Welcome back to Primary 2’s class blog! We are officially into the final term of the year, and it is shaping up to be a busy one! The children have settled back in quickly, and we are delighted to have Miss Barrie joining our team every Thursday and Friday.
Our main focus right now is preparing for our Class Assembly on May 15th, where we will explore the differences between the Scottish Islands and the Mainland.
Additionally, our class trip to the Science Centre is on June 2nd; we are so excited!
Numeracy & Mathematics
We’ve been moving away from standard addition and subtraction to explore how numbers multiply in groups.
We have been using hundred squares and counting sticks to master skip counting in 2s, 5s, and 10s. This is helping us get a head start on our multiplication.
“Skip counting helps us count faster and gives us time to do more things.” – Harlie
“Skip counting helps us to count faster and we can use it to count things without making mistakes to help our brains work better.” – Maisie
“If my mum bought things in the shop in packs of 10, she could skip count to work out how much she was buying.” – Freya
“If you bought lots of toys and you needed to count them all, and they were in groups of 5, you could say 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and so on!” – Eshan
To understand division, we’ve been using ‘sharing circles’. We’ve been busy handing out cubes and counters to ensure everyone gets an equal fair share—a very important skill in P2!
Miss Barrie has been helping us recognise different coins. We’ve been practising how to pay for items using the exact coins needed, which has been great for our mental maths. We will continue to recognise coins up to £2, and will explore the different ways to pay for items using different combinations of coins.
“We have been learning about £1 and pennies – there are so many pennies!” – Aiden
“Pennies help us buy things. We can pay in coins or on card. Everything costs money!” – Aidy
Literacy
The children are becoming much more independent readers and writers this term and should be so proud of the progress they have made this year.
We’ve turned into a classroom of narrative story authors! We’ve been looking at how to build interesting stories, with beginnings, middles and ends, moving from a peaceful beginning to an exciting problem which is eventually resolved. We will use story cubes to roll for random characters and settings to jump-start our imagination. We are drawing on our prior knowledge of nouns, verbs and adjectives to make our stories interesting.
“A verb is a doing word. Verbs are all around us!” – Myles
“Adjectives are descriptive words. We can describe colour, weight, shape and lots of other things. For example a ruler has numbers, it is rectangular and it is informative because it tells you how many centimetres.” – Andrew
The books we are reading in our reading groups have become a bit more challenging lately. We are seeing some great progress as the children tackle longer chapters and discuss the “why” behind a character’s actions. Thank you for your support in developing your child’s reading at home.
“Reading helps us when we are older because we can think back to stories we knew when we were younger and then we could become authors.” – Harlie
“I like my reading books because the illustrations have good clues to help me know what is happening in the story.” – Leo
Having reached the end of our Primary 2 sounds and handwriting joins, we are now in mastery mode. We’ve been doing sound group challenges and developing our ability to independently perfect our cursive joins before we make the big move to P3.
Health and Wellbeing
We are focusing heavily on how we move and how we lead others:
In the gym hall, we’ve been practising our footwork and chest passes in basketball. Outside, we’ve been playing games like ‘Capture the Flag’ to work on our communication and team spirit. We are also spending a good portion of our time rehearsing our assembly.
“PE helps us to be faster and to get exercise. This is good because it helps our bodies be stronger.” – Jayden
“PE is fun and we get to play lots of games which helps us with friendships and getting to know each other.” – Myles
In class, we’ve been talking about what makes a good leader, like being a good listener or helping a friend. We’ve introduced reciprocal roles in class, where children take turns as the leader, recorder, timekeeper, and encourager. We are finding that this is helping our communication and positive class ethos.
Learning Across the Curriculum
Our Scottish Islands vs. Mainlands topic has been a huge hit. We’ve been using Google Earth to ‘fly’ from our school over to the Isle of Skye and the Outer Hebrides to see how the landscape changes.
We’ve been busy creating maps and comparing how people get to school—realizing that a ferry or a small plane is a bit different from our usual walk or bus ride! All of this research is coming together for our big assembly on May 15th.
STEM (Mr Connor)
Over the past term we’ve been learning all about forces being a push or pull on something. We made cool air rockets, modelled in clay and had a whole-class tug of war (click on the QR code). This term we’ll be learning about germs and disease – what the germs actually are and how we protect ourselves from them by washing our hands and keeping clean.
“When we played tug of war there was a team at the ladders and another team at the stage and there were mats around us. Then we had to pull the rope and whomever won was the team that pulled the other team onto their side. I liked when the winning team would give a player over to the other side for the next game.” – Mason
As always, thank you for your support at home. We have a lot to pack into these final few weeks, so keep an eye on our Instagram for more updates and photos of our island projects!
