P2a are sad that we have now reached the end of this term. ….( who said hurray??)… and that 3 people in our class are moving on to other schools after the holidays.  Good luck in your new schools!

So a big wave good bye from us for now….

                   

but wait………we’ll be back soon for next term!

Have a nice Easter Holiday everyone!  Bye for now from P2a!

 P.S.  A HUGE goodbye from the classteacher.  Keep working hard P2a….I’ll miss you all very much xxx

 

Hello again everyone from P2a!

At last it was time for our Spring Assembly on Friday and after a week of busy rehearsals we were ready to sing, dance and put on our puppet show for the P1s, P2s and P3s.

  

Here are some of our puppets, who took part in our play.

                                

The puppets had the easy parts in our play……it was up to the rest of us to read the script, sing the songs and dance!  Here we are during our rehearsals.

  

Everyone had an important part to play and we were all very pleased on Friday when it all went so well.  Even our magic trick worked, when Rylan used his magic wand to make a seed change into a flower in a pot!  It’s P2a’s secret how the magic worked…….

                                    

This week started off just after St Patrick’s day when we arrived in the class on Monday morning to find that a leprechaun had visited our classroom!  He must have been so distracted by the toadstool houses we made, that he dropped quite a lot of his gold coins…..which of course, turned to chocolate when they fell to the ground.  So we were very pleased to find rather a lot of coins waiting beside our toadstools.

  

Here we are munching our ‘gold’ coins.  It was also Kiara’s birthday this week so we celebrated this by singing Happy Birthday to her.  I wonder how old she is…..perhaps the badge is a clue!

                    

In Maths we worked together to collate data about how we travel to school.  Then we had fun making a big pictogram to display on the wall.  If we have time next week, we might try making another graph.

                                    

We also tried to solve some Maths Problems, which were very tricky, and continued working through  revision of odd and even numbers, and times tables.  

On Wednesday we started making colourful pictures of Easter Baskets.  We hope to finish this next week and also find time to make some Easter cards! 

                                

The end of term is fast approaching and we’re sad to learn that 2 of our classmates are leaving to go to different schools.  We wish them good luck and hope they’ll keep in touch with the class on the blog.

Next week the Art Exhibition, which was cancelled due to bad weather, should go ahead on Monday.  We are looking forward to seeing our pictures in the display.  It’ll make us feel famous!

More from us next week…Bye for now from P2a!

  

It started off in the morning when we all arrived with our red noses. 

    

   

   

            

While we were at Assembly a fairy must have visited our classroom because when we came back there were lots of balloons and party nibbles for us! 

    

In no time at all we were all in party mood and dancing to music. 

   

   

   

It was a super end to a very busy week.  We've been working very hard to get our Easter Play just right for next Friday's assembly.  We've learned songs and a dance but it's tricky putting it all together.  More practice this week so it's okay on the day! 

Also this week we have our Art Exhibition to look forward to.  It's on Tuesday and all of the artwork we did a few weeks ago will now be put into frames and entered into the exhibition for the school and parents to see.  We can't wait to see everybody's artwork! 

During the week we learned that it's St Patrick's Day on Sunday so we talked about the things we know about Ireland.  We learned that a lot of our great-grandparents may have come from Ireland over a 100 years ago and settled in Dundee.  Some of us knew about a wee magical person known as a leprechaun, who also comes from Ireland.  We listened to a poem about a Leprechaun who visits on the Eve of St Patrick's day.  He carries lots of gold with him, (which he hides at the end of a rainbow) and if he drops any on the ground apparently it turns to chocolate!  Wow!  So in art this week we decided to set a little trap for a leprechaun.  We made some fantastic leprechaun houses so that just if....a leprechaun visits our school at the weekend....and if he comes to peek at the little houses we made...well, maybe he might just drop some of his gold....and who knows what we might find in our classroom on Monday!   Here are some of the leprechaun traps we made. 

                                            

Hey...who's that sleeping in the middle???  We'll find out on Monday! 

Bye for now! 

  

Hello from P2a!  Just when we thought it was the beginning of Spring…we’ve got snow again!  Oh no……more inside playtimes!

This week we did some rehearsing for our Play about Spring, Chickens and other animals.  which we hope to present to P1-3 at assembly on 22 March. 

                               

We have some lines to learn, 2 songs and a dance…so more practise next week.

Also this week we have some photos of our prizewinners and children who have received certificates or awards recently.   Well done everyone!

   

  

In Maths this week we learned more about division and sharing objects between groups.  It’s very tricky so we’ll work on this again next week.  We’ll also continue learning our numbers to 100 because sometimes it’s hard to remember the order of the numbers.  It’s almost time for the Easter Holidays so we’ll be doing revision of the work we’ve covered this term any way.

We wrote another story this week – this time it was about an alien knocking on a little girl’s window one night.  The alien and the girl flew off in a spaceship to visit Mars, where the girl met and played with all the other aliens.  When she came back in the morning her Mum didn’t believe her.  We all managed to make up a name for our main character and had fun thinking up an adventure for the girl to have with the aliens.  Here are some of our stories.

  

  

We finished our art work and this has now been taken away to be put into frames in readiness for our Art Exhibition.  We are really looking forward to seeing our work on display soon.  We learned how glass is made with Curious Cat and talked about the beautiful stained glass windows found in buildings like churches.  In Art we decided to make our own stained glass window because we liked the idea of letting the sun shine like rainbows into our classroom. We used different coloured cellophane paper  and here’s our finished window.

                               

In Literacy we  went on another journey to China and found out more from a letter from a Chinese penfriend.  We also did a bit more writing in our Read, Write Inc workbooks using our reading books.  (**Remember everyone to bring your reading books every day because we are using them all the time.**) 

We also learned how to spell words with a silent w.  We found this very tricky so we’ll practise silent letters  again next week.

By Friday we were pleased when we had Golden Time to finish off the week.  Some of us dressed up as part of World Book day, others played with toys or the computer.  We all like playing with our friends.

  

  

                

We are excited to see that our Marble Jar is almost full, which means that perhaps we’ll get a Marble Treat next week …….maybe we can have a Red Nose/Pyjama type of party?  We’ll talk about some ideas on Monday.

Bye for now from P2a!

 

 

 

 

Hello again from P2a!

This week we were very pleased to receive our Silver Certificates for Good Behaviour.  Now we’ll have to work very hard to aim for our Gold Certificates next term!

We also found out that some of us were winners in the Scottish Focus Competition.  Well done everyone for taking part – you were all excellent!  Pictures of winners next week.

This week we had fun skipping in the gym hall.  We must be getting very fit!  We also practised marching like soldiers as part of our Let’s Move programme about the Brave Tin Soldier.  We found it quite tricky to march in time with the music…we’ll practise this again. 

In Maths we were very busy learning how to divide and count up to 100.   We use cubes to help us to work out sharing sums and 100 squares to help us remember the order of  numbers.  We also found out some number patterns using the 100 squares that help us to add on in 2s,3s and 10s.   

           

We like working with learning partners and this week we had a bit of a change with our learning partners because one of the largest groups was split into 3 smaller groups.  This gives us the opportunity to work with different learning partners.

In Literacy we read our new reading books.  They’re getting more and more difficult but we are all working very hard to improve our reading skills and it’s fun to read lots of different stories.  For spelling we learned about words with a silent b and practised alphabetical order.  We wrote a story about a cat stuck up a tree and found lots of words with – or in a wordsearch. 

As it’s beginning to look a lot like Spring, we also had some fun acting out a Spring play in Drama.  We included some Spring songs and finished it off with a funny dance.  We’ll practise more next week and let you know how we’re getting on!

This week we learned about a visit to an orchard with William Whiskerson.  We saw the different kinds of fruit grown on a farm in Somerset – lots of apples, plums and berries.  We especially liked the strawberries and cream William ate at the end of the programme and wished we could join him.

Rylan brought in lots of Holiday Brochures for us to use as part of our Journeys topic so we had fun looking through them in our groups.  We had to choose a place we would like to visit and explain the reasons for our choice to the rest of the class.  We particularly liked places like Disneyland and Lapland but it was very difficult to choose because every place looked super! 

           

Thanks to Rylan for letting us use his brochures!

One of the stories we read this week was The Elves and the Shoemaker.  Afterwards we coloured in pictures of elves and then designed our own shoes for the elves.  Here we are busy at work.

  

  

  

   

             

Here is some of our colourful artwork.  Super, isn’t it!

  

More from us next week….Bye for now from P2a!

 

Hello again from P2a!

                         

This week was an exciting one because we were very busy all week practising for our Scottish Focus competition on Friday.  Three of us – Kiara, Matthew and Tess performed a Scottish Poem called – I dinna like the midge, and Frankie, Cameron and Rylan sang a Medley of Scottish Songs.

  

                          

Everyone was brilliant but we have to wait until Monday before we find out the winners….oh no that’s ages!  More next week…

(Did you notice in the first picture above that some of the Hamish McHaggis characters we made were used as part of the Scottish Display on stage?)

As well as learning Scottish songs and poems we were also busy finishing off our snakes as part of the Chinese New Year because we learned that this is the Year of the Snake in China.  Here we are creating our snakes.  It was quite easy making patterns and colouring in our snakes…the tricky part was cutting around and around to make the snake shape. 

   

  

  

    

We have some already on display in the class…more to be put up on the wall next week.

                                       

We also finished our snails and whales as part of our display for ‘The Snail and the Whale’ book we read recently by Julia Donaldson.  We’re hoping to find a space in our classroom for this…but our teacher thinks we may have to have an extension made for all our art work!!

   

In Drama we had fun pretending we were toy soldiers when we acted out the story of ‘The Brave Tin Soldier’ by Hans Christian Anderson.  Our version of the story had a happy ending but we learned that the original story had a sad ending.  We found it quite tricky trying to march in time like soldiers but  we’ll practise this again next week.  Also in the gymhall we had fun playing tig games and practising bouncing and catching balls. 

     

In Maths we learned how to tell the time and now know how to read times like – o’clock, half past, quarter past and quarter to.  We also practised more number sequences for numbers 1 to 100 and revised the 2 times table. 

In Literacy we practised our reading with our new reading books, but we also had the chance to read a short novel by Dick King-Smith about a sausage dog called Dumpling, who was fed up being short and wanted to be long like the other dachshunds.  It was a really funny story and we all enjoyed reading it.  Maybe next week we’ll read another story like this.  We wrote our own story about a boy winning first prize in a competition.  It was a guitar and it gave Mum a headache when the boy in the story played it all day long.

We used the whiteboard to watch William Whiskerson visit the Scilly Isles and a dairy farm.  We found out about the journey milk makes from the cows on the farm to the supermarket, then we had to put pictures of the journey into the correct order and colour them in. 

      

We also watched our science programme Curious Cat and found out about the how bricks are made…from clay to the bricks we use to build houses and schools.  It was very interesting.

      

It was very nice on Monday to welcome a new boy to our class.  We hope he will like being part of Ancrum Road School as much as we do. 

More from us all next week…Bye for now from P2a!

 

 

Hello again from P2a!

It was a short week last week so we didn’t have a chance to write up our blog before it was time for the long weekend!

We came back to school on Pancake Tuesday…..but we remembered that on Sunday it was also the Chinese New Year…so many things to celebrate and so little time to squeeze it all in!

Anyway on Tuesday we did lots of Pancake things …like read a story about Mr Wolf and his Pancakes.

                      

We liked this story because it had lots of characters we already knew such as the 3 pigs and Little Red Riding Hood but it came as a bit of a surprise at the end when Mr Wolf gobbled them all up for being so nasty to him!  Wow!  We didn’t expect that!  Hearing about Mr Wolf baking the pancakes put us in the mood for some pancakes of our own…so later on we had some pancakes with a choice of either chocolate or strawberry sauce on top.  Mmm, they were lovely!  (Oh, and we had some healthy fruit as well!)

In the gymhall we acted out the last part of our Dinosaur story, which meant we had to pretend we were spending the night inside a museum with lots of displays of dinosaurs.  We had to creep about pretending we had torches and were exploring all the exhibits in the museum.  Suddenly there was a loud noise and the dinosaurs came to life and began to chase us!  It was great fun and reminded us a bit about a film we had seen at the cinema about a similar story.

We learned about the Chinese New Year and watched some BBC clips about Chinese primary schools.  We thought it was funny when the children bowed to their teachers when they said ‘good morning.’  We didn’t understand them when they spoke in Chinese but we thought their celebrations for New Year were very colourful and exciting.  We learned about Chinese dragons and made some of our own.  Aren’t they colourful?

  

As part of our Journeys topic we watched BBC clips on the whiteboard about Barnaby Bear and his visit to Orkney.  We had been watching some clips about the first aeroplanes ever invented then we saw the modern aeroplane Barnaby Bear used to take him from the top of Scotland to the Orkney Islands.  We looked at the map to see where the Orkney Islands are.   On his visit to the Orkneys Barnaby visited a farm where the farmer had some sheep.  We saw how he sheared the sheep to get the sheep’s wool.   

Later in the week we saw Curious Cat explain the journey from the farm to the processing factories where the fleece was cleaned and spun into yarn so that it could be made into jumpers and scarves for us to wear.  We talked about this and completed a storysheet about the journey of wool. Here we are busy completing our stories.

  

  

  

  

We talked about other means of transport such as trains and we learned that this allowed people to travel to lots of different places in Britain and the rest of the world.

  

Rylan brought in some travel brochures for us to look at and a big poster about travelling.

We also spoke about making another type of journey when someone moves to another house.  We read a story about a boy who was a bit scared about leaving his home behind to move to another house.  He was given a large box to pack his favourite things to take with him.  We worked with our learning partners to decide what sort of things we would pack if we were given packing boxes.  Here are some of our ideas.

   

   

In Maths we’ve been learning how to tell the time.  We know o’clock and half past!….and we’ve been learning how to write this using analogue and digital clocks.  Blair and Cameron demonstrate how we can use the whiteboard to tell the time.  Half past nine looks like it’s fun!!

                       

In Literacy we got our new reading books and there were some really funny stories amongst them…like The Hairy Fairy!  I think we all found that a bit silly…We worked very hard with our reading this week.  We like to read our stories to our learning partners then they read us their stories.  It’s good because we all get a chance to swap our stories and hear each other read.  Then we helped each other with writing.  We took turns to check each other’s work…we had to pretend we were ‘teachers’ and point out any mistakes to our learning partners!  On Friday we changed our library books and had the chance to pick some really interesting ones for us to read later in class.

Another week now over and we’re off for the weekend….Lara and Morgan look happy that we can have a wee rest again!

                      

Come on Leo, it’s time to go home. 

                  

We’ll see you all again next week.  Bye for now from P2a.

 

Hello! This week we’ve done quite a bit of art because we have a Scottish-themed competition coming up soon as well as an Art Exhibition to provide artwork for. So we have been colouring-in, painting, cutting out, gluing together and weaving with paper! For the Scottish theme we made some kilts using coloured paper strips. Here is a preview of some of our work.

but no….we’ll not give a preview of our work for the Art exhibition….just wait and see!

As part of our Topic on Journeys we learned about the story of the Loch Ness Monster. We used the whiteboard to find images of the monster then we wrote our own story about a journey to the Loch and meeting Nessie. Some of us wrote scary stories where we ended up being eaten by the Monster!!! Some of us wrote happy stories where we made friends with the monster. We also coloured in some pictures of Nessie.

We also found out a little about the Ghost of Glamis Castle when we read the story of Hamish McHaggis and his visit to the castle with his friends. We like Hamish because he says funny Scottish words and we can find out at the end of the book what these words mean.

Later this week we learned more about travelling to different places and how people didn’t have planes, trains and cars long ago. They spent a long time just travelling on foot or using a horse. We now have lots of Topic books in our classroom so we can find out about travelling for ourselves.

We watched some BBC clips about trains, George Stevenson and the first steam engines. We learned that the invention of the train meant ordinary people could now travel to places they had never been such as the seaside!

Someone who did visit the seaside recently was William Whiskerson!

We watched another programme about William’s visit to a place in England called Lyme Regis. As well as having fun on the beach he found some fossils called ammonites. It was really interesting especially when William visited the local museum and showed us some of the dinosaur models made from dinosaur bones…awesome! We wrote a sentence about what we had learned and drew our own pictures of a dinosaur. We really like William especially when he says ‘Pleased to squeak you!’ when he meets people. We wonder where he’ll visit next time!

In Maths we’ve been learning about fractions. We’re finding this quite easy and it’s fun to work out halves and quarters using different shapes…although sometimes it can make us quite hungry when we have to work out what half a biscuit looks like or what a quarter of a cake looks like! Our sums are too yummy!

We’ve been busy learning our Scottish poem and song for our Scottish competition. Some of us tried saying the poem or singing the song in front of the rest of the class and found that it’s really quite scary to perform in front of an audience! Six of us were picked to go through to the final so fingers crossed we do well! Keep practising because there’s not long to go!!

In Literacy we’re doing very well with our reading (but we must remember to bring in our reading books every day so we can practise reading them in class!)

Our writing is getting better too but some of us are forgetting to leave finger spaces…oops!….or we’re writing in little, tiny fairy writing so that our teacher just can’t see it!!

On Wednesday we wrote a story about a girl called Liz and a boy called Kevin. Both had bikes but Kevin decided to show off on his new bike and ended up not looking where he was going and riding right into a hole in the road! We’re getting very good at using the pictures to help us write the story.

Remember that next week is a short week with In-Service on Thursday and Mid-term on Friday and the following Monday…so a nice long week-end for P2a!

More from us all next week…bye for now!

Hello again from P2a!  This week we had lots of snow and it was really cold outside, but that’s okay because we were nice and cosy in our classroom!

We started off the week with P.E. and we practised more dodging skills and throwing and passing balls to each other.   On Tuesday we were back in the gym finishing off the last part of our Pinocchio story.  It had a happy ending with Pinocchio turning into a real boy instead of being a puppet. 

In Maths we did really well with our money sums.  We started off choosing the correct coins to pay for things…but by the end of the week we were trying more difficult sums and we had to try to work out giving change of 20p, 50p and £1.  We found that it was helpful to use cubes instead of coins to work out the sums.

We also practised our shapes and coloured in some shape pictures to show we could identify squares, rectangles, triangles, etc.

  

As part of our topic about Journeys we learned about the journey trees make to become paper.  We watched Curious Cat on our whiteboard, who explained that trees are cut down then go through a number of different processes before finally being turned into paper we can write on. 

We also watched William Whiskerson who visited some of the forests in Scotland and showed us some red squirrels, who live in drays in the trees.  

In Literacy we read the story about Hamish the Highland Cow by Natalie Russell.

                        

Hamish was a Highland cow, who hated having baths and never cut his hair.  He loved sticky toffees and there were lots of sticky papers stuck to his long hair.  One day he visited the hairdresser where he had his long hair washed and cut.  He was now lovely and clean but had nowhere to hide all his sticky toffee papers….so his friends gave him a special bag to keep his toffees in!  We liked the story and decided to colour in some pictures of Hamish (with some of his sticky toffees!)

  

  

On Friday we celebrated the birthday of Robert Burns.  We’ve been talking about lots of Scottish things this week…we’ve been learning a Scottish poem called ‘I dinna like the midge’.  This is the poem we will be performing at the school competition to take place on Friday 22nd February at Assembly..  We’re also learning some Scottish songs for this competition to be judged at the Assembly.  More about this soon…

After our story about Hamish we decided to make some Hamish McHaggis characters to get our classroom into a Scottish mood.  We used tartan napkins, paper plates and scissors to make our Haggis characters.  They really brighten up our room.

   

  

On Friday some of us tried Haggis, Neeps and Tatties for our lunch.  Lovely!

We are always very busy doing things in our class but sometimes we do have some time for a bit of relaxation.  Here we are chilling out with some of our classroom activities.  

  

We do like playing with our toys and games…..and our dolls just love being bathed!  (Unlike Hamish the Highland cow!)

  

 

To round off our Scottish themed week we had a little Burns party on Friday afternoon when we had some Irn Bru and Shortbread.  We also had some dancing.  Here are some of us having fun dancing!

     

It was very nice at the end of the week to look forward to playing in the snow at the weekend.  P2a hope everyone has fun making snowmen and playing on sledges.  We would also like to say Good Luck to Mrs Duffy, who is starting her new job soon.  We hope she liked the card we made for her.

                 

Bye for now from P2a!

 

Hello again from P2a! 

This week we were busy learning more about our Topic: Journeys.  We watched some BBC clips about the water cycle and read the book ‘The Drop in my Drink’ by Meredith Hooper, which explained about the journey water makes before it finally reaches our taps and into our drink of water.  We also watched Curious Cat and found out what happens to water once we’ve used it…e.g. our dirty bath water!  We learned that underneath the streets and our houses there are lots of pipes called sewers that carry all the used water from our houses away to processing plants.  There the dirty water is processed and cleaned so it can go safely back into the sea.   Now we know about the journey water makes from the first raindrop until it is recycled back into the sea!

                    

On the subject of bath water….we were talking about hygiene, health  and how to look after ourselves – in particular, we we learning about how to look after a baby, so we practised bathing a ‘baby’ in class!  We filled up a basin of soapy water and washed a ‘baby’ doll.  We learned how to hold a baby by supporting its head.  We know we have to do this because a real baby is a bit wobbly at first and can’t hold its own head up.  We thought it was funny when we tried to put our ‘baby’ down to sleep after its bath and bottle of milk,  because it didn’t matter how careful our teacher was, the ‘baby’ kept waking up and crying whenever she tried to put it down.   What a naughty baby!

                      

We also read the story about Mog and the Baby, which was all about Mog the cat having to put up with a playful baby, who came to visit.  Mog wasn’t very happy about the baby, but in the end Mog saved the baby from being run over by a car and got a big fish as a reward.  It was a very funny story and we all liked it.

Last week we read the story of Baboushka and  we made our own Baboushka dolls.  This week we were very lucky because Tess told us that her mummy had some real Russian dolls! She very kindly brought them in to show the class.  Aren’t they super!  Thanks, Tess for sharing this with us….and also the globe you brought in, which will come in very useful for our Topic.

                        

In Art we coloured in lots of pictures of planes and trains.  Here is some of our work.

     

    

We like colouring in pictures and are still finishing off our pictures for our Room on the Broom storybooks.   More pictures next week!

In P.E. we had fun with games and circuits.  We are learning about dodging skills so we can play ball games.  One of the activities we practised was working with partners.  We  had to try to touch their knees…. It sounds easy but we had to keep facing them so this made it really tricky to dodge them. 

We continued with the next part of our Pinocchio story with BBC Let’s Move.  We’re good at pretending to be wooden puppets and we especially like when we have to pretend our noses are getting longer if Pinocchio is naughty!  The last part of our story is next week.

                         

In Maths we did some more work with Money and learned which coins to use.  We also had to work out what change to expect if we hand over more money than needed in a shop (e.g. if we hand over a 10p and a sweet only costs 7p we had to work out that we would get 3p change back.)   We’re doing very well with this and will keep practising next week. 

We also used our large 100 square to play a number game where we have to close our eyes while someone takes 2 of the numbers away and mixes up another 2 so they are in the wrong order.  Then we open our eyes and have to work out what are the missing numbers and the mixed up numbers!  It’s very tricky but we’re all very good at this game! 

This week it has been very cold outside (but we’ve been nice and cosy in our warm classroom!)……but we’ve been waiting all week for the snow to come.  Here we are in our playground today.  We’re looking pleased because the snowflakes have started to fall and we’re hoping to have fun at the weekend making snowmen…..well maybe…

  

More from us next week…Bye for now from P2a!