P2C 2021/22

Recently we have been learning more about our school values and this month we have had a particular focus on understanding and practising kindness in our own classroom and across the wider school. Every day of this month we have followed a ‘kindness calendar’, where we are carrying out small acts of kindness to help others and ourselves feel valued and part of our school community.

Pupils from Primary 6 came to our class to lead a lesson on how to recognise the kindness of our friends, family and others who help us.

As part of Scottish Book Week, we read a wonderful book called ‘Rocketmole’ by Matt Carr. The main character is a mole who has decided to build his own rocket to fly to the moon. This inspired us to learn more about how we can use our learning and skills across curriculum subjects to design, engineer and create our own inventions. We read the book and discussed the characters in detail, then we talked about subjects that might have skills we could transfer and use in different ways such as problem solving in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEAM).

We worked in teams to design and build our own catapults to understand how rockets need speed and energy to launch themselves into space. Created our own obstacle course and practiced our navigation skills by directing partners who could not see around the cones without knocking them over. We also applied our knowledge of grid references to play a strategic game of battleships with a partner, which was lots of fun and hard work applying our thinking skills to beat our opponent!

As this was Scottish Book Week, we decided to explore our woodlands area to find interesting objects we could use to create our own imaginative story to share with the class. We found all kinds of fantastic things to spark our ideas for characters, settings and plots and worked with partners to make it more exciting. Then we were able to re-tell and act out our stories for everyone to enjoy, which we loved doing!

This week we have been learning about the comprehension skill of prediction and how to use the information and picture clues on the outside of a book to help us make a prediction about the content using what we know already. We have also been busy practicing our handwriting and independent reading skills and are improving in both every day!

In mathematics we are currently investigating non-standard and standard measurements of weight. This is a very active and practical area of maths and we are thoroughly enjoying making estimations and comparing these to the actual measurements we have taken.

During our R.M.E lesson, we learned all about the Hindu story of Rama and Sita and how it is the inspiration for the Hindu festival of Dwali (The Festival of Lights). We moulded clay into a shape of a light holder and put our own personal design onto these using clay modelling tools. We can’t wait to paint and take them home! #UPDATE# Here is the finished product and we are very proud of our efforts, we are artists in P2C!

We celebrated Halloween in our class by carving pumpkins, creating a haunted house artwork and using our Science discovery skills to observe chemical reactions using household products.

One of the questions we had about the changing season was, ‘why do leaves change their colour?’ So we set about researching this and discovered that trees are very clever and store all of their nutrients deep inside during the Winter until the following year. We decided to carry out an experiment to see if we could successfully extract the chlorophyll from leaves we collected from the playground.

We are so good at creating repeating patterns using 2d shapes in a variety of colours and have even had successful attempts at tessellation.