Walking in the woods 🌳🍂, dodgeball and lots more!

What a fun and busy week we’ve had in P1! It was great to meet so many of you at the parent appointments this week. I enjoyed being able to share their achievements and photos of them in action in the classroom. Thank you for coming along.

In maths, we’ve been continuing our work on understanding the concept of “Are there enough?” and started to develop our own independent recording strategies to share our thinking. This week we asked, “Are there enough tulips for the butterflies?” 🦋 It was exciting to see the how the children went about recording their ideas. Many children used a matching strategy to link the butterflies to a tulip, some counted each category and some of the children began to use cubes to represent the different quantities. We’ve been starting to share our strategies with the class so others can understand the approach we took and discuss it. It’s wonderful to see their confidence when describing their strategies! We will continue to work on this concept.

As part of our comparison work, we’ve also been exploring sorting and grouping. The children have been doing this naturally as part of their play and when organising themselves into groups by attributes of clothing such as, “who is wearing white socks?”🧦 “Who is wearing blue socks?” “Who is wearing a cardigan? Who is wearing a jumper?” and other examples. We’ve then explored this further in our maths sessions and sorted objects by thinking about different attributes like size, shape and colour. We had an interesting discussion with some groups about whether if you only had one of a particular item could this still be a group. We will continue to explore this concept next week.

In literacy this week, we’ve been reviewing the sounds that we’ve learnt so far: l, s, a, t, p, i, and n. As part of these we’ve been taking turns to be the teacher and checking our sounds with our friends. We’ve also been learning how to blend. This is when we say the sounds we can see in a word e.g. sat is /s/ /a/ /t/ and then blend them together to be able to read a word – sat. The children have made a great start on this. We’ve shared a video here so you can see how this is done so you can support at home if you wish.

In writing, we’ve been continuing to explore mark making to communicate our ideas and what we observe as well as using the describing bubble to help us develop our describing vocabulary. This week we had a focus on texture with the writing prompt, “I am walking through the woods and I see…” We went for a walk through our wonderful outdoor area and got to explore things like the texture of the trees by doing bark rubbings. The children loved seeing the textures replicated onto their paper and enjoyed coming up with ways to describe how the bark looked and felt. The children put more of their drawing focus on the trees this week. I loved seeing the different representations of size, shape and texture of the trees in their drawings. Just beautiful work. 🤩

We were very lucky to have a P1 mum volunteer to come in to teach both classes how to make play dough. This week they helped three groups to make squishy and colourful dough for us to play with in the coming weeks. The children loved it! Thank you! ☺️

In P.E. we’ve been continuing to explore a range of activities including developing our balance and strength as well as learning the basic shapes of gymnastics (e.g. straight and tucked) that will provide the foundations for us to explore a variety of different ways of moving in the longer term.

On Friday we also took part in the inter-house dodgeball competition which was led by our active schools coordinator and our P7 sports leaders and house/vice captains. The children really took to the game and enjoyed rushing to get a ball, then trying to catch out others on the opposing team. I was really struck by their confidence and enjoyed seeing their determined and happy faces! 😁

On Friday, we finished off our busy week with a great afternoon with our P7 buddies. We focused on number and counting skills! The children from both P1 classes are split and spend time in either the P1 or P7 classrooms. The children from all classes really look forward to seeing their buddies!

In play, we had a lovely time when some of the children began a game of musical chairs. The children wanted to modify the rules so that everyone got a seat each time! ☺️ The children kindly took turns of playing the music and played so happily together! Here are some photos of some of the children’s independent play from the week.