennedy

We began a topic on Our Local Community this week.  We started by looking at Springfield School and where it is in our community.  We learned about mapping and drew our own maps of the classroom.  We had to pretend that we were birds flying around the ceiling, looking down, to allow us to get an aerial view. Our maps were really detailed and we spent a long time looking around the room to make sure we put everything in the right place.  We shared our maps with a learning partner too, discussing what we had done.  We really enjoyed being Cartographers, although it is a tricky word for us to remember!

Later in the week, Mrs Kennedy used her map of the classroom to plan a treasure hunt for us so we could practise reading maps too.  Each team had different coloured tokens to find using their map.  We then swapped our tokens for a reward.

Following on from this, lots of children have been choosing to draw their own maps during free play.  The detail and discussion has been excellent and Mrs Kennedy is very impressed.

We have had three incredible helpers in P1B this week – A, A and A!  They are  P7s and they have been so helpful to all of the children and Mrs Kennedy.  They even planned and carried out 2 lessons – PE and Maths.  They did everything on their own, they were given learning outcomes to cover and then they researched and planned activities and wrote up detailed plans.  They had thought of everything including organisation of resources and behaviour management.   The children loved the lessons and I can’t believe how professional they were = A+ from me!  You can come back anytime.

We had more achievements this week.  C did really well in his Bambino race last weekend and came away with a medal and a trophy – fantastic driving C!

G got the Enjoy-a-ball trophy for trying very hard when playing tennis, he told he didn’t give up because he wanted to be resilient.

Another very successful week, we are looking forward to health week next week.

Have a good weekend, from P1B and Mrs Kennedy

We have been busy preparing and practising for our assembly this week, this included each of us being filmed – we love watching the video of ourselves! We are really looking forward to performing next week and are going to try hard to have big, loud voices, and to speak clearly.  Please keep practising words at home.

In maths we have been working on subtraction word problems, we played with skittles as they are a fun way of talking about subtraction.  ” There were 10 skittles to start with, I knocked down 6 and there are 4 skittles still standing.”  It is also a good way to see the link between addition and subtraction.

We have been writing about what makes us happy.  We have been discussing how we look and feel when we are happy and how it makes others around us feel too.  We also learned that when we feel sad it is good to know the things that make us happy so we can try some to cheer ourselves up.

We have continued to ‘walk a mile’ on quite a few days.  A mile is five times around our school pitch.  The fresh air is good and as well as getting  exercise it also helps us to concentrate better when we get back to class.

As always, Mrs Kennedy has seen lots of learning through play in P1B.  We have been architects and engineers, artists and designers too.

The nursery children continue to visit us each week as part of their transition into p1.  We are very good at showing them around, playing with them and setting a good example of how to listen and tidy up!  Mrs Kennedy is delighted at how the P1 children have looked after the nursery children and they are passing on a lot of their learning too, well done!

Have a lovely sunny weekend.

P1B and Mrs Kennedy

This week we continued our life cycle topic.  As we have caterpillars in the classroom we looked at the lifecycle of a butterfly.  The children were very good at showing their understanding on their whiteboards, they also talked to a ‘chatty partner’ about the stages of the life cycle that they had drawn.  Then we made paper chain caterpillars like the one in ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ story.

We have also been thinking about being ‘Global Citizens’ this week.  We decided that it is up to all of us to do our bit to look after our lovely planet.  Mrs Kennedy put lots of different objects into a recycling bag and we used it as a ‘Talking Bag’ this is when we use the objects to help our discussion, we touch, explore and look at them to help us to begin our conversations and get some ideas.  We also had the story ‘George Saves the World by Lunchtime.’  In the book George helps his Grandad to save the world using the 4 R’s – reduce, reuse, recycle and repair.  We then wrote down our own messages to others on how they can help to look after the environment.

On Friday, we began to turn our role play area into a garden centre.  There were six committees and they all worked hard doing different jobs. You can see the committees below. There was a Sign Making Committee too but there doesn’t seem to be a photograph of them, they did an excellent job and Mrs Kennedy is about to set it up using all the work that the children produced.

We have had quite a few children with successes outside of school this week.  G got a certificate from Crazy Golf, K was in a rugby tournament and F won the Golden Boot at his football training.  C was also awarded this large trophy in her Judo class.  Well done to all of you!

Have a lovely long weekend, see you all on Wednesday, from P1B and Mrs Kennedy

We have been finding out more about seasons this week.  We went on a ‘Signs of Spring’ walk around the school grounds and found lots of signs – buds, catkins, bees, and blossom to name a few.  We brought some inside with us to have a closer look with magnifying glasses.  Ms Banach has been helping us to plant beans.  We have each planted 2 different types of bean and we will look after them in the coming weeks and monitor their growth.  We then went outside and played ‘The Bean game’, we know it’s healthy to be active and we all really enjoyed it.  We also have caterpillars in our class.  We are going to look after them too and watch carefully as they begin metamorphosis.

We also began to investigate how to subtract – we sometimes call it ‘take away’ or ‘minus.’  We have been practising in lots of different ways, especially how to use objects to help us find the correct answers for our sums.  We will continue with subtraction for the next few weeks.  We have  been continuing our work on coin recognition, we’re getting very good and Mrs Kennedy was very impressed when we were working in small groups with her, she can see we’re really getting it now 🙂

We have been learning the digraphs ‘oi’ and ‘oy’ and have been writing words with these sounds in them, as well as trying to spot them in words as we read.  We liked the story on the Oxford Owl website called ‘Silver Foil Rocket’ and we spotted lots of our new digraphs in words.  You can sign up to this website at home, let me know if you’d like to know more about it.  In writing we were writing special invitations to you (Spoiler!)  You will get more information on this in the next couple of days.  We are working hard to write sentences independently – starting with a capital letter, sounding out words, remembering how to write our common words, leaving finger spaces and putting a full stop at the end.  Some of us are using ‘joining words’ to make our sentences longer and more interesting too.

We enjoy music sessions in the classroom most weeks, using the National Youth Choir of Scotland (NYCoS) resources.  Recently we have been learning rhythm, pitch and tempo.  We sing songs, play games and use our voices and instruments.  It is really good fun and busy so there is usually very little time to take photos, here is one from this week.

Thank you for reading our blog, P1B and Mrs Kennedy

 

We began the week learning the ‘ew’ sound.  We wrote the words on plastic pockets and made words on our magnet boards, working in small groups to do these tasks.

We have begun to read number names up to twenty.  This was tricky to start with, but we have practised every day and we are getting pretty good.  We will keep going with this next week too.  In outer maths on Thursday we started to work on coin recognition.  There are some really good computer games for this and we played coin bingo and worked in small groups with Mrs Kennedy to complete our worksheets.  We have been putting on shows in our role play corner this week, we also have a ticket office with money so we can practise using the coins to pay for things and give change.

We began our mini topic on life cycles.  We learned about the life cycle of a frog and then human life cycles.  The baby photos were great – thank you! It was lots of fun trying to guess who each baby was.  We also had great discussions about what we couldn’t do as a baby but we can do now.  We really enjoyed thinking about what we will be like as teenagers and what we’d like to do when we are adults.

We have now completed our ‘Commotion in the Ocean’ wall display, with the addition of our ‘Rainbow Fish.’  We used celery and rainbow coloured paints to print colourful scales on our fish.  It’s looking really good and we have tried lots of different art techniques as we built up the display.

A last the weather has cottoned on to the fact that it is Spring!  We had a great time playing outside with P1A on Thursday.

Let’s hope the weather stays for the weekend and we can all get outside and enjoy it.

P1B and Mrs Kennedy

What a fantastic day we had yesterday on our trip to Bo’ness and Kinneil Railway.  It was great fun going on a train ride on the steam train.  We loved the old fashioned carriages and bouncy seats!  We ate our lunch on the train on the way to Manuel Station.

We each had a special ticket that we had to keep safe to show the ticket inspector when he came round to check them.  He punched our tickets with a special machine.  He let us help him use the machine.

When we arrived at Manuel station we all got off the train to watch the steam engine as it uncoupled and moved along the tracks to allow it to attach to the other end of the train so it could pull the carriages home again.

We really enjoyed the museum too, there was so much to see, lots of trains and exhibitions.  We got to go inside some of the trains and pretend to drive quite a few too.

To mark the 100 year anniversary of the end of the First World War the museum are asking those who want to to help,  make poppies dedicated to the railwaymen who lost their lives in the war.  We were only too happy to help and our poppies can be seen on display in the museum.

It was an excellent day out and we had a lot of new experiences, we all loved going on the bus with our friends too.  We were all very well behaved and Mrs Kennedy was very proud of us.  We will write a report on our day out this week in class.

P1B and Mrs Kennedy