Hello and welcome to our second blog post of the session.  Primary 2/3 have been very busy, working hard within their groups and following the new routines and class rules we have in place in class.  We had a fabulous first term and the children are eager and keen to begin their new topics in our new term.

Literacy

Our class novel has been ‘The Enchanted Wood’ during term 1 and this has been well received by the children. We will continue to read this novel in class and will also read the follow-on books from the Magic Faraway Tree series.  This will be for fun and to keep the excitement and enjoyment of our first text going over the coming term.

Our reading and spelling activities are continuing to be enjoyed and worked on in class, at various times throughout the week. Children are using a mixture of practical, hands on activities such as play dough, salt trays, stencils and chalk boards to practice their spelling words but are also employing strategies such as ‘rainbow spell’ and ‘pyramid spell’ to reinforce their spelling knowledge at home and in class. We are using the Active Literacy phoneme stories and word building applications to help us recognise our spelling sound and words in texts we are accessing.

In reading we will continue to work on prediction but the focus will switch to sequencing and ordering events within the text, such as beginning, middle and end and what happen first, next and last in our texts throughout this term. Our focus in writing has been descriptive writing, and this will continue this term, as well as giving the children opportunities to write scientific reports, based on findings from the experiments we carry out during out topic of ‘Energy Around Us’.

Just a reminder that homework will continue to be sent out weekly on a Monday, so please check your children’s bags for their plastic wallet.  Reading books will be attached to pupils’ accounts through our online Bug Club reading programme and all homework should be returned to school on a Friday.

Maths

Our focus in maths this term will be place value and becoming more familiar with numbers to 100 with both our rectangle and triangle groups and numbers to 999 with pupils from our circle maths group.  We will also have a focus on money, as well as addition and subtraction, number talks, and word problems to consolidate our strategies within these operations of number. Children will regularly use their ‘Thinking It Through’ jotters to develop problem solving skills, applying knowledge of number to new contexts and develop strategies for any number problems.

Health & Wellbeing

Our Paths Pupil of the Day is continuing and our Pupil of the Day has been receiving lots of compliments and special jobs around the classroom.  All children will have the opportunity to be pupil of the day for the second and third time throughout this term.  We are continuing to explore emotions, comfortable and uncomfortable and how we recognise these emotions within ourselves and in others.

In P.E, our sessions will happen inside (Tuesday) once per week, and outside (Thursday) once per week and our focus will be on large and small ball skills, gymnastics and dance. We are building on our term 1 topics and hope to see the spacial awareness and team building skills further developed throughout this term.

R.E

Our focus during R.E sessions will be on bible stories, saints and the nativity. As our Primary 3 children will be preparing for Reconciliation after the new year, the sacraments will be discussed in depth, so children fully understand each of the sacraments and their importance in their relationship with God.

Topic

Our topics over the next term will be ‘Energy Around Us’ where children will be given the opportunity to explore toys and how they move, looking at pushing and pulling and how magnets can be used to make objects move.  Children will hypothesise about what force could make objects move, carry out experiments and record their findings.

In the lead up to Christmas, we will have an enterprise topic where children will work in teams to budget for and buy resources, which will then become an item they can sell at Christmas time.  The children will hope to turn their budget and craft item into a profit which will be donated to charity. The focus will primarily be on the different roles within a working group, managing money and financial obligations, whilst looking at the benefits to charity, when a profit can be made.

As always, we hope this is the start of another successful term and that the pupils will enjoy all the different festivities that follow as we prepare for Christmas, celebrating Christs birth and the preparations and production of the infant Nativity!

Take care,

Mrs Travers