Happy New Year from P2a!  Yes, we’re back again for another new term and this time our new topic is all about Journeys.

We started the week with games in the gym-hall.  We warmed up by jogging around the hall with a partner…sounds easy but we had to chat to our partner about what we did at Christmas while we jogged around!  This was a bit tricky and tiring but we all managed to cram lots of gossip and news into just a few minutes.  Once we were warmed up we had some relay races when we practised jogging, jumping, hopping, leaping and skipping.  We finished off with a game called Giant steps and Fairy steps – super fun!

In Maths this term we’ve started learning about Money.  We used the whiteboard to play Money games on the Education City website.  We took turns to match the correct coins to different amounts of money.  It all seems very easy…but we’re finding it a bit of a nuisance that there are no such things as 3p coins..or 7p coins…or 9p coins…. More about money sums next week!

As part of our topic on Journeys we read the story ‘Room on the Broom’ by Julia Donaldson. 

This is the story of a journey on a magical broomstick.  There is a kind witch in the story as well as a cat, a dog, a frog, a bird and a dragon.  We really liked the story and have coloured in lots of pictures of these characters.  We’ve also started to write a description of the characters and next week we’re going to use our character descriptions to write our own adventure with the magical broomstick.  To help us with our imagination we now have our very own broomstick in the classroom as well as a ‘cackling’ witch!

We learned about some other journeys this week with William Whiskerson and Curious Cat. 

We watched the BBC programmes on the whiteboard and discussed the journeys water makes…from the first drops of rain on the mountains to streams, rivers and the sea.  It was interesting to learn how we can use water to generate electricity!  We now know that dams can be used to trap the water and that  turbines then generate electricity to our homes so we can use all the electrical things in our houses.  We’ll find out more next week.

In R.E. we read the story of Baboushka – a Russian tale about a woman, who was too busy cleaning and tidying her house to be bothered to go with the 3 Kings to visit Jesus in Bethlehem.  When she did decide to follow them it was too late.  We learned that children in Russia believe that at Christmas it is Baboushka who leaves presents for children at Christmas, whereas we believe that it is Santa!……We were very busy in Art making Baboushka dolls (or Russian dolls) which is 1 large doll with lots of smaller dolls inside.  We think they look super!

Our groups have now been re-named to match our topic so we are now the Planes, the Trains and the Boats.   So congratulations to the Boats, who are Group of the Week, and to Connal, who is Star of the Week….and well done everyone for working so hard this week.  

More from P2a next week…Bye for now!