Category: Primary 1

As this week was “Scotland Loves Languages” week Mrs Gordon was very excited (and so were we). We did lots of little language activities through the week including : stories in French and Spanish, a poem in Polish by a child in P1b, “poissons pêcheurs” game with the language ambassadors, writing our favourite word in another language and practising our family words in French with Camembear. We are getting so good at ordering lunch with Mrs Gordon that we even sometimes speak to the dinner ladies in French…fantastic!

This week in phonics we have been learning the digraphs ai and ay. We have worked hard to remember which is which. We know that ai as in rain, pain and sprain is normally in the middle of words as “shy i” likes to be surrounded by his friends. We also know that ay as in pay, say and spray is normally at the end of words since “toughy y” can be on his own at the end. We need to keep practising this, as it is very tricky to know which one to choose. Mrs Gordon helped us to write sentences with both digraphs in. We also learnt 2 new common words “are” and “they”. We see them lots in our reading books so felt quite confident with this.

Numeracy was a continuation of subtraction where we are working within 10. We included some word problems this week which can prove tricky. All the children have grasped the subtraction concept and we are encouraging use of concrete materials (blocks, counters etc), number lines (jumping back one at a time) and fingers (putting fingers down as we subtract), to ensure they have different ways to solve the problems. In money we did more coin recognition. We have really improved with this. Mrs Gordon added a till and money to the home corner and now we have a wee shop (created by the children).

In PE we are doing a block of football with Mrs Reid (our PE teacher) and with Mrs Gordon we are working on a block of movement skills including balance, coordination and ball skills. This is done through various games focusing on different themes/skills each week.

Our transport focus this week was on looking at timelines and understanding how transport has evolved over time. We enjoyed making our own timeline where we had to order types of transport. We also made shape trains, this was great fun, and we could easily identify the shapes we were using.

Bon weekend, Mrs Gordon and P1a

 

Bonjour! Hola! This week we have been celebrating Scotland Loves Languages Week. On Monday the Language Ambassadors taught us the game ‘Poissons pêcheurs’ which helped us to practise our numbers in French:

On Tuesday we ordered our lunches in French.

On Wednesday MS taught us how to sing happy birthday in Spanish to BP (feliz cumpleaños):

And on Thursday AK read a poem to us in Polish!

We also learned this song, Ma Famille:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ruhed15GvTw

In Phonics this week we have been learning the ai/ay sound. These spelling rules help us to remember when to use which one:

‘ai’ – shy i likes to go in the middle of words

‘ay’ – toughy y likes to go at the end of words

We found this quite tricky and will need lots of practise sounding out words to select the correct spelling. Here are some words to try at home:

rain  pay   gain  bait  say   tray

Ask us: Is it the ‘shy i’ or the ‘toughy y’?

We also learned 2 more common words – are, they

In Numeracy we are getting super confident at subtracting. Some of us are beginning to recognise that if we know one subtraction fact we can find another by rearranging the subtracting number and the answer, eg: 10 – 6 = 4 so 10- 4 = 6

Next week we will be looking at missing numbers in a subtraction sum and continuing to work on recognising and counting coins.

In IDL we learned what a timeline is and looked at different forms of transport through time. EM took his time to cut out very carefully to complete his transport timeline:

Thank you to all those who have already returned the slip with their chosen character for our class assembly. So far we have witches, fairies, an oompa lumpa and even a Frieda Khalo! If you are still to decide then please hand this in on Monday so that we can start writing our story, thank you 🙂

Have a lovely weekend!

Love P1B and Mrs Bell x

 

In Phonics this week we learned 2 new digraphs – ‘th’ and ‘wh’.  Our common words were ‘she’ and ‘be’.

We know that ‘th’ is the rude sound, we have to stick out our tongue a little bit to make this sound. We are getting good at telling the difference between ‘f’ and ‘th’.

The ‘wh’ sound is often used at the start of a question word (when, where, why, which). Some of us had a go at writing a question, very impressive!

In Numeracy we have been continuing our work on subtraction. We are getting more confident at selecting strategies to solve subtraction sums. We loved the subtraction bus game:

In Maths we started learning about money. We learned the value of each coin and explored what each coin looks and feels like.

A simple activity to do at home is to tip out your purse/wallet and let children sort coins. Also, here’s a good online resource to play:

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/money/coins-game

On Monday and Tuesday afternoon we started our new IDL topic – the history of transport. We are very excited about this and can’t wait to learn more. If we have any transport experts or parents/family members who work in this industry, we’d love to hear from you!

We met Mrs McAulay this week, she will be with us again next Tuesday afternoon and is enjoying getting to know all of us.

Here are some photos of our free play this week, we enjoyed exploring ice and snow on Tuesday:

Have a great weekend!

Love P1B and Mrs Bell x

Another very busy week in P1a. This week we learnt 2 new digraphs “th” and “wh” and 2 new common words “she” and “be”. We are finding it quite tricky getting the difference between these digraphs. We also keep saying “f” instead of “th” lots of bafs and pafs. Mrs Gordon taught us to make sure that our tongue sticks through our teeth when saying “th”. Some words to practise making and writing are thin, thick, bath and path. With “wh” Mrs Gordon was getting us to hold up our hand infront of our mouth. If the word blows on our hand it is a “wh” word if not it is a “w” word. Some examples to try are wind, when, wand and which.

In  numeracy we continued our subtraction journey. We played lots of board games with partners where we had to roll dice and subtract numbers from eachother. We are getting better at finding the answer to subtraction problems, but still sometimes get tricked when subtracting zero…

We started a focus on money this week which was very exciting. The first step was to start to recognise the coins from 1p to £2. We loved playing guess the coin where Mrs Gordon hid a coin and we had to ask her questions to guess which it was. She could only answer yes or no. We had some great questions like is it bronze?, does it have 7 sides? etc It would be great if we could practise as much as possible with real money at home.

H got a chance to practise money skills when she held a mini bake sale for the class. She was raising money for Bethany Christian Trust who help homeless people.

M lent us her fabulous storybook called “My Little Orsay”. It is a fabulous book about works of art in the Musee D’Orsay in Paris. Each part is about a different work of art. We let the children choose between 3 different pieces and they recreated their own versions. Mrs Gordon was blown away by how well we did. Have a look at our art gallery below, It is full of wonderful work!

In French this week we learnt all about “ma famille”, we learnt how to say ma mere, mon pere, ma soeur et mon frere. This was quite tricky so we will keep practising. We can now order our lunch in French too which is pretty impressive for P1. This week our S6 Language Ambassador from Linlithgow Academy came along to do a little Spanish lesson with a few of us. We learnt some colours in Spanish.

We also launched our new topic….transport. We were very excited about this and drew our favourite mode of transport. We can’t wait to find out all about different modes of transport through the ages.

Bon weekend, Mrs Gordon and P1a

T

We have had another very busy week in Primary 1.

In French we revised our numbers to 5, and now count up to 10. We also learnt “Jacques a dit” Simon Says in French. That was a fun game.

We got a surprise today to receive a letter all the way from France. It had “Bonne Annee” “Happy New Year” cards, from our French penpals. They live in Fontenay Le Fleury which is near Paris. They are P2 children who enjoy learning English. Listen to us singing a song to them in French.

In Numeracy this week we started our subtraction journey. We have learnt that there are lots of ways to say subtraction like minus and take away. We know that when we subtract the number gets smaller. Our favourite part was probably when we had to subtract marshmallows from 10…by eating them…we may need some more practise at home !

We also enjoyed playing some subtraction games like subtraction 4 in a row and subtraction smash with the play doh.

We really loved playing this smoothie game which helps us practise our subtraction within 10. When playing this select “subtraction facts for 10”.

https://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/smoothie/index.html

We also did a little bit more on time by learning how to tell o’clock times. Mrs Gordon couldn’t believe how quickly we picked this up, we didn’t even get tricked with 6 o’clock. Show us a clock or a watch and see if we can tell you an o’clock time.

In Literacy this week we learnt about digraphs. A digraph is when 2 letters join to make one sound. This week that sound was sh. We learnt about words like ship, shut, mash and fish. We read a story about Sharon the shark and when Mrs Gordon said sh we had to put our fingers to our lips…there were a lot of sh sounds in that story! Our new common words this week are “go” and “we”, look out for them in our reading books.

Happy weekend, Mrs Gordon and P1a

 

Welcome back and Happy New Year!

Thank you for all of the well wishes following the babybell news. The children have all been very sweet and have given me lots of baby advice.

In Literacy we have been practising sounding out words and writing a sentence. We listened to the story ‘Snow Bear’ and shared all the facts we know about polar bears. Then we used the internet to find out more. We each picked one fact to write as a sentence. We are working hard to remember finger spaces, capital letter at the beginning and a full stop at the end. Here is our super work:

In Numeracy we did some revision of addition to 10. We are very good at finding out the answer by counting how many altogether and using cubes. We need more practise at counting on in our heads. For example, 5+2, some of us are counting 1 2 3 4 5. We know that we can solve the sum quicker if we keep 5 in our head and count on. This is something we could work on verbally at home.

Here’s a video we sing along to that helps us to remember our number bonds to 10:

In Health and well-being we looked at what it means to be resilient. We talked about the things we can do (because we’ve practised them lots) and the things we can’t do…YET. We discussed that everyone has things that they can’t do…yet. Even grown-ups!

New homework and reading books will go home on Monday. As we have learned all our initial sounds, we are getting more confident at sounding out words when we read. Don’t forget to say the word after sounding it out to ensure understanding. Eg, I saw a b-i-g big c-a-t cat. We know that we don’t need to sound out tricky words because we just know them (I, saw, the, to, etc). Any questions about how best to support your child with reading please just ask 🙂

Some photos of our free play fun this week:

Admin/reminders for this term:

• PE is on Tuesday and Wednesdays – please make sure long hair is tied back
• Music with Ms Bain on Thursdays
• Show and Tell (optional) on Thursdays
• Special toy (optional) on Fridays

Date for the diary:

Friday 6th March at 10am – our class assembly

Have a lovely weekend!

Love P1B and Mrs Bell x

Well we have certainly had a lot of fun in P1a this week. Mrs Gordon made sure we worked hard before the fun as we had to do some reading, writing and numeracy assessments on our initial sounds from a-z, our common words and addition to 10.

We learnt our doubles this week in numeracy and we really like this song to help us remember them.

On Monday we had our Christmas Party with lots of fun games. Santa even came and brought us some lovely Christmas stories for the classroom.

Today we got a letter from Santa saying that his sleigh had broken and he needed our help to design a new one. We worked in teams with our P7 buddies to design a sleigh. We then presented our finished drawings and design ideas to the class. Mrs Gordon was so impressed at how confidently we spoke, and with our fantastic ideas…we had everything from hot chocolate machines, portals and magic dust to bouncy castles! Here are the designers.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all! Love from Mrs Gordon and P1a. x

P1a have been very busy over the last few weeks. We have now learnt all of our initial sounds from a-z. Mrs Gordon is very impressed with how well we have been able to write, read and say them all. We have also learnt a few more common words was, no, saw, want and no. We now have 12 common words on our word wall. In writing we wrote about what we would do with a stickman, that was a lot of fun.

In numeracy we continued to work on our addition to 10. We have enjoyed doing addition problems in our number talks. This week the main focus has been on number bonds to 10 (all the different ways you can make 10). We are really good at finding switchers eg 2+8=10 and 8+2=10. Here you can see us busily adding using blocks, number lines and our fingers.

Christmas fun has been had by us all. We loved the Christmas Fayre last week, and here we are enjoying our Christmas dinner! Christmas party on Monday!

We were superstars in our nativity “Lights, Camel, Action” this week. As a treat from your very generous donations we got to have a party today! We played party games like pass the parcel and Christmas corners, and we had lovely snacks. We also watched a Christmas movie with popcorn. What fun!

Have a wonderful weekend, and don’t forget we need our party clothes to change into on Monday afternoon for our Christmas party.

Mrs Gordon and P1a