A Very Busy and Festive Time in Primary 1 🎄
Primary 1 pupils have had a wonderfully busy and exciting run-up to Christmas, filled with festive learning, creativity and lots of smiles. The children have thoroughly enjoyed taking part in a wide range of activities that supported learning across the curriculum while embracing the magic of the season.
In the classroom, pupils loved writing letters to Santa, carefully thinking about what they wanted to say and practising their early writing skills. They also enjoyed decorating baubles using paint and glitter, which were proudly hung on our class Christmas tree, helping to create a bright and cheerful classroom environment.
As part of our World Around Us topic, the children took part in a colour-mixing experiment using Skittles and water. This was a fantastic hands-on activity that encouraged curiosity and observation as pupils watched the colours spread and mix. We also carried out a Gummy Bear graphing activity, where each child chose their favourite colour of Gummy Bear and helped to create a class graph. To everyone’s delight, the children even got to taste some leftover sweeties from the experiments!
ICT has also played an important role this term. Pupils explored technology by decorating a virtual Christmas tree and by developing their literacy skills through interactive games on the Nessy programme. Using the Just2Easy app on iPads, children designed their own Christmas jumpers and created Nativity scenes, showing creativity while developing their digital skills.
A highlight for many pupils was spending time with their P7 buddies. Together, they listened to a virtual Christmas story and then worked collaboratively to design a picture of Santa from the story. This was a lovely opportunity for our youngest and oldest pupils to build relationships and work together.
In Numeracy, pupils used Numicon to support their learning in a fun and festive way. They carefully placed Numicon pieces to create pictures such as Santa’s sleigh, decorated baubles and Rudolph’s antlers. The children also completed number and letter activities using Christmas trees. Pupils looked at ten frames, worked out the number shown, and then found and coloured the matching bauble on the correct tree.
There were also five Velcro Christmas trees , numbered 1–5, and the children worked together to find matching representations of each number, including numerals, dominoes, ten frames, fingers, spots and number words.
During one of our Literacy lessons, pupils decorated a Christmas tree by matching baubles with letters on them to the corresponding baubles on the tree.
The children also shared a special Christmas meal, choosing either lunch or dinner, while proudly wearing their Christmas jumpers and listening to cheerful festive pop songs, which created a joyful atmosphere.
During Learning Through Play, pupils took part in a creative activity where they designed and built their own Christmas villages using Magnatiles, Magformers, magnetic counters, jingle bells, glittery pipe cleaners and paper clips. The children created a variety of imaginative houses, shops, hotels and Christmas trees. Through this hands-on experience, pupils not only developed their creativity and teamwork skills but also explored how magnets work in a fun and engaging way.
The children also thoroughly enjoyed creating their Christmas art pieces. In addition to their painted baubles, they made festive wreaths, Christmas cards and designed their own strings of fairy lights using cork printing. Our class elf even worked some Christmas magic by turning all of the Primary 1 pupils into elves, with their photographs proudly displayed on our classroom window for everyone to see!
Throughout December, pupils had the opportunity to ‘work’ in our very own Christmas post office. Using writing prompts, they wrote cards and letters which were posted to Santa and to loved ones using our class post box. The children also designed their own wrapping paper and wrapped boxes, adding bows before placing them under our class Christmas tree. One night, Santa visited our classroom and took the boxes away to use in his workshop. He kindly left us a letter thanking the children for their hard work, which caused great excitement the next morning.
P1 pupils thoroughly enjoyed rehearsing for the school play, both during PE lessons and at the local parish centre. The excitement and enthusiasm of our youngest learners shone through at every practice. Dressed as angels and stars, they truly did us proud with their beautiful rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, delighting everyone who watched them.
At the end of each day, the children eagerly waited to see who would receive the sweet treat from our Frosty the Snowman advent calendar — a lovely way to end each festive school day.
The term drew to a festive close with a very special visit from Santa himself. He took time to chat with the pupils, sharing smiles and laughter as he made his way around. To the children’s delight, Santa presented each one with a selection box, warmly reassuring them that they had all earned a place on his Nice List.
We hope you enjoy looking through our photographs and watching our video, where the children even recorded special Christmas messages using the ChatterPix app.
We would like to wish everyone in our school and wider community a very happy Christmas and a wonderful New Year.
