All posts by gw20craigheather@glow

Uncategorized

P2 Class Blog – April ‘23

Leave a comment

Primary 2 have enjoyed a wonderful Easter break and have been looking forward to letting you know what we have been learning. This term we will be getting supported for the transition into Primary 3 — we can’t believe that time is already here!

We have been working hard again since our last blog update. Here’s all the brilliant things we’ve been up to since January:

Numeracy
We loved having you in for our Maths Open Afternoon where we demonstrated our knowledge of Time, Fractions and number. Thank you to all who were able to attend.

“I like seeing Mums and Dads when they are seeing their kids because they can see what we’re doing in school,” says Kaitlyn.

In Numeracy, we have been working to peer and self assess our work.

“Peer assessment is when friends mark your work,” says Arwyn.

We have really enjoyed swapping jotters with friends to give them feedback. This has helped us to better understand our shared learning targets and the children have been so kind and constructive to their learning partners.

We have been working on adding and subtracting within 20 mentally, and within 30 using column addition and subtraction. We have found this a good challenge and have been doing hard work in our jotters.

“Once you are done your chimney sums you have to miss 3 spaces and you have to miss boxes – not anyhere you like – but with the lower number, the plus or takeaway has to go there. The big number goes on top and the big number goes on the bottom,” says Jessie.

“I’m just too smart for chimney sums!” says Leah.

“Chimney sums are really challenging but it makes adding sums easier and faster for adding,” says Harley.

In March, we have started doing Maths rotations, with a jotter station, a board game station and a Sumdog station. We have been using our in class iPads to play Sumdog regularly in class and have all enjoyed weekly tests on our number bond knowledge. We have noticed patterns between number bonds to 10 and number bonds to 20. Ask your child to tell you about what they know about their number bonds!

“When I go to Sumdog it makes me feel happy because it’s nice to do. I enjoy winning and when I lose I am still happy,” says Logan.

“It is so nice to play on the tablets because we get to play the football game,” says Olivar.

After the Easter Break your child will be issued with their Sumdog log in to take home. If you would like to use this at home to complement Maths homework, you are able to download the Sumdog app from most App Stores on mobile devices and from the Sumdog website on laptops/computers. Ms Craig will set weekly challenges which can be accessed at home and in school.

“At the weekend I remembered my Sumdog log in and I could play it. It was good because I got to do challenges at home,” says Caled.

As of April, we will begin looking at Data Handling. We will learn how to read tally marks, tables and bar charts. This will be a great, active way for us to show off our abilities to count in 5s and use Maths in context. 

“I love tally marks because they are so fun and I have to concentrate,” says Kali.

“Tally marks make Maths so much easier and I like it,” says Max.

“I liked it when we got to tell our friends our questions and we could tally marks their answer,” says Elliot.

Literacy
We have been focusing on our presentation in our Literacy jotters and have started learning 2 and 3 letter joins to make our handwriting neat and presentable.

“When we do handwriting it really helps us to be better at writing,” says Harley.

We love doing finger warm ups for our handwriting lessons and noticing the patterns between the joins we have learned. We have made such amazing progress in our presentation since the beginning of the year and Ms Craig is so proud!

In Reading, we will begin challenging ourselves with more than one book per week to help our reading fluency and enable us to use our word attack strategies more frequently.

“It is quicker to read the book when we have more than 1 each week,” says Halle.

“When I read I really like it because I get better each time,” says Lily.

“Reading helps me with sounding out my letters,” says Shea.

We have continued to do a great job with our Read to Write strategies and have started to make good connections and patterns between different books we have read this year. We are noticing what makes a good story!

In Phonics and Spelling, we have been linking the joined phonemes we have learned this year, and we are noticing which phonemes sound the same but look different. We are getting really accurate with picking which phonemes to use when word building. For example, we know ‘ay’ is usually at the end of a word and ‘ai’ is usually in the middle of a word. This helps us picks which one to use when we are writing!

“I really like the phonics work because we can read words we didn’t know before,” says Caled.

“I like trying to figure out which letters we are looking at. It’s a challenge,” says Kaitlyn.

Ask your child about the trains on our classroom wall to learn more about how we group our sounds.

In our taught Writing lessons, we have been exploring Talk for Writing and have completed some amazing first drafts of stories inspired by The Little Red Hen. We imitated, innovated and finally imagined our own stories.

“When we made our own story map it just went straight to my imagination. I could make up my own characters and I really liked that. It was good,” says Sophie.

“I really liked the writing because when we started, I thought of ideas and I could pick the best one,” says Daniel.

“I really liked it because it was a challenge and we did lots of writing in our jotters. It taught me lots of new words which I didn’t know how to spell before,” says Max.

Ask your child about Story Maps and how to use them.
After the Easter break, we will redraft and publish our stories into a whole-class book. Have a look for this book in our class library on your next school visit!
We will soon move on to Narrative writing this term, and we will use what we have learned from writing our own stories to write even more pieces of Narrative prose.

PE
We have been splitting our PE timetable between using the gym hall and the MUGA:
In indoor PE we finished playing netball and basketball and will be moving on to gymnastics for our final term. We are excited to use the mats and develop our skills in movement.
In outdoor PE we will continue to play atheltics games to increase our stamina and will begin playing fielding games, such as rounders, as the nice weather continues.

STEM 

We have continued with our Forces topic. We have moved ping pong balls through a straw, used Newton Balances to measure force and more recently investigated magnetism. The whole school also took part in a STEM Day where the children participated in many exciting activities!

“I really, really liked the finger printing because I got to put my finger in ink!” says Leah.

“I liked building the bridges with paper and I want to make one with my sister,” says Ozy.

Other Areas

Thank you to all the parents and carers who were able to attend our Reading & Relax Afternoon. We loved having you in and reading with us.

We also had a wonderful time on World Book Day where we took part in fun, active experiences to develop our understanding of reading and books.

We had an amazing time on our Easter Fun Day organised by P7 on the last day of last term. Thank you to everyone who organised this activity, we had so much fun!

We enjoyed our Expressive Arts rotations on Friday afternoons. We swapped classes and learned so much! We had 3 weeks learning about rhythm, tempo and instruments in Music with Ms Craig, then 3 weeks exploring colour and line in Art with Mrs Gilroy (P4), and finished by learning about emotions and acting within Drama with Miss May (P3). This helped us enter the weekend with a smile!
Since the Easter Break, we will be going back to our regular schedule of Homework Club after assembly on a Friday afternoon to help us all be successful in reaching our homework targets.

Ms Craig is currently organising our class trip — it will be linked to our topic of Habitats and Climates. We will be hoping to go some time in June, please stay tuned!

Thank you for reading our class blog! Send us a message on Google Classroom if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing you in school for any future Open Sessions and activities we may have. Your support is so important to us.

 

Class Blog

P2 Class Blog – January ’23

Leave a comment

Primary 2 are back with a bang after the Winter break, and have settled back in to the class with ease. We have been working hard since our last blog update. Here’s a little slice of what we have been learning about since October:

Numeracy

We have been working on our number knowledge within 100 and have been thinking about numbers before and after. This has tested our Ten and Units knowledge that we built upon last term!

 

 

 

In December, we began looking at times tables. These were fun and we all really enjoyed doing ‘thigh, clap, snap!’ – please ask your child to show you how we did this with the 2 times table. We enjoyed chanting the two times table factors and completing a dinosaur 5 times table challenge the most!

“2 x 4 = 8” said Jessie.

“5 x 5 = 25” said Max.

“I know a times table I was good at – the two times table!” said Olivar.

“I enjoyed doing the times tables,” says Quinn.

As of January, we have been looking at fractions. We knew about halves from Primary 1 and now we have learned about quarters. We know a quarter is a half of a half, and we can recognise quarters in our environment. We learned about sharing equally, and we can identify shapes which have been quartered properly (where each part is equal) and can compare these to shapes which have not been quartered equally (which have parts of all different sizes). Try asking your child(ren) to quarter their sandwiches or share pennies equally!

“We have learned that to quarter a number we half and then half again,” said Jessie.

“I enjoyed colouring in the shape sheets to find a quarter,” said Arwyn.

Literacy

We have been working so hard in our Literacy lessons; we loved having you visit our class for the ‘Read, Write, Count’ book bag launch, and we all remember making our stages and puppets with you. Thank you to all who were able to attend and make our class feel very special.

 

In Reading, we have been able to develop our word attack strategies and are reading very independently now. We love doing chorale reading (where everyone whisper-reads-aloud at the same time) and we especially love doing our book walkthroughs at the beginning of the week.

“We need to concentrate and put things in our jotter properly,” said Jessie.

“We managed to move up groups in reading over Christmas. We managed to get the same books as another group and that was really exciting for me!” said Sophie.

In Phonics and Spelling, we have revised all the phonemes we have been learning since the start of Primary 2, and we use these throughout the week using the Active Literacy format. We love using our boards to make challenge words, and Ms Craig says we have been excellent in our Dictation tests so far. Well done, Primary 2!

Elliott said, “It is a bit hard when you have to mess your alphabet up. This is because we need to put them in the right spot the next time. That helps my brain grow.”

Leo said, “When we get a new phoneme it is harder. I feel good by the end of the week because we have learned it.”

In our taught Writing lessons, we have just started Procedural writing. We had a delicious time making jam sandwiches with Ms Craig. We had a wonderful laugh when Ms Craig made the sandwiches all wrong at the beginning. We learned that instructions need to be clear! We worked independently to make our own jam sandwiches and used this experience to write our own instructions. Take a look:

“Jam sandwiches! It was delicious!” said Harley.

“I loved the jam sandwiches.” said Arwyn.

 

PE

We have been splitting our PE timetable between using the gym hall and the MUGA:

In indoor PE we just started playing possession games like netball and basketball. We have been learning to move with the ball dribble and are looking forward to learning how to pass.

In outdoor PE we are playing lots of athletics games and learning how to sustain activity for longer. As we develop our stamina, we have been discussing how we feel and how our heartbeat feels. We really enjoy working together when we are outside and we hope the weather improves to allow us out for a bit longer!

Everyone said, “We missed PE when we practised our Nativity.”

Leah said, “I wish we could do PE every day.”

Logan said, “PE is my favourite thing to do in the whole wide world. We get things we can play with. That’s good because it makes me happy.”

 

STEM

Last term and this term we are exploring ‘Forces’. We have looked at push and pull and balanced forces and we even went outside for a tug of war! We have discussed when friction is good and bad, and in groups we used ramps to investigate how friction can slow down a toy car.

Jessie said, “I want to learn about the forces that go out the way like explosions and volcanoes.”

Arwyn said, “I liked doing the push and pull art with paint.”

Caled said, “I want to learn about things that float and things that sink.”

 

Other Areas

We would like to thank Rookie Rockstars for coming to our school! We got so much out of it and looked forward to it every Friday.

Arwyn said, “I loved singing the songs at Rookie Rockstars.”

Kali liked having her mum and dad at the Rookie Rockstars performance.

Harley enjoyed when all the lyrics came up at the back of the hall – that was cool!

Hannah enjoyed doing the guitar solo.

We absolutely loved performing for you at the Christmas Show. We loved wearing our costumes and being up on the big stage. Our favourite part was having such a wonderful audience to perform to. Thank you to all who were able to come along.

Since coming back to school after the Christmas Break, we have started visiting other classes on Friday afternoons to experience Expressive Arts with Primary 3 and 4.

Leah said, “I liked looking at tones of colour in our lava lamp art.”

This has been a wonderful way to kick-start the year and we really look forward to these class rotations. Some of us are learning about Art, some of us are learning about Drama and Dance and some of us are learning about Music. What we love about these rotations is that, by the end of the year, we will all get to have a chance to learn each of these areas!

 

Class Blog

P2 Class Blog – October ’22

1 Comment

October has brought gloomy weather, but it hasn’t dampened Primary 2’s spirits. We have settled into our new routine and classwork brilliantly. There have been lots of new challenges in Primary 2, but we are all working together to learn and develop each day. Primary 2 have begun preparations for their class assembly – we are very excited to be up on the stage performing for you all on Friday the 4th of November!

Numeracy

We started the year revising our Place Value, and have looked at units, tens and hundreds. We loved playing lots of games to help us develop our fluency with place value and we now use what we have learned in all of our new topics.

Elliot says, “We have been counting in tens.”

Shea says, “We have been doing doubling numbers as well.”

Recently, we have been investigating Estimating and Rounding. We have been learning to estimate how many objects there are (without counting), where a number would be on a blank number line and we even learned how to round a number to the nearest 10.

 

We are so excited during our Numeracy lessons – let’s see what we get up to next term.

Literacy

We have been working so hard in our Literacy lessons; we have risen to the challenge of Primary 2 work and were very proud to show you our jotter and worksheet work during the Parent/Carer Evening.

In Reading, we have spent lots of time discussing our stories and completing written tasks about them. We know how to complete jumbled sentences, character evaluations, beginning, middle and ends and predictions. Ms Craig predicts we will continue to be superstar readers all year!

“We have been putting things in our jotters – bits of work,” says Kaitlyn

“Every time we have a new book we do prediction on it,” says Max.

In Phonics and Spelling, we have continued to use the strategies we learned in Primary 1. We are now looking at joined phonemes and have been using what we learned last year to support us. We also use our common word wall to help us with tricky words when we do our writing.

“We make some words with our letters and write them on our boards with our pens,” says Sophie.

“We do Dictation at the end of the week,” says Leah.

In our taught Writing lessons, we have been looking at Recounts. We know that we need to retell an event in order, using ordering words like ‘first’, ‘then’ and ‘next’. At the end , we say how the event made us feel. We have tried very hard to develop our writing and are having a go at writing tricky words using a shared word bank.

“We have been writing about the cat and the bird. The cat was on the chair and the cat went off the chair. The bird went in the bird bath,” says Halle.

“One of the words we used was ‘next’. We put that at the beginning of our sentences,” says Ozy.

“We need to remember a capital letter and a full stop,” says Lily. “And finger spaces!” says Shea.

PE

We have been splitting our PE timetable between using the gym hall and the outdoor quadrangle:

In indoor PE we have been developing our fitness skills using lots of rotation games like skipping, relay races and ‘be the teacher’. We really enjoyed ‘be the teacher’ because we got to tell our friends which exercises they could do. We measured our heart rates and talked about what we can do to make us fit and healthy.

In outdoor PE we have been orienteering and working as a group to follow design briefs to recreate pictures using gym apparatus.

STEM

We have been looking at the movement of the sun, Earth and moon. We have learned about new moon missions happening now and have developed our engineering skills by building with the KAPLA bricks.

Leah says she enjoyed using the Kapla blocks because, ‘I like building things.’

Ozy enjoyed finding out about the Artemis program to go back to the moon. He said, ‘I would like to go to the moon when I’m older!’

Sophie says, ‘I liked finding out about the Earth because I like Science.’

Jessie says she enjoyed doing Night and Day pictures.

Other Areas

We have been working hard to memorise our lines and develop our performing skills ahead of our Class Assembly. Our assembly will be all about Bonfire Night and Fire Safety. We can’t wait to share what we’ve been up to. Stay tuned to see how we get on with our big performance!