In phonics, we have now learned all our initial sounds and are continuing to practise them every day. We have moved on to learning about digraphs – special friends where two letters make one sound! We have been practising reading sentences with the digraphs and sounds we have learned in class.

In writing, we have been creating our own Gingerbread Man storybooks. We read the story together as a class and watched a short film of The Gingerbread Man. We have been working on using sequencing words like first, then, and next, and on adding exclamation marks in our writing.

In numeracy, we have been learning to recognise numerals to 10, and counting forwards and backwards and practising our number bonds to 10, which has helped us when adding and subtracting.

We have also been learning about the days of the week, the months of the year, and the seasons. We read The Very Hungry Caterpillar and sequenced what he ate on each day of the week! We then created some seasonal artwork with paint, thinking about the colours we see in all four seasons.

In topic, we have been learning about the season of autumn. We discussed what happens in autumn with the weather — it gets colder, it begins to rain more, and the mornings can be icy. We know that in autumn the leaves turn brown, yellow, orange, and red, and begin to fall off the trees.

We have learned about different woodland animals that live in Scotland, like squirrels, hedgehogs, and badgers. We also learned about hibernation, and we now know that some animals have a long sleep during the winter because it is too cold and there is not enough food for them.

Primary 1A have had a fantastic start to learning their initial sounds this September. We have been focusing on recognising, saying, and writing these sounds with growing confidence, accuracy, and independence. We have also begun blending sounds together to read words and even full sentences!

In writing, we are using our knowledge of sounds to begin creating short sentences. We are building strong foundations by practising correct letter formation, leaving finger spaces between words, sounding out carefully, and using full stops to show when a sentence is complete. 

In Numeracy, we have been working on our numbers from 1 to 5. We began by identifying the correct number for each amount, practising number formation, and subitising numbers to 5 using dot patterns, Numicon, five frames, and dominoes – which we now love playing with on the carpet!

Next, we started practising our number bonds to 5 and using this knowledge to help us add two numbers within 5. We have also been learning to use mathematical language such as “more than,” “less than,” “bigger,” and “smaller” to deepen our understanding of the size and value of numbers.

This term in Topic, we have been learning all about the jungle. Primary 1 have absolutely loved this theme and all the activities we have explored together. We began by reading "Giraffes Can’t Dance", the story of Gerald the giraffe who learns to dance in his own way. We discussed the key themes of the story, such as never giving up, being kind and brave, staying true to ourselves, and understanding that it is okay to do things differently from others.

From there, we explored the different jungle animals in the book. We investigated and discovered many more jungle creatures – learning about where they live, what they eat, the sounds they make, and how they use camouflage. We also compared the weather in the jungle to the weather here in Scotland. One of our favourite activities was pretending we had woken up in the jungle and planning what we would wear and do if we were real jungle explorers!