On PE days the children are encouraged to wear comfy clothes such as legging, joggers etc. Please note a school jumper/ cardigan should continue to be worn on PE days. If there are any questions please let me know.

P1a use a class reward system of ‘a marble in the jar’ to celebrate demonstration of our school values and class charter. Once this is full the class will celebrate with a party and this will be communicated via the padlet.

It has been a joy to meet and get to know the children of P1a in the last few weeks and the team and I are very excited to work with the children this year! We hope to ensure they have a wonderful experience in P1 and the start of their time at Ratho Primary.

If there are ever any questions please catch me at the gate or via email to the school office.

Thank you!

Miss Tudor ☺️

Forest sessions will be on a Friday after break time, and so please can your child come to school on the Friday morning equipped for the weather that day. We advise wellies at all times and when the weather turns we advise puddle suits. The children will then return home in their forest clothing. We are likely to visit the forest in all weather, however there may be times where it is too severe and a session may be cancelled. Where possible we will notify you in advance, however as the weather can change quickly on the morning this may not always be possible.

and producing rhyming words.

We will begin to link sounds to corresponding letters and will develop our understanding of how to read, write and spell simple 2 and 3 letter words. We will explore this through blending and segmenting taught and known sounds.

We will also become familiar with some basic common /tricky words which the children will develop strategies to help them read, write and spell these types of words.

Our writing this term will focus around traditional stories such as "The gingerbread man, Goldilocks and the Three Bears etc". The children will become aware of how we write a story where they will consider the story sequence and the problem and solution in each story they read. The children over the term will be encouraged to write parts of the story independently using the sounds they have been taught. The children will also be given many opportunities to inventing or recreate their own stories based on fictional stories or their own experiences.

During listening and talking activities we will focus on turn taking, listening and following simple instructions and answering questions.

The children will also be learning to form their numbers correctly. They will be learning to form numbers 0-9 and will make use of rhyme to help them when forming these numbers. We will explore these through 'the number zoo' and have fun exploring a host of animal characters to ensure our numbers are formed correctly!

Our topic maths this term focuses around shape, pattern and the relationship between them. The children will enjoy investigating both 2d and 3d objects and shapes and will sort, describe and be creative with them.

During our topic of patterns and relationships the children will learn how to spot and explore patterns in their own and the wider environment. They will learn to copy, continue and create their own patterns.  

We will explore those who help us, and what it means to look after our wellbeing, through the SHANARRI wellbeing indicators.

This term in French we will be learning to count to 10. We will become familiar with naming the days of the week in French as well as becoming familiar with basic French greetings.

RME : On the run up to Christmas we will be looking at different religions around the world and how people celebrate Christmas and other relevant festivals.

Expressive Arts : This term the children will enjoy developing their creativity skills through both teacher led and child initiated play. The children will also enjoy developing their performance skills during our Christmas nativity.

When visiting our classroom come and see our ever-growing woodland with lots of wonderful ideas.

Please ensure the children come to school dressed and equipped for the weather while they learn outdoors. All children are welcome to keep a spare pair of wellies in class to help combat the weather when needed.

to use and share space safely.

The children will enjoy games which further develop both their fine and motor skills.

They will also be learning how to work as a team and become a team player. We will focus on turn taking, sharing and sharing positive and constructive feedback. Primarily using our 2 stars and a wish strategy to help support others further develop their skills.

This term we will focus on developing our class charter to ensure our class is a happy and safe place to play and learn, as well as making sure we are promoting feelings of confidence and respect for ourselves and others.

This term we will also work through our Health and Wellbeing indicators, ensure the children understand the importance of each and what strategies they can use to manage these indicators. Watch out for our play characters and the animals who will lead us through our very own wellbeing forest. Sid and Shannari are already firm favourites.

We will continue to link our learning to the rights of a child as detailed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC),

This term we will begin to look at our emotions and how they make us feel and act. We will explore this through friendship groups, stories and general discussion in the moment. We will use the stimuli of "The Story Monster " to engage the children daily to recognise, name and manage their emotions. The children will be encouraged daily to use the colour monster check in board to display how they are feeling and to allow adults to make comment and to check if any children are needing support.

In September, we have started our PE focus all about fitness. We started by exploring how our bodies feel before, during and after exercise. We had a go at activities to help raise our heart beat to recognise how exercise makes us feel (sweaty, tired, flushed, hot). We then enjoyed going outdoors for PE, to explore our fitness for long and short distance running. This was a big hit for both classes!

In the coming term, the children will have learning experiences linked to the human body as part of our science/STEM curriculum in response to their play interests that we have observed during those first few weeks.

The children have also been introduced to the tricky word ‘I’ and some were challenged to use it within a sentence! We had to think about our finger spaces and full stops to make sure our sentence was correct.

There was lots of independent segmenting and some independent writing in P1! Super job! 👏🏼

Please play the following game to reinforce number recognition and identification to 10.

All children should play the following matching game to help embed their knowledge of the first few sounds.

Please ensure the children have the appropriate clothing for tomorrow's weather. Thank you very much!

The children have been tasked with different games and activities to identify these shapes and become confident in naming them. When engaging in these activities, we are ensuring that the children can answer the question ‘how do you know’ or ‘tell me about the shape’ to see if they understand its properties.

Some of our activities included a pizza parlour, the use of loose parts to create the shape and a classroom shape hunt!

The children are very interested in rockets and transport, so our art table linked into our shape learning where they made a rocket craft using the 2D shapes.

Through listening to stories, we get to practice many of our skills of being a good listener. They also are developing their reading skills, by answering questions, making predictions and retelling the story.

It has been wonderful to see the children use their play to consolidate their learning from the week, including their letter formation and exploring a number of the day.

Next week the home corner will be transformed into a classroom for the children to continue their role playing! 👩🏻‍🏫

The children had 5 stations where they had to use their bodies in various ways, such as crawling, side stepping, star jumps, lunges and high knees.

We have also practiced reading and writing our tricky words ‘I’ and ‘the’ using our red bus, as our tricky words are written in red in the classroom. We have been singing “the word on the bus is, I I I…” to help us with our sight recognition and to make our learning extra fun.

Our genre focus is traditional stories and so we began with the Gingerbread Man. The children were tasked with drawing and describing the gingerbread man orally and challenged to write any words or beginning and middle sounds they may already know. As we move through drawing club, we hope to see the children write more of their tricky and cvc words independently. When scribing the sentence, we are encouraging the children to think about finger spaces and full stops and the role these have in our writing.

The fun of drawing club is that there are secret codes, numbers and words that we include on our pictures! E for example chose the secret word ‘bounce’ which when said, the little gingerbread man has the power to bounce off of the fox’s nose to safety! Already we are thinking creatively about the adventures ahead.

Within the classroom, the story of the Gingerbread man was enhanced through sequencing activities where the children had to place the events of the story into an order: thinking of the beginning, middle and end. Alongside this, the children had puppets of all the characters to retell the story to their peers.

We have continued to practice number formation, through our race track numbers in the maths area and by independently writing numbers at the teaching table.

We have focused on recognising numbers to 20 by naming these out of order. We are growing more confident with recognising 11, 12, 13 and 15 now and will continue this!

We have ensured that once we can recognise numbers to 20, that we can also order numbers forwards and backward within 10.

Through our number of the day, we are practicing many numeracy skills: formation, representations of the number, saying the number before and after, representing on a ten frame and learning to count on (counting on from the number of the day, rather than going from 1).

We then have explored what it means to count a group of objects carefully. We explored the book ‘Everybunny Count’ and watched as Miss Tudor demonstrated mistakes like counting the same rabbit twice and not saying the correct number word for the order being counted. We then used a group of counters and discussed how to count these carefully so we don’t count more than we need to. We talked about ticking them, circling them and moving them into a line or to the side to ensure the final number is the correct one.

I am really impressed with the children’s focus and commitment for their numeracy skills!

Please can all children from the green group come prepared for forest and the weather on Friday.

The children in the green group are: Michael, Emily, Sophie D, Florence and Charlie.

We then learnt about 3D shapes and how these are solid, rather than flat like 2D shapes. We listened to songs and played different games to learn the names of these shapes and discuss their properties, so that we can begin to identify them. We discussed things such as their corners, edges and faces.

The children used this knowledge to try and guess what the 3D shape was in the mystery box.

On Monday, the children will be sent home with their Christmas card design, if any families would like to order these.

As part of our morning routine, the children are asked to vote on which book they would like to read after break time. The children cast their vote onto a ten frame, which the children are increasingly more accurate in using and are more confident in saying which book has more votes. The class can immediately identify which frame represents the larger number and are starting to count on from the completed ten frame to find the final total.

Please can all drawings, whether copies have been ordered or not, be returned to school before the October holidays.

Thank you very much!

Our party will be on Friday 9th October with P1b. They will have the opportunity to enjoy some games, magic tricks, a movie and play. The children in both classes are welcome to bring a toy from home to play with.

The children will be provided with some Pombears to enjoy. Please let me know if you would prefer your child not to have Pombears.

Well done P1! They have made a wonderful start to the year and I am very proud of them all … it is a joy to be their teacher!

Thank you!

Here are some of our favourite books that we have read in P1 so far ... the children enjoyed these stories the most and The Book with No Pictures is by far our favourite! In this photo the class 'tricked' Mrs Martin who didn't know about all the silly words she would have to read and sing!

• Good morning,

• Good afternoon,

• Miss Tudor,

• Mrs Walker,

• Mrs Martin,

• Mrs J,

• Donna

• the alphabet (for their own name!)

• waiting,

• finished,

• fantastic,

• colours: green, blue, white, black and red.

Here we can see the children practicing the letter sign for one another's name (A and T).

After the October break we will continue to learn more signs as part of our daily routines.

We have been thinking about how to use the library space responsibly and enjoy sitting with a friend to enjoy a book.

We have practiced our fine motor skills by creating necklaces and bracelets with beads from Mrs J.

Many children are still enjoying role playing as the different teachers at Ratho! It is lovely to see them practice their learning through this role play, with children independently discussing numbers of the day, identifying shapes, sounds and letter formation.

Some children enjoyed building towers and the task of creating a tall and stable tower. There were many smiles when we realised we could create a tower taller than ourselves! The tower also helped us to think about our 3D shapes and which ones could be stacked.

Other children enjoyed exploring the craft resources and created their own crowns to wear.

As we have started to learn more initial sounds, some learners have enjoyed exploring various games for identifying the initial sound and matching it to the printed letter.

We enjoyed a dance session in the gym hall, followed by a magic show from our very own Mrs J! Back in class we enjoyed time to play together with our toys brought into school from home and watched some of Aladdin together on the carpet with our pom bears and milk.

Before we went home, both classes were then surprised with their own balloon animal or object made by Mrs J and Mrs Walker whilst we watched Aladdin with Miss Tudor.

In our numeracy, we have continued to build on our foundational number skills through number of the day where we explored teen numbers through formation, representation, naming before/after and counting on and back. We also continued our skills of counting quantities, where we had to count each object one at a time carefully to ensure all are accounted for and that our brain does not go faster than our finger/what we are saying and then come to the wrong number. The children were then tasked with counting on from the first group of elephants counted (e.g., if they had 8 elephants from the first group and then were given 5 more, can they count on from 8 rather than counting from 1 again).

Each week we have explored one story and have responded to a key question to show our understanding. These answers have been scribed / drawn on the insects for our wellbeing woodland within the classroom to create a beautiful display. Now that we have explored each insect, our wellbeing woodland is complete! In our final week before the holiday, we explored 'responsible' and 'included'.

At the teaching table, the children discussed their ideas again, drew an image to represent this and then thought of a sentence to describe how the Gingerbread Man survived. They were challenge to write any sounds or words that they knew. All children were working on writing the tricky word, 'the'.

We enjoyed many different activities, such as:

• letter formation games,

• crack the egg and find the initial sound and/or spell the cvc word,

• match the capital and lower case letter,

• identifying rhyming words.

We have continued to practice reading and spelling the tricky words, I and the.