Day: December 5, 2019

There has been a big buzz in Primary 2/1 with the start of Advent this week, with lots of chatter about  Elf on the Shelf and Christmas decorating. We are looking forward to adding some festive cheer to our classroom next week.

This week we got all festive in our writing lessons. We wrote about what we would do if we were an ‘Elf’. The children came up with some wonderfully imaginative and naughty ideas.

Erica – I would wrap toilet roll around the toilet.

Nathaniel – I would throw things down the stairs.

Tyller – I would throw books at people.

Kayden – I would sit on top of the tree and watch everybody.

We also had a go at writing sentences all by ourselves. Mrs Stevenson put a picture of a cat in a Christmas stocking on the smartboard and our aim was to come up with a sentence which we could have a go at writing independently. We are getting really confident at using the sounds we know to help us spell words. We were all able to use /ck/ to sound out tricky words like stuck, sock and lick. We have started to use targets in our writing to help us focus on what we need to do be successful and to improve our writing. At the moment we are focusing on remembering to use a full stop, finger spaces and to use our very best handwriting.

In numeracy we have started to think about using mental strategies to help us in our number work. We have started a ‘Daily 5’ challenge on the smartboard, here we have to answer some addition calculations using our knowledge of number families within 10.

In Health and Wellbeing we are still investigating and celebrating differences. We have been enjoying starting our lessons with ‘calm me’ time, where we clear our minds and imagine we are in a calm and safe place to help us relax. Here are some of the examples of our ‘calm me’ places.

Nathaniel – At home in my cozy and warm bed.

Euan – On a beach listening to the waves crashing on the shore.

Elkie – At home stroking my guinea pigs.

We are finding that when we start off our lesson like this we are relaxed and ready to listen and learn. Elkie and Belle both described their feelings afterwards as calm and happy.

Last week we had a discussion about bullying and this week our focus was on what advice we would give someone who was being bullied. The children gave lots of sensible ideas and we finished off our lesson by drawing a detailed picture and describing 2 things we would do if we knew of someone getting bullied.

Lennon said that he would tell his friends to share the problem. Tadas said that he would say ‘Stop’ to the bully. Jordon suggested that he would say that he was going to tell an adult about what was happening. Take a look at some of our wonderful pictures.

As you can see we are getting more confident with adding important details to our work and talking about what is happening in our pictures.

For the past two weeks, we have been working on a STEM challenge. We have been reading the bible story, Noah’s Ark and discussing our favourite parts and which animals we would save if we had the chance to. Mrs Stevenson set us the challenge of designing our very own Noah’s Ark. We thought carefully about which materials we would use, especially materials which would be waterproof or not. Then we had to think about materials which may float or sink. There definitely was a lot to consider in our designs. Luckily, we had lots of junk modelling materials in our class which we could use to help us construct our arks. We spent one afternoon building our arks and choosing appropriate materials. It was pretty tricky and we had to solve quite a few design problems in the process. One problem which kept cropping up was what type of glue would work best. Thankfully in the end we were ready to make some predictions about whether our ark would float or sink and then test out our arks. Here are some of our predictions…

Here we are ready to test out our arks.

It was great fun testing out our arks, unfortunately not all of them floated. It led us onto a great discussion about what we would do differently next time to ensure our ark floated.

We are looking forward to next week and our Nativity performance. We hope that all of our friends and families can come and enjoy some super festive singing with us.