This week, we have started to learn about multiplication. We know how to add 4+4+4+4+4+4+4 but we like the idea that we could just do 7×4 instead. There’s a lot to learn and we are just at the beginning but knowing that multiplying is just a quick way instead of repeated adding is one of the first things we’ve thought about. In groups and with partners, we’ve started to make little groups of different items and written sums to go with them. Sometimes we write the repeated add sum and sometimes we write the times sum. Everyone is pretty excited and enthusiastic about this new Maths.

Over the course of this term we have been working on  project where we will end up with (hopefully), a Stop Motion movie. Our learning Outcomes for the topic relate to making models, drawing plans and using technology. Our Topic skills relate to working together co-operatively.

We have been working through an engineer’s planning routine – ask, imagine, plan, create, improve, present and reflect.

So far we’ve asked ourselves question on which materials we’d need and how we’ll go about it. We have planned a short story and drawn out a storyboard, breaking the story into little chunks that we will film. To build the sets for our movie, we are using all the cereal boxes that we asked parents to send in. The characters in our movie will be Lego minifigures. There’s going to be a goody and a villain.

At this point in the term, we have been practising different skills using the tablets and the Stop Motion App. We can make our Lego figure walk, dance, slip and do magic. Our set creation is about half way there.

In a couple of weeks time, we should have practised all the skills we need to learn. Our sets should be ready and we will have a special day where we spend however long it takes to film our movies, using the tablets.

Our ‘working together’ skills have been really tested in this topic and we have learned a lot of useful ways to compromise for the greater good and to get the job done.

One of the things we’ve been learning about this term, is how to write Instruction texts. We looked at some good examples of real instructions and found out what the important parts are, so that we could work towards including all these things in our writing.

Using different time Openers and an assortment of Bossy Verbs, we’ve written instructions on ‘How to make bird cakes; How to do the Canadian Barn Dance; How to get ready for playtime and How to plant vegetables’. Over the course of the last few weeks, we started this by supporting each other a lot and we’ve progressed to being able to do this type of task independently, which we are very proud of!

The last week or two, we have been learning a lot about the value of each digit in a 2 digit number. There’s a lot to learn!

We’ve found the numbers on a 100 square; we’re learning where they all are in relation to each other. One of our morning routines has been to count in Tens. We practise doing this with all the round Tens and with Tens with some Ones. We’ve used concrete objects to count out the Tens and Ones, we’ve drawn pictures of Tens and Ones and we’ve written sums with Tens and Ones in them. By the end of this week, most of us are confidently adding together 2, 2 digit numbers eg 43 + 35 =

Next week we’ll be looking at these 2 digit numbers again and using our different methods to practise the operation of subtraction.

Today in Maths, we started to learn reasons why people in real-life might use co-ordinates eg map reading or pilots of planes or ships.

Using some different methods, we started to be able to plot points ourselves and also to write or say the co-ordinates for an object.

At the beginning we worked as a whole class, later we helped our partners and finally we did some tasks on our own to show that we’d learned well.

At the beginning of the individual task, some of us were a little hesitant but after a while, Hussein said, “It’s starting to get easier!” We all knew that, that was because he’s had some practise.

At the end of our individual tasks, Mrs Cameron often marks our work and gives us feedback. One of the skills that we are working on in P2, is to think about our learning and to be able to judge if it is a ‘good job’  and to know how to get even better. When we’d finished our task today, we knew we should have a proper picture. We self-assessed whether we had met our target or whether we still had to keep practising. Most of us had met our target and next week we will still practise some more on some more challenging pictures.

We’re back at school for a new year and hard at work already. This term our Topic will develop engineering, problem solving and ICT skills. The plan is to build models, using engineering attachment techniques, to create a ‘set’ for a Stop Motion animation.

This week we had a wee go at one attachment technique and started making a small animation, using the Stop Motion App, of a rolling dice.

So far, so good. Everyone was really excited, engaged and successful.

Our class is the Eco-committee responsible for the school grounds. We had a think about what we wanted to improve and decided that we want our school to be a bird friendly school. To attract different birds to our playground, we decided to make some tasty bird cakes to put in the trees over the winter, when it’s harder for birds to find good food. In the cakes, we put vegetable suet, raisins, bird seed and sunflower seed. While we were making them, we worked on our skills of working together, to make sure it was fair for everyone. These skills are obviously, really important and we spend a lot of time thinking about them and trying to improve. Next term we will be working on Procedural Writing/Instruction Writing and we will be able to write instructions for the other classes on how to make these yummy cakes.

One of the topics we have been looking at in Science is which material is best for which job. We carried out an experiment where we tested how absorbent different materials were. We tried to make it a fair test by using the exact same amount of water for each material. We made predictions on which material would be most absorbent and then tested our hypothesise. Different papers sucked up the water and were absorbent but the water just ran off a jacket. We realised that if we want to keep dry, we shouldn’t make jackets out of paper and if we want to soak up a spill of water, we shouldn’t use a jacket to do it.

Over the course of this term, we have learned various ways to measure different types of weather.

By reusing old plastic bottles, we made rain gauges, put them outside and watched while the filled up with the pouring pouring rain that we had during the beginning of December.

On a day when it wasn’t raining , we headed outside to measure wind. Using bubbles and a wind vane, we measured the direction of the wind. Using an anemometer, we measured the speed of the wind. Yet again, our Scottish weather was quite cooperative as gales were forecast for the day we used the anemometer.

We also measured temperature, using a thermometer over the course of a week.

Using the information we collected about temperature and rain, we learned about information handling and created bar graphs for both.

This week in class, we played a game where our partner handed us a 2d shape, behind our backs. We had to have a feel and tell our partner how many sides; how many corners; whether the sides were straight or curved and the name of the shape. The shapes we were working with were squares, rectangles, different triangles, circles, half circles and hexagons. We can remember the name of a hexagon because it has an ‘X‘ in it’s name and it has siX sides! After that, we had a think about which 2d shapes would tile ie make a pattern when they were put together that had no gaps. We loved both these games and made awesome tiling patterns.