Author: WLCarolyn.Ewart@glow

Happy New Year from Primary 2/1.

Happy New Year everybody!

It’s been a quick and busy break but we are all back to school and raring to get learning. We’ve had a hectic first week back in Primary 2/1 and have packed lots of exciting learning into our days.

One of the topics we have been having a focus on, is developing our 4 social Intelligence skills which are, leading, communicating, feeling and collaborating. These are essential skills for everyday life and will provide us with the appropriate skill base for entering the workplace, which is a little while off for us but its good to make a start early!

Primary 2/1 have become something of experts at leading number talks, so much so that we don’t even need Mrs Stevenson to help! We are able to discuss and share with the class how we see the number patterns and can confidently record our calculations using the correct symbols, all whilst talking to the class and writing on the board. We really enjoy taking on the role of the teacher and helping our friends learn. Here are some photos of us in action….

 

We have also started investigating the concept of time in maths this week. We  explored different calendars and found out how many days in total were in each month as well as how many Monday, Tuesdays etc there were. It was tricky at first but we soon got the hang of it. We also discussed why it is helpful to have a calendar and how it can help us remember to important dates and get organised. We decorated our very own calendar to take home, not forgetting to circle the most important date of the year….our birthdays! Just so nobody forgets!!! Here are some examples of our work.

With Burn’s Night fast approaching we have decided to start a mini topic featuring a special visitor to Mrs Fleming’s on Wednesday……Hamish McHaggis. It was all very mysterious indeed. We got a note to tell us that a visitor was hiding somewhere in the class. After a frantic search we found Hamish wrapped up in a tartan scarf. He had brought a number of books with him to help us with our learning. The first book he introduced us to was called the ‘Edinburgh Adventure’. Here we saw lots of famous landmarks in our capital city, like the Edinburgh castle and the Forth Road Bridge. There was also lots of funny Scottish words which Mrs Stevenson couldn’t pronounce, so we helped her out! We are looking forward to learning lots more about our beautiful country with Hamish and his friends.

We had a big think about all the things we already know about Scotland and what we would like to learn about in the next few weeks, we enjoy planning together and having a say in what we would like to learn about.

 

Christmas Countdown in Primary 2/1

We’ve made it to the last week of term and we have been truly embracing the holiday spirit in our classroom. We have still been busy with numeracy and literacy in the mornings (with a Christmassy twist) but in the afternoons we have been working hard to create a number of festive pictures, decorations and take part in various festive activities.

Here are some pictures of what we have been getting up to…..

   

We made Christmas wreaths using paper plates, green paint and a variety of sparkly decorations. The finished wreaths look fantastic and we are very proud of our hard work. They are the perfect addition to a festive front door.

In this activity we used green paint and a fork!!!! to create the effect of the pine needles on a Christmas tree. This was incredibly messy but once they were dry and decorated they looked great.

Here we were using our cutting, gluing and designing skills. We had to cut out triangles to make the shape of Christmas trees and glue them onto a snowy background. Then we used chalk and different types of line to decorate the trees.

We have also been using technology to get festive. We all got the chance to decorate our own virtual Christmas tree and the highlight of the week has definitely been using ‘The Santa Dance’ as a brain break.

As well as all the fun and games we’ve been having, we have also been reminding ourselves of the reasons behind which we celebrate Christmas.  We read different versions of the Christmas story and we are getting very good at retelling it in our own words and remembering all about the different characters involved. We had a go at sequencing writing about the story and drawing pictures to go with our sentences.

Seeing Christmas is the season of goodwill and love we read the most beautiful story called ‘Little Robin Red Vest’ by  Jan Fearnly.

This is a heartwarming story about a kind little robin who gave away all of his lovely cozy vests to other little animals he met on his walk who were cold and in need. It started us talking about giving gifts at Christmas time and showing love and understanding towards others especially those less fortunate than ourselves. We also got to design our own snazzy vests for little Robin. Check out some of our cool designs…..

It was been  busy week so far and we are looking forward to the arrival of Santa soon and having some relaxing time at home with our families and friends over the holiday period. We would like to thank you for your continued support and wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Feeling Festive in Primary 2/1.

It has been a busy week in Primary 2/1 and we are now in full festive mode. We decorated our classroom with Christmas trees, tinsel and fairy lights and we have even been enjoying having a ‘real’ fire crackling on our smart board whilst we work.

      

On Tuesday we had our Christmas jumper day and our Christmas dinner, it was very yummy!

Despite all the festivities we have still been working hard in the classroom. We have been learning all about the sound ‘e’ and are making great progress using the vowels we know to help us build and write new words. We have been writing more silly sentences using tricky words and the sounds we know to blend together and create CVC words.  We also had a go at some functional writing and created some wonderful invitations to our Nativity performance.

In numeracy we are continuing to develop our skills using number bonds for 10, we are enjoying using games on the smart board to help us and practising using concrete materials to help us. We are still practising our mental maths skills every day with our ‘Daily Five’, we are coming up with lots of strategies to help us such as, counting on, using our fingers or using a ten frame.

In Health and Wellbeing we are continuing to develop our focus on Celebrating Differences. This week we have been investigating the qualities which make a good friend. We have been working alongside Primary 1 where we came together to watch the story of ‘The Rainbow Fish’, this helped us to think about what makes a good friend and what doesn’t!

We designed a Friendship Token which displayed a quality which we would like in one of our friends. We had lots of lovely ideas which reflected our class charter and school values and we were able to share our thoughts confidently with the group.

   

This week we have also been having a big think about our learning environment. We spend so much time in our classroom everyday and it is important that we all have a say in how we would like it to look and what resources we have to help us learn.  We talked about all the things we like about our room and all the things we don’t. We then made a list of what we would like changed or included. The main items to come from this discussion was the inclusion of a ‘computer den’ and to improve our class library, making it more colourful. Here are some of our detailed designs. What this space to see what happens to our classroom in the New Year………

   

To round off the week we finally got to perform our Nativity ‘It’s a Baby’ to all of our friends and family. We have been working very hard over the last few weeks to perfect the actions and words to our songs. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and hope all the audience did too! We would like to thank everybody who attended for their valued support.

Dressed up and ready to perform!

We are looking forward to another festive week before we break up for the holidays. Please remember our class party will be held on Thursday afternoon, get those party clothes at the ready!!

 

 

Primary 2/1 Weekly Update.

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.

 

A Busy Week in Primary 2/1

It’s been another busy week in Primary 2/1. We have been busy learning our songs and actions for the Christmas Nativity Performance. We are looking forward to sharing it with all our friends and family.

In numeracy this week we have had a big focus on using the symbols = and + in number stories. We have been investigating all the different ways to make 10. We are becoming more confident adding groups together mentally and using strategies such as counters and drawing pictures to help us. We made a ladybird display in our classroom to help us remember all the different ways to add up to ten.

  

The boys and girls had lots of good ideas on how our display should look.

  

Here are some examples of how we like to learn in Primary 2/1.

In Health and Wellbeing this week we are still celebrating differences. Through this we have been looking at the topic of bullying. We shared our ideas on what we thought bullying would look like and how it might make us feel.  We discussed what we could do or who we could talk to if we thought bullying was happening in our school. We had a go a drawing some pictures to illustrate a bullying situation and we were able to talk about our pictures and describe what was happening in each. We are becoming so confident when discussing our work and are trying extra hard to add lots of important details into our drawings.

   

We are looking forward to welcoming friends and families tomorrow for our Book Bug Launch in the hall.

Celebrating Differences

This week in Health and Wellbeing we have had a focus on celebrating our similarities and differences.  We started off by having a discussion about what makes us special. Here are some of examples that the children contributed to the discussion.

Elkie – ‘I love my guinea pigs’.

Euan ‘I have been to Lego land’.

Erica ‘ I love underwater creatures’.

Belle ‘I love coming to school and learning’.

Next we teamed up with Primary 1 to play a game of ‘Switch’. We had to listen to a statement, for example, ‘I have a little brother’ and stand up if it applied to us. We then had to find a friend who was also standing to switch places with. It was lots of fun and made us realise we have lots of similarities with our friends.

We then played a game of spot the difference. We examined 2 pictures and had to explain what was different and what was the same in each. It was harder than it looked!

In the last activity we had to work with a partner and find three similarities between us and draw them onto a picture. Most of us noticed that we were all wearing a similar uniform and some of us even had the same hair colour.

We are looking forward to what next week’s  Health and Wellbeing lesson will involve!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Primary 2/1 Learning Breakfast.

On Tuesday we held our Learning Breakfast and what a success it was! It was lovely to open up our classroom to all of our parents and carers to share and demonstrate the super learning which takes place on a daily basis.

We started off our morning in the dinner hall with the most delicious breakfast of pancakes, croissants and fruit, all made by our talented dinner ladies – Thank you so much for feeding us all!

It is safe to say the Primary 2/1 pupils gave the breakfast a big thumbs up!

After we had filled our tummies we went back to the classroom to share some of our Numeracy Learning.  We were able to share what we were learning, how we were learning and why. It was great to be able to demonstrate our addition skills, counting and sequencing in tens and all the ways we can use Numicon.

 

A great big thank you to all the parents and carers who attended on Tuesday. Thank you for your continued support of our school.

Deans 5Oth Celebrations in Primary 2/1

What a fantastic morning we had in Primary 2/1 celebrating our 50th birthday. Many thanks to all the parents and carers who came along and joined in with all the fun activities in our classroom. It was so busy and lovely to see so many friendly faces.

Our focus was on how we learn in the present day. We had a number of literacy based activities to take part in and we were able to explain all of our learning to our visitors and show them how it’s done!

After break we even had a visit from the ice cream van, it was the perfect way to end such a fun day!

  

Primary 2/1 Update!

It has been an exciting week so far in Primary 2/1 as we prepare to celebrate our schools’ 50th Birthday on Friday! We have been talking about birthdays and what they mean to us. We talked about what month our birthdays are in and we even got to celebrate Miss Swanson’s special birthday on Monday!!

This week we have been learning all about why we celebrate Bonfire Night. We learned about Guy Fawkes and his plans to blow up parliament. We shared all of our plans for the evening and even designed a special poster to raise awareness of how to keep ourselves safe. We were lucky enough to have a special visit from Fire Officer Steel who did a fabulous job of explaining all about his job and he also gave us some hints and tips on how to stay safe from fire.

Seeing it was bonfire night we wanted to explore lots of different media to create some fantastic art for our classroom.

We used salt, paint and PVA glue to design a firework picture.  It was tricky to create an explosion picture but the end result looked great.

We also cut up cotton buds and dipped them in various colours of paint and glued them onto a black background to create more firework explosion pictures. This was extremely tricky but it also       helps us to develop our fine motor skills too!

At the end of the day we went into the playground to create a whole class piece of art. We used a massive sheet of black paper and covered it in stripes of glue. We had such fun then throwing handfuls of glitter over the glue. Here is our finished product….

Homework superstars this week – Alfie and Archie with their fantastic 3D firework models . The boys were confidently able to share to the class how they went about building their models and which 3D shapes they used! Well done!

 

This week’s sound focus has been on the vowel ‘a’. We learned all about Inky’s vowel house and how this is a black tunnel sound coming from the back of our mouths. We did lots of fun activities to help us practise recognising and writing our new sound.

 

 

In numeracy we are practising counting in steps of 10 and 5. We have been using the 100 square to identify patterns and help us to count both forwards and backwards. Keep practising at home!

We are very much looking forward to opening up our classroom on Friday morning to showcase all of our super learning in the year 2019.

P 2/1 Weekly Update!

What a busy start to the week it has been in P 2/1.

We started off Halloween week  by concocting our own ‘Silly Soup’ recipes. We tried to think of as many disgusting ingredients as we could. We used super adjectives to describe our revolting ingredients, we had some pretty gruesome ideas! We thought about using phrases such as ‘a dash of’, ‘a pinch of’ or a ‘sprinkle of’ when writing our recipes.

To continue our spooky Halloween theme we created some fiery bats. We used yellow, orange and red paint and sponges to print around a bat template. It was messy but lots of fun and the pictures ended up looking fantastic.

One of the stories we have been reading this week is ‘Room on the Broom’, by Julia Donaldson. It is a super spooky story about a witch who keeps on dropping things but fortunately she has some helpful friends who come to her rescue. At the end of the story her broom snaps in two. We went on a hunt outside to find leaves, twigs and sticks so we could design and make her a new broom stick. It was great fun and then we even made one giant broomstick for all of us!

 

 

 

In literacy this week we have been learning all about the sound nnnnnnnnn. It is a long, stretchy and loud sound made with the tip of our tongues. We made newspaper n’s to help us remember the shape of the letter and help us when we are writing it. Primary 2 have been building and writing lots of n words in their jotters and drawing detailed pictures too! We have enjoyed practising our new common words this week by playing ‘Splat’ using the fly squatters. It is a fast and furious game but it helps us with our reading skills and recognising our new words.

   

Thank you boys and girls for all your hard work so far this week!

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