Author: Miss Muir

We have been getting into the Christmas spirit in P2A and we can’t believe Santa comes next week!

We had our Christmas party on Monday where we had lots of fun with the P1’s and P2’s. We played lots of party games like musical statues. The teachers found it really tricky to spot who was moving, we were all so still. We looked very smart in our party clothes, even Miss Muir wore her special reindeer antlers. We even had a surprise visit from Santa at the end who gave us a class present. He was making sure that we were all on the nice list first before he gave us it!

As a class we have been doing some Christmas themed French. We played Camembear’s bauble challenge on his Christmas tree. We had to say the colour of the bauble that was shown to us on the board then find it on the tree. The bauble then had a number on it which we had to say in French to guess another bauble on the tree. We had lots of fun practising our French colours and numbers playing this game. We also learnt some new Christmas words in French. We learned words like Christmas tree and presents. We played a fun presents game to help us with this learning.

We had a special visit from P3 this week. They had created their own games with magnets as they have been learning about magnets. We worked in pairs and the P3’s told us how to play their game. There were so many to choose from such as catch the fish. We were great at taking turns playing the games and being kind towards one another. Hopefully P3 can come back again one day with more games to play!

In Literacy we have been revising some of our blends. We have been able to create mind maps of words that have the blends and been finishing off sentences using them. Some of us were able to make them Christmas themed! In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been solving number problems and recalling our number facts to 20/100. We are looking forward to starting subtraction in the New Year.

We hope you all have a fun filled Christmas and a Happy New Year when it comes. See you in 2020!

P2A and Miss Muir 🙂

What an extra busy week we have had in P2A. It has flown by, must have been all the singing and dancing we have done!

Look below at what we have been doing in our play based learning…

This week we showed our Nativity: ‘Lights, Camel, Action’ twice in one week. The church was such a special place to perform in. We acted, danced and sung our hearts out. We loved wearing all our costumes, it got us into character! Miss Muir was very proud of us all and thought we were all stars. Thank you to everyone who came and for being so kind with your donations at the end of the performances. You were so kind in fact that we did get our special party! We played lots of fun games and had some food as well. Even though we were Nativity mad in P2A we were still learning as much as ever.

In Literacy, we have been revising our P2 common words. We were able to create some fantastic festive sentences, played common word board games in pairs and used play dough to make our words. Miss Muir noticed how kind we were when playing the board games. We were taking turns and helping each other out if we weren’t sure about a word. We could even spot common words in festive sentences on the board.

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been recalling our number facts for 20 and adding 3 numbers (2 digits and 1 digit numbers) up to 20. Some of us have even been challenged to solve number facts up to 100 and adding 3 numbers up to 100 as well! To help us with adding 3 numbers we played a game called ‘Dice Addition’. This is where we rolled three dice, wrote the sum on a whiteboard then solved it by ourselves or with a partner. We were even giving each other clues as to what the answer could be. We enjoyed it so much that we were filling our whiteboards full of calculations! Miss Muir couldn’t believe how many we had solved. We were very proud of our work so we showed the class.

We have had a fun week this week but are definitely needing a well-earned rest. We hope you have a relaxing weekend and see you next week ready for a busy last week of term.

P.S. Please remember party clothes for Monday!

P2A and Miss Muir 🙂

It is officially the first week of December! In P2A we have been very busy practising our Nativity and having fun using our class advent calendar each day. We are counting the sleeps until Santa comes!

In Literacy we have all been learning new sounds: ‘sn’, ‘sp’, ‘fl’ and ‘gl’ this week. We have enjoyed using the magnetic boards to spell our words and like to show children in the class what we have created. Some of us created our own small stories with the ‘sn’ sound. We were able to use more than one ‘sn’ word in a sentence sometimes. Miss Muir was really impressed and some of them even made Miss Muir laugh as well. In small groups we thought of as many ‘sp’ words as we could think of using whiteboards. We thought of lots and lots. You can see in our photos below!

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been recalling our number facts for numbers between 13 and 19 this week. We have used Christmas objects on the board to help us with this. We enjoy counting them as a class. Some of us have even been solving number facts for numbers between 30 and 80. Lots of us have been having a go at creating our own number facts and creating number fact mind maps during free play. We have also been challenged to try out each other’s number fact questions. Miss Muir has also been creating Christmas number fact problem solving questions to help us with our learning.

We have also had our Christmas lunch. We got to wear our Christmas jumpers and eat lots of food! The hall had a massive Christmas tree with lights and had Christmas music playing. We were completely stuffed after all the food we ate and could have went for a nap in the afternoon!

We can’t wait to show you ‘Lights, Camel, Action’ next week in the church. We love our costumes and can’t get the songs out of our heads! We have been practising really hard over the past few weeks and are looking forward to showing you it.

We hope you have an enjoyable weekend.

P2A and Miss Muir 🙂

We are excited that December is next week and we have been busy preparing for all that is to come next month! Please take a look at our post to see all our hard work.

In Literacy we have all been learning new sounds: ‘sk’, ‘sm’, ‘bl’ and ‘cl’ this week. One of our tasks was to write ‘sk’ words in the skirt. We did this really well and even managed to create our own sentences using these words. We even included some of our other sounds we have learned in P2 into our sentences. During free play some of us created our own mind maps or “word maps” on paper and whiteboards. We were kind and helped each other out with some of the spellings. We had become reporters again this week in P2A. This time we were reporting on Dinosaurs coming to school. We had to think about what would a dinosaur do if they came to Springfield Primary? There were lots of ideas that ranged from wearing dresses in the home corner to giving children piggy backs in the playground. We were also able to create our own interesting headlines that would make people want to read our reports. Miss Muir challenged us to write an opening sentence this time and write more than one sentence for what happened when the dinosaur came.

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been learning about a new addition strategy called bridging. Some of us have found this challenging so we have been kind by helping each other out. Bridging is when we cross over a 10 then keep counting on whatever is left over. We found it easier when we add the biggest number first then the smallest number. We discovered that it doesn’t matter which way the numbers are in a calculation you will still get the same answer. In partners we were able to create our own calculations with bridging. We also have been recalling our number facts for 11 and 12. Our dinosaurs have been helping us with this learning as well!

We have had fun this week creating Stick Man pictures during free play. We used cold colours to create our pictures and different materials to create our works of art. Miss Muir even has a space on the walls now so we can put up more of our pictures as we like to be creative!

We have also been making our crafts for the Christmas Fayre. We really enjoyed using the glitter to make them! We won’t tell you what we made as it is a surprise but here is a sneak peek…

We hope you have a lovely weekend. See you in December!

P2A and Miss Muir 🙂

We have been very busy in P2A this week with Stick Man and practising for our Nativity. We can’t believe how fast time is flying by and that December is getting ever closer!

In Literacy we have been revising the sounds: ‘bl’, ‘cl’, ‘fl’, ‘gl’, ‘pl’ and ‘sl’ this week. We have also been learning ‘gr’ and ‘pr’. The magnetic boards have helped us sound out and blend our different words. Miss Muir even set us a challenge in pairs of how many words we could think of that had our sounds in them. We presented our boards in front of the class to show how many we had written down. We were really proud of them. In our writing we created our own Stick Man stories. First we watched a Stick Man animation and discussed what he was used for in the story. We then thought of what else Stick Man could have been used for. We came up with so many ideas from being used for a sparkler to a row for a boat. When writing our story Miss Muir challenged us to include how Stick Man would feel and use phrases from the story in our own writing. Some of us even tried to use speech marks.

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been adding 10 onto single digit numbers and adding teen numbers. We have been sharing our addition strategies with each other in these class discussions. We were able to come up with many to help each other, such as using number lines and cubes. We created our own questions on whiteboards and swapped with a partner to see if they could answer them. We have also been recalling our doubles. The Hit the Button game helped us with this. We have been learning what a near double is. We enjoyed playing the near doubles bus board game to help us with our new learning and doubling space race to double even bigger numbers.

We had a special visit from Camembear this week. It has been his first time in P2A this year! Camembear had forgotten our names from P1 so we had to introduce ourselves to Camembear in French. We then revised our colours and learned some new ones by playing a matching game on the board. Miss Muir was very impressed at how well we could listen then say the word back. We had fun looking for different things in the classroom that were the colours we had been discussing and saying their colour in French. Some of us drew and some of us ticked how many things we could see.

 

Other highlights of the week…

We hope you have a lovely weekend. See you next week!

P2A and Miss Muir 🙂

We have went dinosaur mad this week. We have had lots of fun learning about dinosaurs and much more. Please take a look at what we have been up to.

We had some special visitors in our class over the weekend. We discovered dinosaur footprints in our classroom as we came in on Monday morning! We have had fun during free play playing with the dinosaurs in our tuff tray and making dinosaur shows in our theatre. As a class we have been learning what a dinosaur is and what extinct means. We then looked at what animals today are endangered and who could become extinct in the future. We enjoyed working in groups trying to think of animals we know that are endangered. We created our own dinosaur fact cards where we could choose the dinosaur we wanted to find out more information about. Miss Muir played a clip called the Triceratops rap which was funny and very catchy. It helped us remember how many horns they have!

In Literacy we have been learning the sounds: ‘pl’, ‘sl’, ‘dr’ and ‘fr’ this week. We did well in blending our words and writing them in sentences. We were able to think of lots of words with our sounds, we could have done it all day! There weren’t enough frog’s lilly pads for us to write our ‘fr’ words on. Some of us were writing as many words as we could think of with our sounds during free play and creating a ‘pl’ flower in a plant pot. We enjoyed searching for silly words with Miss Muir in a Triceratops text. We learned lots about Triceratops as well as making sure we read the text carefully. Miss Muir was very impressed with how well we could find the silly words and replace them with sensible ones.

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been continuing with our learning of 3D shapes and their properties. We learned new words: faces and edges and counted these on different 3D shapes. We had fun creating 3D shape animals. We had to work out how to make the different shapes to create our animals. In Number Talks this week we were discussing splat questions. Splat is when we see coloured circles, we count them then a splat covers some of them. We then need to say how many coloured circles are under the splat and how we reached our answer. It has been good to hear how people can see one splat in lots of different ways and it is helping us practise our addition skills too.

Thank you for reading our class blog. See you next week!

P2A and Miss Muir 🙂

It was a very busy week in our class with fireworks, new sounds and more. We can’t believe that is us in November already! Please take a look at what we have been doing.

Fireworks was a big theme in our classroom this week as it was Bonfire Night on Tuesday. We liked talking about what we were doing for this and where we were going to watch the fireworks. In class we read a firework story and created our own firework poems (you can read about this further on in the blog). We were able to make our own fireworks in the tuff tray using different coloured chalk. We also watched a Disneyland fireworks show to give us inspiration of drawing our own fireworks picture. We discussed the shapes, colours, sounds and sizes of them. We used oil pastels to create our works of art.

In Literacy we have been learning the sounds: ‘fl’, ‘gl’, ‘br’ and ‘cr’ this week. We did well in creating our own sentences with our new sounds and finding all the ‘br’ pictures. We were able to spot ‘fl’ words in a postcard that was sent to the class and write ‘fl’ words in the fluffy foam. The fluffy foam was so soft and smooth to write our words in. Since it was Bonfire Night we created a piece of writing that was firework themed. We wrote our own acrostic poems. Miss Muir even read out a firework poem to us. We closed our eyes and imagined the fireworks which helped us to discover how important it is to use describing words in our writing. We were then able to describe the sounds and colours fireworks make and write these in our own poems. Miss Muir was impressed with the different words we were able to come up with and how hard we tried to include describing words.

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been continuing with our learning of 2D shapes and learned some new ones: pentagons, hexagons and octagons. We discovered how many sides and corners they had. Some of us even learned what a nonagon was! We had fun trying to draw these. Miss Muir even had a go at drawing one. During free play we have enjoyed making our own shape pictures and posters to show our learning. We have also used shapes to complete and create our own patterns. Our class mind map of 2D shapes is looking very full now on our wall this means we have had to start a new mind map for our 3D shape learning. Thank you to those who came to our Number Talks event, we enjoyed having visitors in our classroom and we hoped you enjoyed coming along too.

In Science with Mrs Bergarnie we learned about pitch. We made our own instruments using tubs and elastic bands. We had to figure out which bands made a higher or lower sound. We had so much fun making these and doing our own performances in front of the class after. Some of us had even decided on names for our instruments: ‘tubguitar’, ‘bitar’, ‘harp’, ‘child designed guitar’ and ‘tubar’. We couldn’t choose as a class what our favourite name was. Do you have one?

Thank you for reading our blog. We hope you have a lovely weekend!

P2A and Miss Muir 🙂

Halloween had definitely landed in our classroom this week! We had fun creating our potions made out of all sorts of spooky things and pretending to be a witch. There might have been a spider or two as well! We also had our Spooky Event. Miss Muir thought our costumes were fantastic and couldn’t recognise some of us. We danced, listened to a story read by Mr Wells, turned people into mummy’s and had food. It was a busy afternoon! By the end we were feeling a little tired after all the dancing and fun we had.

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been finishing our numbers to 100 topic this week and been showing off all our learning to Miss Muir. Last week we counted in 2’s and 10’s as well as estimating and rounding using a number line to help us. We are excited to be starting 2D and 3D shapes over the coming week. We enjoyed the shape ‘feely bag’. We had to close our eyes and pick out a shape and guess what the shape was without looking at it. We were also able to discuss and explain how many sides certain 2D shapes have. We created shape Haunted Houses where we had to find and identify 2D shapes. Some of them looked very spooky. During Number Talks we have been taking part in ‘Esti Mysteries’ in a slightly different way. We don’t have any clues so we have to estimate how many objects there are on our first guess. We then compare our answer to another jar with objects and estimate how many objects are in the other jar. This has helped us to compare and demonstrate our learning of using terms such as ‘more’, ‘less’ and ‘between’.

We read a story called ‘Funnybones’ as a class. It is about a family of skeletons who go out and about wanting to frighten people but end up at the park frightening each other. In our writing we created an imaginative story using the Funnybones characters. We had to think of other places the skeletons could have visited. We came up with so many: the library, flying into space, a yacht an enchanted forest and go karting. Miss Muir was pleased at how hard we worked to include descriptive words and write in one of our sentences ‘dark, dark’ like it did in the story. During free play we also had the chance to create a house out of wooden blocks for the skeleton family. We have been learning new sounds: ‘bl’, ‘cl’,’ng’ and ‘nk’ this week. We were able to write ‘bl’ words on the black blots and write our words in the blue glitter. We had lots of fun with the glitter. The carpet saw a lot of it too!

We hope you have a great weekend! P2A and Miss Muir 🙂

We have went Lighthouse mad this week in P2A! Miss Muir set us a STEM challenge: build the tallest lighthouse. In teams we had 10 minutes to construct a lighthouse which could stand on its own using wooden blocks. We all had the same amount and size of blocks so that it was fair. We then measured our lighthouses to see which one was the tallest. All of them were higher than 55 cm! After we built our lighthouses we reflected on the challenge. We discussed if the blocks were a good material, how we worked as a team, what we used the blocks for and what we could do next time. It was lots of fun.

In Expressive Arts we created our own lighthouse pictures. As a class we looked at and discussed what a lighthouse looks like: shape, colour and lines it has. Some of us were even able to describe a time when we had seen a lighthouse. We then looked at the landscape of where lighthouses are set. To create our picture we painted the background first. This was our sky and sea. We were able to explore the mixing of colours to create our backgrounds. On a separate piece of paper we drew an outline of a lighthouse then used either pen, crayon or pencil to add colour. We then cut them out. We are very pleased with our work so far and can’t wait to finish them.

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been comparing and ordering numbers within 100. We were able to put a range of numbers in order from smallest to largest and largest to smallest. During Number Talks we have been taking part in ‘Esti Mysteries’. This is where we look at different objects in jars and estimate how many objects there are. We are then given clues as to what the number will be. We then change our answer depending on the clues until the answer is revealed. During free play we have enjoyed estimating how many fuzzy balls there are in the jar and are excited to find out the answer. Miss Muir doesn’t even know how many there are!

Last week we went out litter picking with some P7’s and read a story called the ‘Messy Magpie’. We thought of what we could do to stop people littering. We came up with the idea to create posters. We thought this would be a good way of spreading the message. We looked at what would make a good poster. We had to make sure it had a title, some sentences of what litter can do to the environment and be eye catching. Miss Muir was impressed at how hard we worked to make sure the posters looked their best. We really enjoyed making these. Some of us during break and lunch have even been litter picking.

In P.E we were improving our balance and control on Tuesday with Miss Muir. There were different activities such as hopping, passing/catching a ball to a partner, bean bag throw and pass the hoop. We worked well together in our pairs and teams, helping each other develop our skills.

We hope you have a lovely October break! P2A and Miss Muir 🙂

It has been a very busy week in P2A. Please take a look at what we have been up to!

On Monday we went out to the field with some P7’s and took on the big challenge of picking up all the litter in the field. To help us pick up the litter we used litter pickers, bin bags and gloves. We were able to pick up at least a bin bag full of litter between the whole class. We couldn’t believe how much litter we picked up in such a short amount of time. Hopefully we can go out again soon and pick up even more litter!

We had lots of fun playing with the rock pool this week in class. There were shells, rocks and animals in the tuff tray. We were able to work together to name the animals and say some of the food they would eat. We enjoyed having the water in the rock pool although the floor got a little wet at times! There was even a light house on top of a rock. We think Mr Grinling is watching over the animals.

In Numeracy and Mathematics we have been investigating 10 more than and less than any given number within 100. We learned that the units stay the same when taking away 10 or adding 10 but the tens change. Some of us were doing so well with this that Miss Muir asked us to be ‘mini teachers’. We were able to explain this strategy well to our classmates who found it challenging at first. Also we have been comparing numbers within 100, identifying the largest and smallest. We really enjoyed playing ‘Coconut Ordering’ during free play to help us with this.

During story time we read a book called ‘Dylan’s Amazing Dinosaurs’. In the book he has a fact file all about T-Rex’s. As we talked about beach habitats last week and the animals that live on the beach a fact file would be a great way to show our learning. We learnt about what we should include in a fact file and how to pick key information to write one. We either chose to write about an otter or a puffin. After we wrote our fact files we played a game of ‘Guess Who?’ We were very good at guessing each other’s animals from the descriptions.

Also we enjoyed being reporters for the Springfield Herald and Reporting Scotland this week. We played different roles when presenting the news: reporter, camera operator and script writer. We even used microphones and wore a sparkly bow tie to complete our reporter’s outfit!

In P.E we were improving our balance and control on Tuesday with Miss Muir. There were different activities such as hopping, passing/catching a ball to a partner, ‘copy me’ and bean bag throw. We were able to discuss what we found challenging when practising our balance and control. We then discusses what we could do in our next P.E lesson to overcome our challenges.

We can’t wait to see what next week brings.

P2A and Miss Muir 🙂