P2 All Stars

Well that’s us here, P2 is nearly over. We started out at the beginning, trying to be the best; trying always to be kind, have good manners and be good friends to everyone. When the ‘You’ve been spotted’ total for the whole year was counted up, we found out that all our efforts had been worth it. Not only have we been happy because we’ve been trying so hard, but it’s been acknowledged as well, by the fact that WE WON THE WHOLE YEAR, YOU’VE BEEN SPOTTED TOTAL!

Bye bye Primary 2, it’s been a fantastic year. Hello summer, we need the rest that summer will bring to be ready to come back and be the best all over again in Primary 3.

(ps. Mrs Cameron is really going to miss you all. She’s so proud of the amazing little people you are and so happy to have been able to teach you all this year.x)

It’s only Thursday and so far, we have done some hula hooping with Miss Tierney; some PowerFit with Miss MacGibbon; some dance with a coach; we’ve learned about what the similarities and differences are between boys and girls (lots of similarities, not many differences); a dental health worker has helped remind us how to look after our teeth; we’ve made ice-lollies; we’ve learned how to stay safe in the sun and we’ve won so many ‘You’ve been spotted cards’ for not bringing any unhealthy snacks to school. We are loving being healthy!

One of our Learning Outcomes is to know about foods that are produced on Scottish Farms so we’ve tried to think like farmers and see what we could produce.

In a large pot outside in the playground, we planted some wheat seeds. Out there, they would get everything they need to grow like, water, heat and air. As it’s been quite hot and dry weather, we’ve had to make sure to go and water the seeds each day. We know that the seeds from wheat are taken and ground up to make flour.

In the class we used our maths skills to measure out all the ingredients to make soda bread. Everyone helped and obviously, we all had to wash our hands and make sure not to cough into our hands or touch anything, while we were preparing our dough. The scales showed the weight of the flour and the millilitres of liquid that we had. We had to read the numbers properly and work out if we needed more or less and how much more etc. The ladies in the Rainbow Room let us use the oven and after 30 minutes (we know that is 1/2 an hour!), it was ready and smelling amazing.

In a clean jam jar, we put some double cream and a clean marble. It was like a mini butter churn. Over the course of a whole morning, we all took turns to shake the jars and by lunch time, we had butter! It was popped into the fridge over night to harden a little bit more.

The next day, just before morning break, we all washed our hands again and enjoyed eating our fabulous bread and butter. As we had some spare, we shared it with all the grown-ups in the school and we were given so many compliments for our amazing food production.

Over the last few weeks we have listened to the story of George’s Marvellous Medicine by Roald Dahl and talked about the language he uses and how he uses it to make a fantastic story. In pairs, we built sentences using some of Roald Dahl’s language, along with a variety of openers and connectives of our own.

We’ve been learning about the structure of a story and how it starts with the Opening, moves into the Build-up, then the Problem or dilemma, then the Resolution and finally the Ending. Once we had our sentences, we grouped them into the right parts of the story and made a Story Map. In the Story Map, we have little pictures that stand for the words in our sentences. Over the course of a week, we practise acting out our story and telling it to each other. By the time we go to write it down, we have all the words in our heads and we can put our story down on paper, using all the  fabulous new

vocabulary that we’ve learned.

Our finished books look great.

Next week, we’ll change our stories. We will probably use a lot of the same vocabulary as we did today, but we’ll change the characters and setting to show we know how to use the words again in a different way.

This morning we did some practical Maths. We’ve been learning about halves and quarters so we’ve folded shapes; we’ve shared and divided cubes; we’ve used plasticine and fraction magnets and today we were using food for our fractions. All the food we used today is food that could be produced from a Scottish farm, which is part of our topic too.

Each group had a plate for the food that they had halved and another plate for the food they had quartered. Obviously, we washed our hands first, we also made sure not to cough over the food or our hands while we were preparing it. Everyone did really well, working together, which is one of the skills we are working on in P2 and at the end, of course, we ate it all up!

After our amazing farm visit, we thought we should write to the farmers, Allan and Joanna and say, ‘thank you’ for having us. Normally when we do taught Taught Writing, Mrs Cameron gives us a lot of help with ideas. This time because we are nearly ready for P3, Mrs Cameron didn’t really tell us much and we came up with all the ideas ourselves by chatting first to plan and then being careful when we did our writing to check as we went along that our letters were a good enough job to send away. Mrs Cameron thought we’d done such a good job, she took photos of all the finished letters to put on our blog.

This week we’ll also be writing our adapted versions of Roald Dahl’s, George’s Marvellous Medicine. Over the course of P2, we’ve learned how to make good sentences by thinking about how to vary the start; how to lengthen them using conjunctions/connectives; different vocabulary and adjectives to use and which kinds of punctuation work in which situations. Make sure you check out our Blog next week to see some of our excellent sentence work. We pinched ideas from Roald Dahl and have made some bang-whizzing sentences up!

This week, Wilf told us all about his protractor and measuring angles; Anshmaan read us his favourite book about the Lion King and Aidan showed us a science experiment. Lots of the children wanted to try Aidan’s experiment at home so this is what you need to do:

Boil a red cabbage and keep the purple water.

Add some bicarbonate of soda and watch the water go from purple to blue.

Add some lemon juice to change the colour back to purple.

If you keep adding lemon juice, the colour becomes more pink.

It’s very cool and very easy to do!

This week is Digital Learning Week. We got together with our friends in P3 and they showed us how to do some coding using a website called Code.org. Some of us did some Angry Birds coding and others did a Star Wars coding activity. Hopefully we’ll be able to use the tablets over the next few weeks to get more practise. Sometimes the internet is really really really slow in school so we don’t always manage to get as far with these activities as we hope.

On Wednesday this week, we visited Shothill Farm in Lanarkshire. It is a real working farm so most people don’t get to go and visit but because it is our topic this term, we were lucky enough to be invited.

In the time we were there, we learned an amazing amount about the jobs that a farmer does. Parents and carers, why not ask your child to tell you about: how long a cow is pregnant; how many times a day a cow is milked; where the farmer gets the cow food from; why it is good to keep alpacas near chickens; what time of the day cows need milked; how many bottles of milk you get from a cow in a day; which foods are made from the milk; how the farmer gets the milk from the cows; which chickens lay brown eggs; which chickens lay white eggs; where in the farm are there computers and what do computers have with feeding baby calves?

On Monday this week, Colin who is a zoologist and friend of Aidan, came in and we learned lots of interesting facts about mammals. Colin took us outside and we measured out the size of a blue whale on the playground. Even if we all lay down, our class are not as big, end to end as a blue whale. If we were to end up in the mouth of a blue whale, our whole class would only take up the front of it’s mouth. Luckily, if we did end up in a whale’s mouth, it wouldn’t be able to swallow us because it’s throat would be too narrow, phew!

Using timers, we checked to see if any of us were as fast as cheetahs. Guess what? None of us were as fast. Some of us were as fast as domestic pigs, some us were as fast as squirrels. No one was as slow as a sloth.

We loved having Colin in. We absolutely love learning animal facts!