Primary 1 – Page 25 – Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School

March 31, 2017

Learning through play

What a lot of fun we’ve had outdoors this week. Edward’s dad has made a new water resource for us and we’ve been learning about the flow of water as we play. We’ve also been finding out how we can recycle water and we’ve been using mathematical language such as full and empty. We’ve shown good problem-solving skills outdoors when using our outdoor scales and when making a great selection of meals in our muddy kitchen. Can you see Matthew is writing his recipe for his muddy soup.

This week many of our nursery children also visited P1. They had an opportunity to listen to a story read by the P1 teachers and then had a chance to play in a P1 classroom. Many of our children had made Easter hats which they wore during their visit.Thank you to the teachers who really welcomed all our children and to the boys and girls in P1 who were so kind and helpful.

March 31, 2017

Easter Fun

This week we were kindly invited up to P6 to play some of the games they had been making in Science. We loved answering the questions and trying to light up the bulb to see if we were right. The P6s were great at helping us and explaining the different tasks to us. We also had a visit from the Nursery children who came to see our classroom and join in with some play time. We loved having them up to play!

We continued to practise writing different kinds of instructions. We made our very own banana and strawberry milkshakes. We had to practise our chopping skills and worked with a partner to cut up the fruit and pour in the milk. We wrote down instructions for each step and focused on using different sentence starters such as; firstly, secondly and finally. We were also looking at ordering sets of instructions. Miss Mudd had written some instructions for making Easter chocolate nests but they were all in a muddle! We had to use our reading skills to read them out and put them back in the right order. To check we had them right, we followed our instructions to make our own Easter nests.

In Maths we have been applying our subtraction skills to different word problems. We went on an Easter treasure hunt and had to find the missing eggs with the correct answer on them. We also used the giant dominoes to try and find the difference between the two numbers.

In Phonics some of the class were looking at the ‘oo’ sound so we decided to make some sticky ‘gloop’. We added water to corn flour and mixed it together until it formed a goo. We loved playing with it and moulding it into different shapes.

In IDL we finished off out Transport topic. We discussed all of our learning throughout the term and went back to look at our original plan to see if we had covered everything. We then started to look ahead to the future and think about how Transport may continue to change over time. We became inventors and invented our own modes of transport for the future. We had some very interesting ideas!

Our mums and dads have worked SO hard at home making wonderful bonnets for us. They were all amazing and everyone looked fabulous. We loved our Easter parade and got a chance to show off our handy work. Miss Mudd was amazed at how creative and imaginative we had all been. ‘Hats off’ to everyone who helped.

Thank you so much for all of your support this term. It has been a wonderful term and we have achieved so much together in P1/2. We have so many highlights to talk about and have made some very special memories together.

Wishing you all a wonderful Easter holiday. Enjoy your special time together with your families.

P1/2 and Miss Mudd

March 25, 2017

Reading Buddies

We have a number of children across school who act as ‘reading buddies’ to each other. Here is Sean in P3 who loves to read each week to Bailey in P1B. I caught the boys sitting quietly reading as I passed by this week and it warmed my heart. Hoping that it warms your heart too!

Have a lovely weekend in the Spring sunshine everyone,

Miss Baillie xx

March 25, 2017

P1/2 Friendship Assembly

Thank you to Miss Mudd and P1/2 for their lovely assembly about friendship that we all had the pleasure to watch yesterday. It was great to see all children speaking confidently and taking part in a variety of ways. The importance of being a good friend was relayed to the audience through the story of The Rainbow Fish. Well done to all involved and a special mention to the P6 and P7 children who helped along with Miss Prince!

Miss Baillie xx

March 24, 2017

Our Week in P1B

We got a lovely surprise this week when a card arrived in the post from Lauren and Alex’s grandparents. They have been enjoying our blog and like to see what we get up to in P1B. The card even had boats on it – the mode of transport we have been learning about recently. Alex told us all about the scene on the card. Here is a little clip of us saying thank you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT8cv9LjFus

We did some peer assessment of our writing this week. We were looking at our friend’s work to check for capital letters, full stops, finger spaces, writing on the line and well formed letters. It was nice reading our written work to our friends and we were very honest in our assessment! We used the ‘tickled pink’ and ‘green for growth’ method by colouring pink the areas they had achieved and colouring green the things they should still work on.

A lot of what we’ve been doing this week is top secret – so there are no photos to show of us making surprises for Mother’s Day. We have all worked very hard to draw, write and create a couple of nice things for our mum’s and we hope they all have a lovely day on Sunday.

Continuing our transport topic we furthered our investigation into boats by carrying out a ‘Does it float of does it sink?’ investigation. We each chose an object from around the classroom, made a prediction as to whether it would float or sink and gave the reason why we thought this. We then carried out our investigation and compared the actual results to our predictions – most of them were accurate, the few that weren’t gave good opportunity for further discussion. We will look more at the reasons why objects float or sink next week, including making our own boats.

We were awarded class of the week again this week 🙂 Miss Baillie was really pleased to see all the play that has been happening in the classroom and she thinks that we play very well together. Play is important to us as it fosters curiosity, imagination and experimentation and helps us with concentration. It also gives us opportunities to speak and listen, often processing and putting into practice what we have been learning. We also learn to share resources, explain actions, negotiate plans and take turns.

We were working on balance, control and coordination in PE this week. Lots of activities whilst balancing beanbags on our heads – throwing and catching were quite tricky! We also had a few games of ‘Cups and Saucers’ which we love.

As promised last week, here are a couple of the finished spring pictures:

They turned out really well and the sheep are full of character.

Finally, two children brought in achievements this week. Clara brought in her swimming certificate and Haley won the Enjoy-a-Ball trophy – well done girls!

We hope you have a good weekend and the sun continues to shine.

From P1B and Mrs Kennedy

March 24, 2017

Our week in P1A…

This week, in P1A, we have been learning two new sounds, ‘oa’ and ‘ow’. We have been highlighting ‘oa’ words in stories, using our sounds to write ‘oa’ words, matching ‘oa’ words to pictures and practising how to write the ‘oa’ sound. When learning the ‘ow’ sound, we played bingo (Miss Harrison also enjoyed this activity), drew pictures containing the ‘ow’ sound and made sentences with ‘oa’ and ‘ow’ words.

We have been continuing to learn subtraction facts to 10. This week, we learned to take away from 3, 4 and 5 and we even looked at tricky subtraction word problems. We are working very hard with our subtraction facts. This week, we finished learning about analogue and digital o’clock times. We were able to write o’clock times on digital displays.

This week, we started our football block in gym. We were learning to dribble with the football and enjoyed playing Follow the Leader and working in groups to dribble round the cones.

We made fantastic Spring pictures – our art lesson was very messy! We put our hands in yellow and green paint to make our background and then dipped our fingers in blue and orange paint to make the rabbits. Once the paint was dry, we used a pen to add the eyes, nose & whiskers. Some of us need to finish our pictures next week.

Miss Harrison didn’t recognise some of us today! We came to school with crazy hair, red noses, hairbands and dressed down to raise money for Red Nose Day. After break, we went to the bake sale and bought some delicious cakes! It was strange eating a cake in class! Well done to everyone for their fundraising efforts.

We hope that everyone has a lovely weekend and a happy Mother’s Day on Sunday,

P1A and Miss Harrison 🙂

March 24, 2017

In Primary 1/2 we don’t swim alone, we swim together

This week has been an exciting week for us as we had our class assembly! We worked SO hard on our acting, costumes, props and singing. Miss Mudd was so proud of us and was blown away by our enthusiasm and commitment. We hope everyone enjoyed it as much as we did. We have loved learning about the Rainbow fish and hope it helps remind everyone to be kind and appreciate their friends. We even used sticks of celery to print scales on our own rainbow fish. Look at all of the wonderful colours.

In Literacy this week we were learning the oa/ow digraph. We have been building and writing words with this sound and trying to apply spelling rules to remember which one to use. We have done lots of sentence writing to practise using our digraphs. We give each other feedback and help each other improve each time. We also became digraph detectives and read short stories and poems to try and spot our digraphs. Some of us have continued to work on split digraphs and have been reading and writing with these tricky sounds.

We continued learning about how to write instructions. Paddington Bear left us a note to say he was feeling very hungry and would love a marmalade sandwich. We worked together to make a sandwich and had to think about the different steps we were doing. We then wrote a set of instructions to tell him how to do it. We used some fabulous sentence starters and as a treat got to try our sandwich at the end.

In Primary 1/2 we are very grateful for all of our wonderful mums who do so much for us. We made them some beautiful finger print cards and wrote about why we love our mums.

In IDL we were learning about the history of flight and watched a very funny video showing the first attempts at flying. We compared the first plane flown by the Wright brothers to aeroplanes we travel on today. They are very different! We then looked at the first hot air balloon flight in Paris and created our own hot air balloons by using collage materials.

Mrs Malcolm had asked us to do some Spring art work for her gallery. We experimented with mixing colours and talked about the colours we would see at Spring time. We painted some beautiful flowers that can be put together like a jigsaw to create giant pictures.

In Numeracy we have been sharing subtraction strategies. We have used fingers, number lines, tens frames and Numicon to look at all of the different ways we can tackle a tricky sum. We have been partitioning numbers to help speed up our mental calculations. It is tricky stuff but we have shown great perseverance. Miss Mudd has also been setting us daily Maths problems to try. We work in pairs to talk through our thinking then share our ideas with the class.

Wishing everyone a lovely weekend and a happy Mothers Day.

Primary 1/2 and Miss Mudd

March 17, 2017March 17, 2017

P1B – Dogs don’t do ballet, or do they?

Hello from P1B, it has been lovely to see all the parents at parents night this week and talk about all the progress the children are making.

Last week we did a mini topic on the book Dogs Don’t Do Ballet.

Image result for dogs don't do ballet

This is a funny story about Biff the dog who fulfills his dreams of becoming a ballet dancer despite continually being told Dogs don’t do Ballet. Using the Thinking Reader approach we looked at many different aspects of the book. We drew pictures and wrote about Biff’s feelings when he was sad and happy, made cards and wrote him messages to cheer him up, sequenced the story, designed front covers for our own books, looked at jobs that real dogs do and looked closely at the vocabulary – identifying and discussing interesting and unusual words. We made a huge list – 48 words!

Hayley and Lauren read their messages to Biff.

Tess the teddy wrote us another letter, asking us to learn about a different form of transport – boats this time! She left us a book called Peter the Cruise Ship. We worked in groups to draw and write about the different kinds of boats we know. We shared our knowledge of ferries, kayaks, canoes, submarines, sailing boats and many more. We have also been learning about the history of boats – from hollowed out tree trunks to what the have today. We will continue with our boat theme next week.

Last week we learned the sounds ‘igh’ and ‘-y’. They are tricky sounds to hear and use in words but we worked hard and practised in lots of different ways.

This week there were no new sounds but we took the time to use the digraphs we’ve been learning recently and to consolidate our tricky words.

We have also been enjoying the (slightly) better weather and thinking about Spring. We had fun playing outside and have been trying some new art techniques as we make some pictures to go on display in the school corridor. I’ll upload photos of the finished pictures when they’re dry and mounted!

We have a school achievement wall in the corridor outside Miss Baillie and Mrs Malcolm’s offices. We display achievements from within and outside school here. Please encourage your child to let us know of any achievements outside of school. Although it can be, it doesn’t have to be an accolade from an organised club – it could be learning to ride their bike or baking a cake, anything they are really proud of. Last week Imogen and Daisy took part in a gymnastics display and brought their medals in to show us and Ruaridh and Cohen both received trophies from their enjoy-a-ball classes.

Well done guys!

Happy weekend, from P1B and Mrs Kennedy

March 17, 2017

What time is it, P1A?

Over the last two weeks, we have been learning to read analogue and digital o’clock times. We have been linking our daily routines to o’clock times and we know that we go for lunch at 12 o’clock!

We have also started to look at subtraction to 10 and have been learning to use different strategies to subtract. Our activities Subtraction Bowling and Subtraction Smash have been very popular! We were excited to use our new subtraction workbooks and we have been working very hard to subtract from numbers to 10.

Last week, we learned two new sounds, ‘igh’ and ‘-y’. We looked at how to form these sounds and we were able to write different words featuring these sounds on our whiteboards. Using our sounds to read, we were able to work out which words were nonsense words and which words were real words. We also used magnifying glasses to hunt for ‘igh’ and ‘-y’ words and used ‘igh’ light bulbs and initial sound light bulbs to make words.

This week we have been revising all of our common words. Did you know that we have learned 54 common words so far?! We have been looking for common words in our reading books, have been matching common words, making common words on our magnetic boards, playing common word games in the playground and using our common words to write sentences. No wonder we are tired!

Last week, Mr Fluff went on another adventure! This time he had been on a yacht so we decided to help him learn about water transport. We worked in groups to draw and write all of the types of transport that we knew that went on water and then we looked at a powerpoint on the smartboard to compare our results. We learned about the history of boats and looked at why we use different types of boats today.

Daniel made a fantastic kite at home and brought it in to class to show us!

We have been continuing to develop our movement skills such as throwing, catching, balancing and jumping and we have also enjoyed gym with our PE teacher, Mrs Reid.

Finally, we have a few achievements to share with our readers. Firstly, we won the peg challenge again today! Well done to Carla, Eva and Sophia who won medals at the Linlithgow Gymnastics Show. The girls said that they had to perform a gymnastics routine and practise lots! Well done to Kerr for winning a medal at Enjoy-a-Ball and for achieving his Grade 6 white/purple belt at Tae Kwon Do.

Thank you very much for reading our blog post. We hope that you have a lovely weekend.

P1A and Miss Harrison 🙂

March 14, 2017March 14, 2017

Fizzy Fingers!

We are very proud to show you pictures of our Fizzy Fingers group who work with Mrs Manlove once a week to develop their fine motor skills. What superstars they are! Thank you so much to Mrs Manlove for the effort and care that she puts into facilitating and supporting this group. What happy children they are!

Miss Baillie x