Hello again from P2a!

This week we learned a poem in Literacy about Geraldine the Giraffe by Colin West.  The poem is written in the shape of the long scarf she wears around her neck.   We were given a copy of the poem but most of the words were missing so we had to fill in the blanks (in our best writing).  Then we had to colour in a picture of Geraldine, cut out the long scarf-shaped poem and either put it around her neck or glue it onto a piece of card.  Here we are very busy on this task.

  

  

  

  

  

  

We also continued with our story of the Flying Magic Carpet in our BBC Let’s Move programme in the gymhall.  Last week we had to imagine we travelled to a tropical island where we found monkeys and fantastic birds.  This time we had fun pretending we were flying on our carpets to the North Pole, where we had to imagine we were polar bears in the snow! 

Later in Art we created our own Flying Carpets using coloured pens and pencils.  We coloured in patterns on our carpets and finished them off by sticking different coloured paper fringes around the edges.  We tried very hard to keep within the lines with our colouring in and we are getting very good at this.  Here we are concentrating hard as we make our carpets!

  

  

  

  

This week in Maths we carried on with Multiplication and division, numbers to 100 and adding and subtracting to 20.  We like using the Education City website for the multiplication songs, especially the 2 times table song about the train that starts off slow and ends up fast.  Later in the week our Primary 6 buddies helped us play our Snakes and Ladders and Lotto games.  This is really helpful for us because they show us how to play the games, remind us to take turns and help us with any reading or counting required in the games.   

The first of our Parents’ Nights was on Thursday and some of our parents or carers were able to come to school, speak to our teacher and see some of our work.  We hope you were all pleased with our work.  Next week the 2nd Parents’ Night is on Tuesday.

Also this week we were visited by the Book Fair and we were able to look at the books for sale and buy some if we wanted.  There were lots of really interesting books for us to choose from.  We still have a chance to buy next week.

In RME we read and discussed the story of Androcles and the Lion.  We learned that the story took place a long time ago in Ancient Rome when the Romans were very powerful.  Androcles was a poor slave who made friends with a lion called Leo when he helped him by removing a thorn from the lion’s paw.  Later in the story Androcles runs away from his Roman master but is caught and put in an arena to be fed to the lions.  Luckily the lion who came into the arena was Leo!  The Romans were amazed at their friendship so Androcles was set free.  It was an unusual story but it taught us about kindness and friendship.

We learned more about animal topic when some of us brought in some pictures and stories we had cut out from newspapers.  We read the stories and put them on our Animal News noticeboard.  One of the stories was about a very clever elephant who can paint pictures and they are so popular people want to buy them on E-Bay! Another story was about a ‘sausage’ dog, whose back legs were paralyzed so he couldn’t walk.  Doctors had carried out a special operation on this little dog  and now the dog is able to walk again!  We learned that doctors are now hopeful to try out this type of operation on humans, which would be wonderful if it allowed people, who were confined to a wheelchair, to be able to walk again!  We must keep looking at our newspapers for more interesting animal stories!

Still no news of any winners in our Road Safety competition…we’ll maybe find out next week.  However, we received our Bronze Awards for good behaviour at Assembly on Friday.  Well done, everyone!  Our Star of the Week is Ellis, and our Group of the Week is The Happy Hedgehogs again!  Well done! 

Remember next week we’ll be having our pantomime – super!

More from us then…bye for now from P2a!

 

Hello from P2a!

This week we didn’t find out about our Road Safety competition yet …nor have we got our stories about flying ready for our blog…..BUT we did have lots of fun in the classroom with our animal topic!  In Art our learning intention was to make a picture of a parrot using  pens, pencils, glue and lots of feathers!    We also learned how to make an animal mask using a template.

Here we are busy making our parrot pictures and masks-

     

     

   

While we were working we sang along to some of the songs we are learning about Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  It’s nice to have a sing- along when we’re busy.

Later we read a story called Rumble in the Jungle and talked about the animals we would find there like gorillas, leopards, monkeys, lions, tigers, giraffes, hippos, snakes….and parrots! 

Some of us brought in our own animal books this week, which we enjoyed reading in class.  There was one about farmyard animals, one about a tiger, one about a hen laying eggs and one about mammals.  There’s bound to be lots more stories about animals next week!

Anyway, once we’d finished our artwork it was all hung up in the class (some still have to finish off their work…but that will go on display too as soon as it’s ready!)  Here is some of our work –

     

     

   

We watched some BBC clips on the whiteboard and learned about animals and their babies.  We also read some articles from newspapers about animals and especially liked the one about a Chorkie puppy called Lily, who was missing this week in Dundee.  Luckily the puppy was found so the story had a happy ending.

On Monday we practised our Scottish dancing again in the gymhall as well as doing some aerobics to pop music.  We were very hot after all this dancing!  On Tuesday we were back in the gymhall for Let’s Move.  This week we had to pretend we were on a flying carpet.  We had to clap our hands and raise our arms so our imaginary carpet rose up into the air.  Then we pretended we were flying in the sky travelling to a faraway place.  We ended up on a tropical island where we had to pretend we were monkeys and tropical birds!  Next week we are going to use our ‘flying carpets’ to travel to somewhere very cold….we wonder where that could be??

In Maths we have been busy learning about multiplication,  ordering numbers up to 100 and subtraction to 20.  This came in very useful because on Friday at Golden Time we had the chance to use our mathematical skills when we played maths games with our new Primary 6 buddies.  They helped us play games like snakes and ladders and lotto.  A big thank you to Primary 6…and we look forward to playing with you again next Friday.

We started our new reading books on Monday.  This was quite tricky but with a little practice we did very well. 

More from P2a next week…meantime bye from us and bye from some more animal friends who have joined us in our classroom – Rylan’s snake and an assortment of fluffy dogs, ducks and pandas!

 

Hello again from P2a!  This week was a very short one – only 3 days…so we had to cram in a lot of learning in those 3 days!

We started off on Monday at P.E. learning a Scottish dance called the Gay Gordons.  It was very tricky when we went over the steps and then we had to put it together with the music.  That was when we found we had to move very quickly to keep up with the music!  We were all very hot by the end of P.E. but it was good fun.  Tess worked particularly well as she had to be the teacher’s partner and helped to demonstrate the steps!  More practice next week!

This week in Literacy we learned how to spell words with the -ow sound, like snowman, yellow and elbow.  We moved on with new reading books and started writing a story about what it would feel like if one morning we woke up and discovered we could fly…  We prepared a story plan to help us with our stories then used these to help us write our stories.  We’ll finish them next week and show some on our blog.

In Maths we tried estimating where numbers were on a numberline.  This was tricky because we knew what the beginning number was and the end number but had to make a best guess to find out numbers marked in between.  We also had more practice using numberlines to calculate addition sums to 20 and put numbers in order to 100.

On Tuesday we had more fun in the gymhall with the next part of Percy the Park Keeper – Let’s Move programme!  We had to move around the hall pretending we were the park-keeper and the park animals.  This week in the story one of the rabbits fell down an old well and the other animals didn’t know how to rescue her.  Later we read the story and found out that the animals and Percy all helped to get the rabbit out of the well….but the rabbit had already found another way to escape!

We read some more animal stories in class this week – one about a Farmyard and another Hugless Douglas story.  We’re getting very good at listening to stories and reading them ourselves.

At the beginning of the week we had a visit from the Ancrum JRSOs i.e. Junior Road Safety Officers, who told us that we could enter a school competition to win prizes.  We had to draw a picture about Road Safety and hand them in next Monday.  So here we are very busy drawing and colouring in pictures for this.

     

   

   

We hope some of us are lucky and win a prize…we’ll find out next week!  Meantime here are some of our finished pictures –

     

   

   

   

As it was such a short week we decided to wait until next Friday for a Star and Group of the Week.  Our marbles in our jar are building up….so hopefully we’ll have a Marble treat to look forward to in the near future!

Oh, we also had another furry visitor to our class, who has decided to invite himself to the 3 bears’ table along with Goldilocks.

                                                                                      

We hope he knows how to behave nicely….because we don’t want a naughty chimpanzee in our class!

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

Hello again from P2a!

This week we made lots of pumpkin characters for Halloween.  We used coloured paper, pens, scissors and glue.  For the arms and legs we had to fold the paper back and forward to make a ‘crinkly’ look.  Here we are busy at work.

  

 

and here are the finished Pumpkin characters in our classroom!

   

We took them home on Friday so now we have lots of space in our classroom to make more things for display.  We wonder what we’ll be making next…

For Halloween we also read 2 super stories  about cats – Trixie the Witch’s Cat by Nick Butterworth and The Scaredy Cat by Russell Punter.

 

In Drama we acted out a creepy story for Halloween about a Haunted House.  We all got a part to play and had fun making the sound effects of creaky doors, howling wind, thumps and bumps and screams!  It turned out that the house wasn’t scary at all…..there was only a little cat hiding in the house.  The 2 characters in the play took it home to give it some milk so the story had a happy ending.

In the gymhall we used the story of Percy the Park Keeper and the Rescue for Movement and Dance.  We had to move around like rabbits, foxes and hedgehogs and pretend that we were like Percy helping to keep the park tidy by fixing fences and planting plants.  We’ll continue with the second part of the story next week. 

On Tuesday morning we had our class photo taken by the photographer in school.  Copies can now be ordered using the envelope taken home later in the week – see contents of schoolbags!  Then on Tuesday afternoon we visited the DCA to see the Gruffalo’s Child by Julia Donaldson. 

We all liked the story and it was fun to travel on the bus with our class and some parent helpers. (A big thank you to our helpers!  We hope you enjoyed your visit too.)

In Literacy we learned words using Y  such as cry, try, why and fly and learned more about adjectives.  We used the whiteboard to watch BBC clips showing words with Y and we particularly liked the Alphablocks song about Y.  Later in the week we practised our handwriting and completed a wordsearch where we had to find words with -SH, like fish, dish and wish.  We are getting very good at this.

In Numeracy we played a game with our 100 square.  Everyone had to put their heads on the desk (like Heads down, Thumbs up) whilst one of us mixed up some of the numbers on the big 100 square.  Then we had to sit up and work out what numbers were jumbled up.  It’s a bit tricky for us but we’re beginning to find patterns and tricks to remember the order of the numbers.

Remember that next week is a short week because there’s IN-SERVICE days on THURSDAY and FRIDAY

Also remember to bring GYM KIT in for P.E. on Monday and Tuesday!

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