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!   

Hello again from P2a!  Sorry we’ve had a bit of a break since our last blog…but we had a slight computer blip.  Now it’s all been sorted and it’s back to business as usual.

In our last news we said we had our Marble Treat when we had a bit of a class party to celebrate filling our Marble Jar.  Here we are having fun at our party.

  

  

  

  

  

We danced to some music, had some nibbles and juice and even had time to play with our toys.

  

Now that it’s time for us to come off for Christmas we’ve opened up all our Advent Calendar windows, made Christmas stockings, wrote our letters to Santa and made Santa pictures using lots of glitter and cotton wool.

  

We’ve worked very hard  this term and  finished our Maths revision.  We’ve  learned all our spelling words for December and  sang lots of Christmas songs.  We acted out the story of the 3 Kings visiting Bethlehem and we’ve even pretended we were a grumpy camel!  So it was very nice this week to have our Christmas Disco, when we had the chance to dress up and have Christmas fun.   We especially liked the bubbles and snow machine at our disco!

  

  

  

We finished on Friday with our end of term service.  Our classroom is looking a bit tired now and we’re ready for a break.  We hope everyone has a very happy Christmas and look forward to lots more news in the new year.

See you in 2013!  Bye for now from P2a!

 

Hello again from P2a!

This week we had a visit from Hopscotch, who performed the pantomime ‘Dick Whittington’.  It was very funny and scary in bits.  We all screamed very loudly when the ‘baddie’ came on and tried to catch Dick Whittington’s cat Bingo.  After a lot of singing, screaming and dancing there was a happy ending…aaah! 

In P.E. we tried out our ball skills with a game of netball.  It was great fun.  We learned that we need to  find spaces, because it’s tricky to pass the ball to each other if we’re too squashed.  We’ll have another go next week!  We also practised our drama skills in the hall with another BBC Let’s Move programme.  This time we pretended we were performers in a circus.  We  juggled balls, rode a uni-cycle, walked a tight-rope and walked on stilts.  It was fun trying to balance.  Next week we’ll be pretending to be the clowns at the circus so that should be funny!

As this is the last week in November we know that next week we’ll be into December and the countdown to Christmas will begin.  So we got busy in Art making Advent Calendars in readiness for Monday.  We used 2 pieces of card to make our calendars: 1 piece was the front picture with press-out windows, the 2nd piece was glued to the back and had little pictures to be seen once each window is open.  Here we are busy making our calendars.

   

  

  

  

…and now our calendars are ready on the classroom wall waiting for us to open some windows on Monday!

We worked hard this week in Maths and Literacy.  We’re revising the work we’ve done this term in adding, subtracting, numbers to 100 and multiplication and division. In Literacy we’ve been bringing in some of our own books to read in class and we’ve also been cutting out articles from newspapers to read and put on our noticeboard for our Animals Topic.

The star of the week is Lara, who worked very hard at her spelling and got 10 out of 10!  Well done, Lara!  The group of the week is the Fantastic Foxes!  Super work everyone!

P2a has been working  very hard this term and managed to fill up their Marble Jar.  This meant that we earned a Marble Treat on Friday.  As it was Saint Andrew’s day on Friday we had a Marble Treat party with a Scottish-theme.  We danced to Christmassy music and played with our toys and games.  We’ll put some photos of the party on our next post.

Bye for now from P2a! 

 

 

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!

 

We’re back again after a lovely two week break!

At the beginning of the week we were really excited because we had our photograph taken by the school photographer.   We hope to get our copy of the photo soon!

This term our new topic is The Animal Kingdom. We spoke about what we already knew about animals and what we would like to know, then we wrote some of our ideas on the board to help us decide what learning we would have to do this term.  It looks like we’ll be very busy! 

We now have a noticeboard for any Animal News…so we’ll have to remember to cut out any news and pictures we find in newspapers or magazines about animals and bring it into school.

On Tuesday we were going to visit the DCA to see The Gruffalo’s Child but it was postponed until next week.  We decided to make Gruffalo masks anyway.    We also used paint pads to make prints of animals and their footprints.   Here are some we made for our wall display.

        

As part of our Animal Topic we are going to be acting out the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  We started learning some of the songs we’re going to sing in our play.  One is called the Bear Song and  it describes each of the bears who live in the cottage.  We have our own Goldilocks and the three bears to play with in our activity corner.    

     

We also listened to a funny story about another bear called Douglas, who just wanted to find a big hug.  The story is called Hugless Douglas by David Melling.  Poor Douglas just couldn’t find the right hug until he went home to his mum at the end.  Aaah!   Next week we’ll listen to another story about Douglas.

In our activity area in the classroom we have a Shop where we can practise using money.  We have a till, plastic coins and matching activity cards.  We have to try to match up the coins with the correct amounts on the cards.  We also have lots of other numeracy and literacy games we can choose to play with.

     

We also like to play Money games on the computer on the Education City website. 

In Literacy we read our new reading books and learned words with the –ea sound and -igh sound.  We  played a game called the Letter Wizard, using a ‘special’ apron with cards in the pocket.  We read out the word on the card to the rest of the class, then had to identify the letter the word began with so we could put the card into the correct alphabet pocket on the wall.  It was tricky but we managed to read all the cards and put them in the right place.  Well done!

We’re getting very good at our grammar and punctuation. One of the activities we do each week is to try to identify deliberate mistakes in writing.  Tyler-Jay was particularly impressive this week because he spotted not one… but two sentences that needed capital letters and full stops.  Wow!  So it was no surprise who our Star of the Week was this week….well done, Tyler-Jay.

As part of our Animal Topic, our group names are all different this term.  We now have –

• The Happy Hedgehogs
• The Running Rabbits, and
• The Fantastic Foxes.

Our Group of the week with most points was The Happy Hedgehogs!  Hurray!

This term we are earning Marbles in our Class jar for good behaviour.  See how well we’ve done so far –

Once we have filled our jar we’ll get a class treat.  We talked about what treats we would like.  A lot of us thought a Pyjama day would be good….. or extra Golden Time …..or a class party….We’ll have to wait and see.

On Friday we had a special Halloween-themed tuck shop and we were allowed to come to school dressed up in Halloween outfits.  Here we are trying to look very scary!

  

  

  

  

  

  

We also had some fun in the afternoon dancing in our Halloween outfits.

  

We hope we’ll have some more Halloween fun next week ….so we’ve left our Halloween decorations up in the classroom.

 

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

Hurray – we’re off for 2 weeks!

Before we came off we started the week in the gymhall when we were busy being giants again. We acted out the next part of The Smartest Giant in Town.  This time the Giant met some mice whose house had burned down so the Giant took off one of his new shoes and gave it to the mice for a new home.  We pretended we were the mice, then we had to be the Giant hopping around the hall with only one shoe on.  It was fun!

    

Later in the week, we spoke about our classroom rules and decided to make new posters for our walls to help us remember what our rules are.  We used photographs of ourselves to illustrate our rules.  Here are some of them –  Can you guess what our rules are by looking at our pictures?

        

1.  We put our hands up and don’t interrupt.  We work together quietly.

  

2.  We share and take turns.

3.  We line up quietly and don’t push or skip the queue.

 

4.  We move safely – We walk…we don’t run.

 

5.  We listen so we can all learn… and we do what we are asked first time.

6.  We look after our classroom and equipment.  We put things away.

       

7.  We sit nicely in our seats.

In Maths we had some fun with symmetry.  We had pictures showing only half an object.  To find out what the other half of the picture looked like we had to use mirrors.  Then we were able to see the rest of the picture reflected in the mirror so we could complete the whole picture. It was very tricky and we had to concentrate very hard.

  

  

 

We have all been working very hard in class this term…but we’ve also been busy at home doing our homework.  We all tried very hard and were pleased when we got a Homework Award on Friday for all our hard work.  Well done P2a!

The star of the week  is Amy.  The Rockets are Group of the Week.  Well done!  (We wonder what our new Group names will be next term???)

So after an exciting term learning all about Space, subtraction, lots of spelling, reading and writing, we’re now off to have a well-earned rest for a couple of weeks.  Yes, Leo we can all sit back and relax!

 

until Monday 22nd October when we’ll be back for more!  (We wonder what our new Topic will be next term???)

P2a look forward to sharing more news then…bye for now! 

(Oh…..and remember to bring back  permission slips so we can all go to see The Gruffalo’s Child at the DCA on the 23rd!)

Only one more week and P2a will be off for the October break!  Look at what we’ve done so far in August and September –

 

      

What a quick term this has been for us.

No it’s not time to put our coats on yet, girls…..another week to go!

This week we had a visitor in our classroom and he wasn’t very nice!  His name was Mr Rude.  Here he is sitting at one of our desks.

      

We listened to a story about Mr Rude and learned that he had no friends because he was so rude to everyone he met and he didn’t remember his manners.  It was only when he met Mr Happy that he eventually learned how to be nice to other people.  P2a  always remember our manners….so we were very polite and allowed Mr Rude to stay for a while.

On Monday we all remembered our gym kits and Leo was especially proud to show how cool he looked and how neatly he had left his uniform on his desk.  Well done, Leo! 

We played lots of games and relay races at gym to help build up our fitness.  We also listened to the story of the Smartest Giant in Town by Julia Donaldson and acted out some of the story in the gymhall on Tuesday.  We liked the part where we had to pretend we were the giant doing a happy jig.

As part of our Space Topic we looked at different parts of our own planet Earth.  Using our whiteboard we watched BBC clips about Barnaby Bear visiting Norway and then Mexico.  We saw how Norway was a much colder place to live with snow and reindeer, whereas Mexico was a hot country and people were wearing Summer clothes.   We learned it was all about how far or near we are from the Equator, an imaginary line around the middle of our planet!  Then we had to choose somewhere on our planet to write about.  We had to create a Travel Brochure about our country or city, draw pictures and write a few sentences to describe the place.   Here are some of our brochures:

   

   

  

In Maths we are nearly finished our adding and subtracting to 10 and 20 and have started to revise all this term’s work already!

We learned our spelling words with the -wh sound and wrote sentences using our words.   This week we’ll get another reading book and more spelling words to learn….and then we’ll have a break for 2 weeks.

On Friday we had an extra playtime in the afternoon because we all behaved so well at Assembly.  We had fun in the playground and were pleased that we also got our Golden Time afterwards in class. 

  

  

As well as playing with our friends we managed to squeeze in the first 10 minutes of watching the dvd – Monsters inc.  We’re hoping that we can watch some more next week…

The Rockets won Group of the week and the Star of the Week was Lyall.  Chelsea-Leigh also received a certificate for her Topic work.  Well done to everyone!

    

Abigail and Reece are just checking that’s all our news for this week…..

  

Yes….except that we found out that it was one of the P7 classes who won the Walk to School competition.  Well done, P7!  Oh…and Bethany wanted to share her Sticker book with everyone…lovely.

Bye for now from P2a!