Ahoy there mateys!

What a busy week we’ve had in P1R, we have lots to tell you about.

The focus in phonics this week was our new sounds ‘l’ and ‘r’. We can’t believe how many sounds we have learned so far, our ‘big mouth’ on the wall is running out of space! In carousels we used letter join to practise our letter formation, we all agreed that handwriting is a skill for life and something we should keep practising at school and home. Mrs Scott took time today to organise a learning families event to show families how to use it at home. We also played phonics games on the education city website which is one of our favourite sites and used the letter cubes for blending activities.

Subtraction continued to be the focus in numeracy and we are quickly learning the different mathematical language associated with this, our pirate subtraction song, ‘when you subtract with a pirate’ has helped with this. Carousels were great fun as most of the activities were practical play based activities – ten pin bowling(using plastic cups and a sponge ball), takeaway tower (all you need is 10 pieces of Lego in a tower and a dice), subtraction screening( counters and coloured paper) and interactive smart board games (rabbit take away).

In PE we are really enjoying our gymnastics block where we are exploring how we use our bodies and the space around us. We used a ‘space soundtrack’ in our lessons, eg. Space shapes/jumps, astronauts game, mediation to music. Using the mats and equipment is allowing us to practise turn taking, sharing and teamwork.

IDL has been ‘awesome’ as we continue to learn about the life of pirates who lived over 300 years ago. Ask us what we have learned about Anne Bonny and Blackbeard. We linked our learning using what we had learned to make WANTED posters for our displays, they look great! We also worked in small teams to make and build a pirate ship for our display, we are really proud of our efforts and teamwork. To make us feel like pirates we all made pirate hats, even Mrs Roy, or Ruby Roy as she likes to be known in pirate land! Our motto for structured play this term is ‘Work like a captain, play like a pirate’. We have set up different areas in our classroom: treasure chest maths area, pirate writing table, pirate role play, pirate story corner, pirate puppets and the pirate ship station. It’s been lovely to see each other’s IDL homework tasks, we have been taking photos for our pirates display.

We celebrated World Religion Day on Wednesday and enjoyed learning about Christianity and Islam. We used a smartboard activity to help us learn about the different signs and symbols associated with the religions, we even tweeted about our learning.

The week ended with Committees:

Paul M- we learned about UNICEF’s day for loose change. Every class has to collect loose change in their wee box.

Abigail-we made posters about the dangers of litter.

Ephraim-we learned about Fairtrade food.

Lucy- we thought about how we could show love to others.

James-we learned about Chinese New Year.

Phew, that’s all for this week, remember to try out some of the activities at home if you have a spare minute or two!