P2 All Stars

Well, we’ve had a busy wee time over the last couple of weeks. We’ve been writing some amazing sentences with totally impressive vocabulary; we’ve been loving learning about fractions; some of us built a jail to trap Mrs Cameron in; Mrs Cameron and Betsy outsmarted the jailers and Ms Hobbs made us an incredible pretend cow that we can actually milk. We’re going on a visit to a real dairy farm next Wednesday and we’ll be able to compare what we’ve been doing here with real life, modern farming.

This week, Khalid came from Saudi Arabia and joined us in P2. Everyone has been helping him feel welcome, by looking after him in the playground and lunchroom and showing him how we behave when we’re learning. Mrs Cameron has been incredibly proud of what good examples we’ve been for Khalid.

While we were playing, Mrs Cameron was really impressed that Ali was sorting the animals into predators and prey.

It’s been a fabulous first week back. Everyone has been so grown-up with their attitude to learning. It’s not all that long until the end of P2 and the whole class has shown that they are nearly ready for P3.

We’ve been learning about Persuasive Writing. After much discussion, the children chose to write to Mrs Hendry to ask her, to ask our janitor to have a look at the heating in our classroom. It becomes so hot and uncomfortable sometimes and we are the Eco Committee after all!

Persuasive Writing has very particular characteristics so we had a look at some real examples of adverts for toys and holidays and other letters. We pinched some of the language from them and in pairs and groups, came up with the Openers, Connectives and WOW words that we wanted for our letters. Also in pairs and groups, we came up with what we thought were good reasons that would convince Mrs Hendry to help us.

Mrs Hendry was actually so impressed, she phoned an engineer at the council to ask that our heating gets looked at ASAP.

Here are some photos of the Story Map we made to help us, The Openers (in red), Connectives (in green) and WOW words (in orange). When we had finished our writing, we looked back over our work and highlighted the V, C & O in the correct colours to check that we had used them properly. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll remember that we can use this language to persuade someone else to do something else for us. Watch out parents!

On Friday 9th March we performed our Holi assembly to the rest of the school. (a week late due to The Beast from the East snow!)

Some of our fabulous mummies had organised beautiful Indian clothes for the whole class to wear while we told the story of Prahlad, Holika, Vishnu and the Demon King. After we had acted out our story, we performed a Holi dance which we really enjoyed learning. The music was so catchy and we have to again, thank the mummies for helping us. Anshumaan’s Mummy, Divyum’s Mummy and Ayaan’s Mummy came in and helped us with the dancing. They also asked some of the other mummies to help us with our outfits and providing delicious snacks for the whole school. We are really fortunate to have such amazing support from our parents.

After our performance in the hall, the whole school went out to the big playground and we had a fabulous fun time, throwing coloured powder to celebrate Holi and how Good always triumphs over Evil.

We have been starting to learn about multiplication. Some of the children already have learned some of their times tables at home. They were interested to find out that we had 10 Success Criteria to achieve to be able to multiply and divide and that quickly knowing your tables was only 1 of them.

We’ve gone back a few steps from the times tables and we can, draw a picture; do a long repeated add sum; do the 2 times sums; show it on a number line; make an array and draw an array which are all ways to show we understand multiplying and dividing. We also know what the Commutative Law is! Do all our blog readers know what this is? Maybe your hardworking, maths loving P2 child can help explain it to you…

This week, we brought in tonnes of different materials to use to design and create our marble runs.(thank you to all the people at home for organising this)  One of our learning outcomes is to think about different types of materials and how they can be used and adapted for different purposes. An extra challenge that we were given this week was to try and attach the materials to each other without using tape. We’ve learned 3 attachment techniques, flange, slot & hole punch with pipe cleaners. We were only allowed to use tape if we had tried these techniques first. In the end no one used tape to attach the materials. It was used once as an emergency repair which was ok.

Our group working skills are improving so much and every group met the challenge this week by making a successful marble run.

The classroom did need a fairly massive tidy at the end. We had a visiting teacher from the Gaelic school watching us and she was mightily impressed by our excellent behaviour and group work, by the brilliant marble runs we created and by our amazing tidying up!  

We do have some wee short videos of the marbles in action but unfortunately they won’t upload to the blog. We’ll keep them to show parents, next time we have a parent workshop.

In our Taught Writing this term, we are learning how to write instructions. To be successful, we know we have to include ‘bossy verbs’ (imperatives) and ‘time openers’. While Mrs Cameron made smoothies, we sat in groups of three and wrote down bossy verbs that we thought she was doing and which we could use when we wrote out instructions on how to make fruit smoothies. We kept them all a secret from the other groups so that we could hopefully get a wide range of different words between us. Mrs Cameron thought we did really well and poured us all some yummy smoothie to try.

Next week, we’ll all sit together and talk through the steps that we watched Mrs Cameron go through. As a class, we’ll draw out a Story Map of the instructions. We’ll add in our bossy verbs and think of good time openers that will make it clear when each stage or step needs to be done. We’ll make up actions for each step and we’ll practise speaking and miming our work. After a few days practise, when we’re really clear on all of the important things to include in our writing, we’ll write it down. Maybe we can put some of our finished work on here for you to see?

We love the snow and we were desperate to get outside and play. After a bit of a chat about how to be safe and sensible, we ran about mad, got roasting hot, made snowmen and threw snowballs in a safe and sensible manner. By the end, we’d had a brilliant time and everyone was happy, if a little wet and soggy.

Why doesn’t it snow more?

Happy new year! We’re back in class and already getting stuck in to new challenges. We have started a new technology topic where, each week we will be asked to build a new mystery structure. During this topic, we will be learning and using different skills. We will always work together in a group to solve the problem. We will learn about different types of material and which ones work in which situations. We will plan our structure first in our group by drawing labelled diagrams. As we work together to share ideas and build, we will improve the structure as we go along. At the end, we will present our structure to the rest of the class and reflect on what went well, what didn’t and how we will change and improve for the next challenge.

On Friday 1st December we had to say a sad goodbye to Noni, who has gone back to Saudi Arabia. We absolutely loved having Noni in our class. She was a great friend to everyone, she worked really hard and we will miss her so much! We hope Noni is having fun with her cousins and grandparents back home and we hope that some day, she’ll get to come back and see us all here at Anderston.