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!