We’ve had a very festive week leading up to the end of term, and have enjoyed many different Christmas celebrations.

On Monday we had a virtual message from Santa and Mrs Wilson, chief elf, delivered our class present. Here we are playing with the Geomagnetic set.

On Tuesday we watched ‘Hoodwinked’ dvd, an alternative Red Riding Hood story that links in with our Jolly Christmas Postman story. We dressed up and enjoyed party food too.

We made a moving gingerbread man using split pins, the last of our Jolly Christmas Postman activities. Children showed determination in putting the split pins in themselves!

On Wednesday we ate Christmas lunch together, and it was delicious! Thank you, Mrs Clyde.

On Thursday we watched the Kingsland Christmas message.

We made a calendar and Christmas cards to give at home.

In the afternoon we watched the online pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk and booed at the baddies! We had juice and popcorn too.

We also found time to write a three part story about a lost teddy!

Classes visited all of the decorated class doors and we also saw our hanging paper plate Santas with curly beards.

Wishing you and your families a healthy and merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

What a fun filled festive week we’ve had! We’ve opened some great picturebooks in our advent including The Jolly Christmas Postman and Meerkat Christmas.

On Monday afternoon we had a virtual visit from Santa, who left a gift with his elf Mrs Wilson. We were very excited to open our present – a wooden marble run! We’ve had lots of fun with it already.

On Tuesday we all looked great in our party clothes. In the afternoon we watched Happy Feet with Mrs Thomson and enjoyed our drinks and snacks.

Wednesday was a busy day – we started by thinking about all the people who help us in school, from Mr Harkness for looking after the school to Mrs Clyde for making us lovely lunches. We then all wrote a Christmas thank you letter. This was followed by a very tasty Christmas lunch. We were joined by Mrs Fletcher and enjoyed the crackers and the silly jokes!

After lunch we went on a tour of the school to see everybody’s doors. It was very exciting going for a walk upstairs and seeing what a great job everybody has done. At the end of the day we watched the Kingsland Christmas story. We were delighted to see ourselves on screen and talked again about the meaning of Christmas.

On Thursday we had great fun watching the pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk. We enjoyed booing at the evil characters and cheering for Jack and Jill! We also enjoyed our cinema style popcorn and drinks.

We’ve also been working hard this week making cards, finishing our Christmas present for our grown ups and wrapping it up ourselves. We hope you like them!

Merry Christmas and we look forward to seeing you all on 5th January 2021.

It’s starting to feel very Christmassy in P2/1. Our classroom door is decorated and our stick children are wearing scarves and Santa hats and are relaxing with a good book!

We’re continuing our picturebook advent each day and have read some lovely stories, including one about how Santa’s reindeer are actually girls, because the boys lose their antlers each winter.

We’ve been looking more closely at the months and seasons. We’ve been doing cotton bud printing of trees in different seasons and talking more about what happens in each season. We made a winter display for our classroom where we all worked together using different materials to make a snowman. Then we did a fantastic job cutting out our snowflakes and concentrating to make sure we didn’t cut them in half!

In numeracy we’ve doing a great job building our number lines and then doing our own subtraction sentences. This week we’ve been focusing on subtracting teens numbers.

In literacy we’ve been writing some Christmassy sentences. We also wrote our own stories this week around the theme of being lost, with an introduction, a problem and a resolution. We had some very creative stories, including one about a dragon called Tutankhamun! 

For health and wellbeing we’ve been talking about the school values and are starting to consider what they mean to us. We’ve been focusing on compassion and in circle time spoke about being kind to other people and being considerate of each other’s feelings.

We have decorated our classroom door to create a winter village scene. First, we made a collage house using tissue paper and gummed paper. Our challenge was to make a tiled roof and show something in the window. Next, we decorated a 3D Christmas tree. Then we looked at pictures of skating figures and talked about what they were wearing and how they were moving. We each drew a skating figure to go on the frozen village pond.

Our rhymes this week were ip and an, and we came up with great words such as ‘Japan, Peter Pan and Dalmatian’.

We are still enjoying ‘The Jolly Postman’ and we wrote a story about a parcel he delivered to another character.

Other activities were to use adjectives to describe Red Riding Hood and the wolf and to put a jigsaw of Humpty Dumpty back together again.

We are very grateful to Miss Muir who teaches us Signalong signs every week. Here we are signing ‘I see a reindeer’.

We painted a pink sky, and many of us have noticed these skies recently. We are very careful not to over mix the paints and make it all one colour. Then we cut out silhouettes of trees, snowmen and reindeer and finished off with glitter snowflakes.

In maths we are learning subtraction facts for teens numbers and have played Bingo to help us practise.

We are getting into the Christmas spirit by listening to this wonderful story and making decorations while stamping the snow off our boots! The Jolly Christmas Postman Is a story about a busy postman visiting different characters from traditional fairytales and nursery rhymes. We are enjoying the story and doing different activities around the theme over the next two weeks.

We are opening our Advent calendar each morning. There are Christmas themed rubbers for the children and a message around the theme of health and well-being.

In literacy we are continuing to learn rhymes to help us to read and spell. The story is Supersonic Engine Juice and this weeks’ rhymes were ub and et.

0ur writing was a description of the Jolly Postman.

In maths we are learning subtraction facts for numbers to 20. We are using number bonds and patterns to help us, and we know what bridging a 10 means.

Our science topic is forces and we are investigating the effect of friction on movement. We described friction as the opposite of slippery when talking about the ice today!

Here we are testing the speed of different surfaces. As scientists we ask lots of questions and put forward our predictions, saying things like ‘I think this will go faster’, ‘I wonder if two of these will win?’ and ‘This will win because it is smooth’.

We were very excited this week now that it’s December. Each morning we talk about the day, date and season and were delighted to finally change our board to winter and the 1^st December! Because so many children open advent calendars before they come to school we all know the date each morning! For our class advent we are taking it in turns to unwrap a picturebook each day, this morning it was How the Grinch stole Christmas.

We’ve been doing lots of writing this week. We’ve been writing rhyme words and then hanging them on our rhyme tree. We’ve also been writing some silly sentences with our rhyme words. This week for our imaginative writing we wrote a story with the title ‘The Icy Puddle’ and did some great picture plans to help us plan our writing. We’re also focusing lots on capital and lowercase letters and putting them in the right place in our sentences.

In numeracy we’ve now moved on to subtraction to 20.  We’ve been writing addition and subtraction sums for our partners. In our play we’ve also been using the Cuisenaire rods – this group were proud to share that they had made the numbers to 30.

We have started our Christmas crafts – last week we made reindeer for Mrs Ryalls’ corridor displays and this week we did a great job very carefully painting robins on wooden discs. All classes are decorating their doors and we’re having a snowy woodland scene.

What a quick week!

This week in P2/1 we’ve been doing lots of reading. We’re enjoying reading in our groups and talking about the characters in the stories. On Monday we looked at -in words and came up with a huge number of rhyming words, including longer words like robin and dolphin. In writing this week we looked at recount writing and wrote about the time a robin came into our classroom. We looked at the verbs (doing words) we would need to build our sentences.

We’re practising correct letter formation and ensuring our letters are a similar size and all sitting on the line. In our handwriting lessons we start by working on our core, then our shoulders, then a ‘crossing the midline’ activity and finally work with playdough to help make our fingers strong. Then we practise our letter formation. This week we’ve looked at r and n.

In numeracy we’re continuing with our addition to twenty. We’ve been adding three numbers and also used our subtraction and problem solving skills with missing number addition. We also set up a Kingsland Shop to help our adding and subtracting, working out how many items we could buy with our money.

On Wednesday we watched an assembly with Mrs Hope, who told us all about St Andrew’s day and read a lovely poem. There was also a quiz and we found out about some of the other patron saints in the UK.

We’re continuing to talk about filling our buckets. In circle time we drew little pictures and talked about what had filled our buckets this week.

We’ve had a great week doing lots of reading in P2/1 looking at the books for the Bookbug Picturebook Prize.

On Monday we started reading My First Book of Birds. We talked about our favourite birds and birds we have seen in our gardens and on walks. Later in the week we went for a bird watching walk around the school grounds. We learned how we have to be still and very quiet when we’re looking for birds. Around the school we saw a robin and crows and on the hill we could see some birds in the distance in the trees at Hay Lodge Park and seagulls over the parish church.

On Wednesday we read Brenda is a Sheep. In the story Brenda pretends she is a sheep but secretly plans to eat her sheep friends with mint sauce! We all enjoyed the story and were not fooled by Brenda’s antics. We did black pen pictures of Brenda, taking our time on the detail of her jumper, and wrote about the story, focusing on the who and what and using finger spaces and full stops in our writing.

On Thursday we read This is a Dog! We made our own dog masks and while they were drying we did some drama, acting out the different animals in the story and thinking how the different animals might eat, drink and play.

This morning we voted for our favourite picturebook, watch here for the winner…

Also this week we’ve been doing some more rhyming. We’re reading Scat, Cat! and are looking at the rhyme patterns. We’re making up real and nonsense words and writing sentences with lots of rhymes in them.

We’re doing lots of reading, with our partners and with Mrs McGilp and Mrs Ward. Finlay and Rowan have been reading a book about magic tricks and today showed us all a magic trick with a spoon!

On Tuesday afternoons Mrs Thomson is teaching us all about time. This week we made some fantastic clocks to take home. Also in numeracy this week we’ve been looking at how to show numbers to 100, odd and even numbers and are trying to use strategies to add up in our head (for example. for 7+8 you could do a double 7 and add 1).

This week we continued to use rhyme to help us read and spell. P2 are great at suggesting rhyming words, including ‘ma’am’!

We looked at the shapes in tangrams and made pictures of our own.

Our story this week was about ‘playing’, based on our story ‘Who wants to play with a troll?’ Our writing is always improving in terms of sentences, spelling, ideas and handwriting. And more detail is being added to our drawings.

Here we are during play time, where we create, discover and imagine!

We enjoy our weekly reading books, reading them alone, in pairs and in groups. There is always plenty to talk about in the pictures!

Each week we use our rhyming words in dictation. Our sentences are beautifully written and correctly spelled!

It’s been a busy few days in P2/1. We’ve been learning about Remembrance and why we all wear poppies. Yesterday we did a great job making our own poppies to hang in our windows. Today we watched a short video about the effect the First World War had on animals and it inspired our own pictures and writing.  At 11am we sat quietly to remember those who have lost their lives fighting in the various conflicts and those serving in the Armed Forces today. We all enjoyed listening to Mr Johnstone and Archie play the pipes.

Also this week we revisited the pictures we took six weeks ago of the trees around the school field. We knew the leaves had changed colour and were falling but we were quite amazed at the difference (photos by Daniel, Noah and Amber). We also did an autumnal scavenger hunt, looking for something autumnal that makes a noise and evidence of wildlife around the playground.

Enjoy the long weekend and we’ll see you on Monday!