In Primary 2 we went on an adventure with the book “Open Very Carefully, A Book that Bites!”

In the book a naughty crocodile begins to eat and steal letters and sentences from our story so we decided to get our own back by dressing the crocodile up in silly clothes while it was asleep. We also went on a treasure hunt around the school finding clues that the crocodile left for us. At the end of the treasure hunt we were surprised with our Read, Write, Count bags!

Primary 2 loved book week!

On Monday afternoon the whole school first met with the Rookie Rockstars team to learn and sing some new songs which we practiced every afternoon in preparation for our CD recording. Come Thursday we were all very excited to record the CD and did a fantastic job. We will be performing our songs at our concert on Thursday 22nd November and I definitely think P2/3 have some future rockstars in the making.

In Numeracy we are continuing to order and sequence numbers and work on getting faster at our human number line. We have enjoyed regular ”number talks” where a sum is presented and we need to solve it mentally. This has encouraged the children to use a variety of strategies and generates a discussion amongst the class about what strategies are the most efficient and develops children’s justification skills.

Our Charlie and the Chocolate Factory topic continues and this week we have had some discussions about the characters that we have met so far and have started to form our own opinions about them. On Friday we were thinking about some adjectives that we could use to describe Augustus Gloop and are putting them towards our character profiles. We have also been summarising the chapters we have read and using clues from the text to make predictions about what might happen next.

On Friday it was Children in Need day and we got the chance to dress spotty and bring in some money to donate. In class we decorated spotty biscuits!

Over the past weeks in maths we have been learning to sequence and order numbers. We were each given a number written on a whiteboard and were timed to see how long it could take us to order ourselves from smallest to largest. We have now been doing this as a warm up activity and so far our record is 47 seconds!! This collaborative activity encouraged a lot of discussion amongst the children about where they should stand and why. Our class record is yet to be beaten but every time we do this we find we are getting faster and faster!

We have been doing a lot of work on instruction writing and have been using story maps to help us think about the structure of our writing. We listened to a song about how to make a pizza and as a class all agreed that a successful set of instructions would tell the reader the steps they need to take, use bossy verbs and have time connectives. We then went away to come up with our own instructions in our jotter. The instructions made Miss Gill very hungry when she was reading our writing. Have a look at some examples of our work!

In reading we have been working on different strategies that we can use when we come across a word that we do not know. We have been using chunky monkey to help us to break the word into chunks that we already know so that we can then try read the whole word. As well as continuing to make predictions we have also been working on summarising and re-telling the story.

After a lot of hard work and dedication our Wonka bars are now completed and on display in the classroom. We had received another letter from Mr Wonka who set us the challenge to create our own chocolate bars. We had to make sure that they were colourful, had different shapes and patterns on them and were named. We looked at some examples of chocolate bars and discussed what made us want to try them and took some of these features on board when creating our own designs.

Our main highlight from the past week has been creating and performing a short drama to the class. In groups we were given the task to report on the opening of Willy Wonka’s factory. We had to work collaboratively to assign roles so that each group had a Willy Wonka, interviewer and two news anchors.  All children were absolutely fantastic when performing and spoke with clear loud voices and demonstrated confidence! They were all very supportive of their peers performance and provided excellent feedback which related to our success criteria, speaking loudly and clearly.

In reading we have been working on coming up with questions that start with who, what, when, where, why and how before, during and after reading. As a class we read part of the first voice in Anthony Browne’s ” Voices in the Park” which gave us a lot to think about and question. We then went away and came up with our own questions and then came back as a class to finish the voice and see if our questions were answered.