We have all enjoyed playing outside in the sunshine this week. In PE we had so much fun running around the field and feeling the grass beneath our feet instead of concrete! We have been improving our throwing skills by using the foam javelins. We have some very impressive javelin throwers in our class.
We can wear suncream, sunhats and sunglasses now. It is a good idea to keep our sun hat and sunglasses in our school bag in case we do our learning outdoors.
This week we worked very hard on our Numeracy and Literacy tasks. We also spent some time looking back over our old work and seeing the improvements we have made and talking about our learning with our friends.
We have started to think about our wellbeing and we are having discussions with our teacher. We are all going to complete a Wellbeing Wheel to show how we think we are doing with our learning in school.
As we returned to school on Easter Monday we made some very simple Easter masks.
On Friday we had some very special visitors in our class from Apple. They had a chat with us about our learning on the iPads. They were amazed by the skills we had already learned. They were also impressed with how clear we were at explaining what we had been learning on the iPads. They took some photographs of our work too.
We watched a Newsround report that really gripped our attention about saving red squirrels. Then we had a Lego challenge on Red Nose Day to build an animal habitat from Lego.
We constructed our designs,drew labelled diagrams and then we used the drawings to help us to write our procedures.
When we had completed our procedures we did some Peer Assessment and it was interesting to share our writing with our learning partners. This feedback also helps us to improve our writing next time.
During our iPad session we used the Notes App once again. We took photos of our Lego animal habitats and then we either labelled the photos by marking up or we typed a summary of how we had created our models.
Everyone worked very hard today and it was with great hilarity that we marked up photographs of ourselves on the iPads.
We loved wearing red and our class was a vision in scarlet.
We marked up our images on the Notes App and we also enjoyed creating characters on Sketches School. We were able to work independently on our iPads because we are familiar with these Apps now.
If we encountered any issues we were usually able to resolve them by working with our partners.
( We are looking forward to sharing our photos of Red Nose Day when we resolve our technical issues ) We had a laugh at everyone’s funny photos after Brunch and we told lots of hilarious jokes.
This week we were very industrious making our class video to welcome Mrs Strathearn to Kingsland. We spent a lot of time editing it and deciding if scenes were to be kept in or deleted.
Welcome to Kingsland, Mrs Strathearn.
Spelling
We had tricky words to spell this week with the si/tisounds in them. For example: vision & tension. We will revisit this pattern again in our Spelling games and this will help us to learn them.
Writing – procedure
Our teacher modelled how to write in the procedure style. We are enjoying adding bullet points and numbers into our writing.
Reading
In class our guided reading continues to be non-fiction. We are becoming very skilled at reading photographs and what information they are giving us. We can use the contents page accurately and we are getting better at using the glossary.
Maths
It was exciting to use the dotty paper and dotty whiteboards to make tilings. We had to use our ruler to make the lines very straight. We made tiles on our dotty paper with squares and then to challenge ourselves we then tried to draw hexagons on the dotty paper.
We played Maths games to develop our Maths skills and this also helped us to work better together as a group. This was a fun way to explore or number bonds, times tables and dividing skills.
Yoga
We did some mindfulness yoga and it was very funny when we all became starfish but, then we found it very relaxing and we felt very calm afterwards.
Science
We learned about how molecules make up solids, liquids and gases. We played a game to test whether we knew the difference between how the molecules are packed in solids, liquids and gases. We managed to work this out very quickly and we will keep playing this game to help us to remember the facts.
For a bit of fun we put some tiny water beads in a tray . Cold water was added to the tray and we were amazed by how quickly the beads grew and then they became quite slimy.
iPads
During our iPad session we continued to explore the Notes app. Last week we took photos of our sock puppets so this week we swapped iPads and took photos of our learning partners. There were lots of retakes, striking a pose and best of all lots of very happy smiles in our photos. It was great to be active in our learning too when we got to move around the classroom to take our photographs. We had lots of personalisation and choice because we had to choose where we took our photographs and the mischief our sock puppets were getting up to.
Then we typed up text from our teacher modelled procedures and we were very proud of what the documents looked like in the end.
The part we enjoyed the most from this session was when we got to share our work with our friends.
We had a lovely week exploring books, joining in on live events like,”Matilda” and we really enjoyed hearing Matilda singing her song on a pile of books that moved up and down on the stage.
It has been interesting learning who is behind each book on the bookshelf and finding out what children’s books the staff enjoy reading. Mrs McGilp made the bookshelf and we will continue to peek behind the books until we have opened them all. Our challenge will be to remember who is behind each book !
Can you remember what Mrs Strathearn’s favourite children’s book is ?
We made dog sock puppets and backgrounds and then we had so much fun playing with our puppets. It was amazing to be able to enter into another world and our dogs got up to all sorts of adventures. One of them even had an adventure under the sea!
A highlight for many of us was just having the time to explore, share and enjoy the favourite book we had brought in from home.
Mrs. Istephan read us a story on Thursday afternoon and it was a real treat having a visitor reading to us. She read us a story about a dog that thinks it is a ballerina. It was very funny !
In Art we looked at Claude Monet’s water lilies watercolours. It was amazing that they were huge panels when we usually think of watercolour paintings as being dainty. He also worked in the Impressionist style where he dabbed on little lines of colour to build up the lilies and the water they are floating on.
We created our own version of the water lilies in the Impressionist style by using felt tipped pens on clay tiles. This also linked in with our recent learning about tiling in Maths.
In Numeracy we are looking at rounding numbers to the nearest 10 and estimating what number is missing on a number line.
We have been exploring thinking skills in Maths and we started off by thinking about the number 18 and how we can make it in many combinations. At first we made random number bonds and drew the picture of the sum using Base Ten materials. Then we talked about being more systematic and writing our sums out in an ordered sequence.
Being systematic in setting out the combinations of number bonds will help us to make sure we have not missed any out and it can help us to see very quickly if we have.
Our iPad session was fun too. We continued to explore the Notes app and this week we photographed our sock puppets then added text around the image to show the materials we need to make them.
As this is our third session using the Notes app most of us were independent and did not need much help from adults. We are also getting much better at helping each other out and being really good learning partners.
In P2/3 we had the privilege of having Stephen Graham, who works with the PM Reading and Writing schemes we are using in school.He worked with a reading group and they explored a non-fiction book about trees.
He was amazed by the super readers we have, the lovely manners the group have and by the enthusiasm the children have for reading.
Well done everyone! You have been super role models this week.
Mrs Ryalls has built up the suspense this week and we have been so excited about seeing what her display of our Big Panda and Tiny Dragon by James Norbury would look like. We are so proud of ourselves because it has turned out to be a beautiful display. It is just outside our classroom and it helps us to feel calm whenever we look at it. Thank you, Mrs. Ryalls!
We have been learning the alphabet and we drew a poster to show the lower case and upper case letters. How many letters are in the alphabet? We will explore alphabetical order next.
In Maths we have been learning about tiling and the importance of very straight sides on our shapes.
We are very proud of the display Mrs Ryalls has created for our Chinese New Year Art. It caused great excitement in the corridor when she was putting it together.
Mrs Little had set us an iPad challenge and we had fun exploring more on the Notes app that we had started a few weeks ago. We took a photo to show what we have been learning about and then we selected the markup tool to add text and drawings to the image. It was challenging at first but, we rose to the challenge beautifully.
We did a little yoga in class and many of us got so chilled out that we almost fell asleep on the floor of our classroom!
In Writing we have been learning about a new style called procedure and we are looking forward to learning more about the structure of procedural writing.
In Reading we revisited the main idea and what that means and we then wrote a summary about the non-fiction books we were reading this week.
In groups we brainstormed what we already know about water because this is our new Science topic. We are really looking forward to doing lots of investigations and experiments with water. Some of us found it tricky to work in a group but, we persevered and then we found out that we really enjoyed working with others.
You have worked very hard this week. Well done !
Please bring a book to class on Thursday 3rd March for World Book Day.
We have been very inspired by the art work of Polly Dunbar from the book, “While we can’t hug.”
It was fun learning how she draws her hedgehog and tortoise. We then drew our own characters and because it’s Valentine’s Day on Monday the 14th of February we decided to add some paper hearts. So, although hedgehog and tortoise can’t hug they can still show each other that they are friends.
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone and have a lovely holiday!
An example we used to help us to design our own willow pattern plates
Yet another busy week in our class. We learned about the willow pattern story that we see on the design of many dinner plates.
We enjoyed designing our pagodas, bridges and turtle doves and then adding some patterns to make our plates interesting to look at.
We think our plates look good enough to eat our mince and tatties from !
Gong Hei Fat Choy ! Happy New Year !
We have been exploring the skeletons of some 3D shapes then using them to help us to work out the number of faces, edges and corners these shapes have.
We had to really be patient when the models kept collapsing and we had to rebuild them. We became quite resilient though.
Skeletons of 3D shapesPersevering
Working collaboratively
How many corners?
We are continuing to write in the narrative style and next week we hope to be finished writing our final narrative story. When our stories are completed we will share them with our friends and act them out. When we act a story out it helps us to feel like we are actually there in the story with the characters.
Then we are moving on to exploring procedural writing.
Our virtual Scottish Afternoon was amazing. We really enjoyed sharing everyone’s experiences of the Scottish topic. Kingsland definitely has talent!
Great Scot!
The Scottie shortbread that Mrs Clyde made us went down a treat and we wish Mrs Clyde a very happy birthday today!
Mmmm!
Adding text on the iPads
Today we explored the Notes App, typed our text, added emoji’s and drew a picture. Phew !
On the 1st February it is Chinese New Year. The year 2022 is represented by the tiger. Last year was the year of the ox.
Can you find out what animal will be represented in 2023 ?
What animal represented the year you were born in ?
In class we were so excited about using the iPads to explore Chinese New Year through Numeracy and Reading. It was so strange not having to wait our turn on the Smartboard because we all had our own iPad to work on. This meant we could work at our own pace and a little faster.
Although we have really had fun drawing on the iPad we felt very grown up when we did ordering, sequencing and reading real facts about the Chinese New Year festival.
We say goodbye to the year of the ox today and we look forward to greeting the year of the tiger tomorrow. 🐅
Happy Chinese New Year everyone! 🐲
We have also been working very hard on our Scottish theme and we are really looking forward to sharing our learning with you on Scottish Afternoon on the 3rd of February.
