Welcome to Primary One
Our teachers are called Mrs McManus and Mr Gallagher
Life in Primary One is very busy with lots of fun and interesting things to do. We learn to read, write and count.

Learning through Play:
In St Joseph’s we follow a play-based curriculum where we all learn in a fun and practical way. All our learning is topic based. We are involved in planning our learning. Every morning we have the opportunity to choose from a variety of both indoor and outdoor activities, such as role play, sand and water, construction or creative art. We have a system for choosing where we wish to play and have a structured task to carry out in each area. We have so much fun and it really helps us learn! After play we have a healthy break and go outside to the playground. We each have a special ‘big’ buddy from P7 who we meet throughout the year. They look after us in the playground and have great ideas for games to keep us active!

Literacy:
We take part in fun activities which improve our understanding of rhyme, syllables and alliteration, helping us get us get ready to learn sounds! Our teachers encourage us to develop a love for books through daily story time and big book activities. We enjoy discussing the illustrations in picture books and develop our concepts of print, for example, noticing the author’s name, knowing what the blurb is and understanding directionality of print. We learn to read and write through our Oxford Reading Tree scheme of books. We love to follow the adventures of Kipper, Biff, Chip and Floppy! We learn phonics using the Jolly Phonics programme and use our sounds to help us write simple sentences.

Numeracy:
We learn Maths skills through play and practical activities. The areas covered are Number, Measures, Data Handling and Shape and Space. Throughout our Maths activities we are encouraged to think and talk about what we are doing and get lots of opportunities to explain our work to others. We love to use lots of Maths resources to help us learn. We work hard to learn numbers from one to ten, counting forward and back, making sets for each number and how to write each number correctly. Later in the year we explore Number Stories and addition. We enjoy learning about 2D and 3D shapes by going on ‘shape hunts’ around our school and using play dough to make squares, circles, triangles and rectangles. Our junk art helps us learn about 3D shapes, we use lots of shapes to make amazing creations! Doing maths in our heads is great fun, we call this Mental Maths. Before every Maths lesson we ‘warm up’ by playing a fun, interactive game to help us develop our mental maths strategies. We really are whizzes at Maths!

I.C.T:
We have so many opportunities to develop our I.C.T skills throughout the school day and across all subject areas! We have an Interactive Whiteboard in our classroom . We love to use our new iPads where we get to explore lots of interesting apps.

World Around Us:
We love to learn about the world we live in! For each topic our wonderful role play corner changes. We are budding scientists, as we love to carry out investigations and make sure it is always a fair test. We predict and discover if things float or sink, where ice will melt the quickest, how big our hands are and experiment with different materials to keep our teddy bears dry. You will find some of our fantastic work displayed in our classroom for everyone to see.

The Arts:
We sing songs, play instruments, create our own songs and listen to music. We love music in Primary 1!
We use clay, junk materials, draw pictures, use paint and learn about different artists.
We are actors every day in our Role Play Area.

Religion:
We follow the new Grow in Love programme and enjoying singing.

P.E.
We are very fit and healthy in Primary One and love to play games!