Author: wls.alloway-mudd@glow

This week we have been stretching our brains even more! Miss Mudd has set us lots of different challenges to apply our skills to different contexts.

In phonics we have been learning our consonant blends. We had lots of different stations set out to help us to read, say, write and make words using these blends.

In Maths we have been learning about money. It was Grannie Island’s birthday this week so we had to work in groups to plan a surprise birthday party for her. We had to make decisions about what we wanted to buy. We worked together to add up what we had spent and we had to stay within a certain budget. We then went on to design party invitations for Grannie Island. We developed so many skills through this task. We learnt how to budget, make decisions, calculate change, add up coins.

There was also a disaster on the island this week. The Redburn bridge had collapsed which meant Katie Morag could not deliver the post. We conducted a paper experiment to investigate how to make a structure stronger. By changing the shape of the paper, we learnt that it got stronger and could hold more cubes. We then used this learning to help us design a new Redburn Bridge. We worked in pairs to design and evaluate our bridges. We talked about what went well and what was tricky. We thought about how an engineer would design a bridge and how they would have to keep changing and adapting their ideas. During our free play time, Miss Mudd set out different materials and we had a go at making  more bridges. We showed great resilience when things got hard and didn’t quite go to plan!

In PE we were working on balance. We practised different types of balances, using different parts of our bodies. Our muscles worked hard to stay strong and still.

Miss Mudd and P2A x

 

This was the week the snow came! We couldn’t resist going out and having some fun together. We stacked, rolled, squashed and squeezed.

In Maths we started a new mini topic on Money. We were learning how to recognise and identify different coins. We were also adding coins up to 50p and £1. We linked this to our work on place value and could identify the tens and ones. We practised our skills by playing lots of Money games.

Miss Mudd set up a new Finger Gym activity this week. We had to use the coins to make up different totals. We then had to use the giant tweezers to put the coins in the right cake cases.

In Literacy we have been learning how to give feedback to our friends. We wrote a sentence then went round the circle and listened to the feedback given. We then had to write the sentence out again and make improvements. We enjoyed doing this because we could see our sentences improving every time!

On Monday Miss Baillie set us a challenge to research Polar Bears and create a fact file to give other people information. We watched videos, analysed pictures and shared our own knowledge to come up with some key facts.

This week we also started our block of Futsal. A big thank you to Neil for teaching us new skills. It was hard work!

The Isle of Struay role play area was finally open for business. We have loved playing in the Post Office and have been practising paying for items and giving change.

For Scottish week we learnt about the artist Steven Brown. We loved how he used bright colours and long wavy lines to create his pictures. We had a go too!

On Thursday we had a very special visit from Travelling by Tuba. We participated in a workshop and learnt to play music from around the world. We had to stay in time to the beat and experimented with different instruments.

At the end of each day Miss Mudd has set out our P2A learning log. We roll out the piece of wallpaper and write down all of the things we have learnt that day. It is important for us to be able to identify what we have learnt so we can reflect on it. As you can see, we have learnt a lot this week!

 

Miss Mudd and P2A x

 

 

Happy New Year from P2A. We celebrated the new year by singing Auld Lang Syne and looking at different ways people celebrate.

We also set ourselves a very special homework task. We had another visit from the Kindness Fairy as she wanted to check we were still following our kindness promise. We talked about acts of kindness and we each picked a kind thing that we are going to do this week. On Friday we all shared the kind acts we have been doing. Miss Mudd was incredibly proud and even awarded us with a kindness award! Being kind is one of our school values so it is important for us to show kindness all the time.

We started using our traffic light cups more in class. We can use them to show Miss Mudd if we are stuck and we were using them to self-assess our writing.

This week we were talking about what makes a good learner. We drew around one of our bodies and filled it with our ideas. Here are some to share with you:

• Listening skills
• Concentrate
• Ask questions
• Keep trying your best
• Show resilience
• Be confident
• Be positive
• See mistakes as good things
• Share your ideas

 

We then thought of examples of when we have shown some of these qualities. We realised that we can all be great learners!

We also started turning our classroom into the Isle of Struay. We turned our reading corner into Grannie Island’s house, we added a Post Office to our role play area and we built the Redburn bridge.

On Thursday we joined P2B for some Cosmic Yoga. We had to follow instructions and listen carefully. We stretched our bodies and developed our balance.

We have also changed our Dojo skills this term. Miss Mudd has linked them to our school values so we can earn dojo’s for showing our values.

Hope you all had a lovely break. It is nice to be back and we have an exciting term ahead!

 

Miss Mudd and P2A x

This week we finished our snow globe stories. We used our plans to write the middle and ending of the story. We all used some lovely describing words and came up with some very imaginative ideas.

We were also helping Miss Mudd with some of the corridor displays. We used cotton wool to make clouds for outside our classroom. We made flowers to go around our door and made a banner saying ‘We Grow Together’.

On Tuesday we went to P6 to play some of the board games they had made. We had a great time testing them out and we even gave our feedback to them when we had finished. We then played Sumdog with our buddies and practised logging on independently.

On Wednesday we learnt the ’Twelve days of Christmas’ song. We looked at the names of the numbers in the song. We worked in groups to solve some word problems that Miss Mudd had made up to try and stretch our brains! In the afternoon we did a lesson linked to our Christmasaurus story. In the story some of the characters talk about how they feel different and don’t fit in. We did some discussion based on being unique and special. We then completed sentences to show how special we really are. We wanted to celebrate our differences!

On Thursday we had our Christmas Disco. We danced the afternoon away and Miss Mudd was pretty impressed with our creative dance moves. We also wrote some elf rhymes based on the story of the Christmasaurus. In the book, the elves all speak in rhyme. We played a game of ‘pass the rhyme’ then worked in groups to pick a subject card and write our own mini rhymes.

On Friday we joined P2B for a Christmas craft morning and made Christmas tree cards.

What a busy term it has been! Thank you all so much for your support and help. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and New Year. Be safe!

Love

Miss Mudd and P2A

On Monday Miss Baillie took all of the infant children for a big ‘Winter Read’. They read the story ‘The Polar Bear Son – An Inuit Tale’.

The story is about a lonely old woman  who adopts and raises a polar bear as if he were her own son. The polar bear provides well for her and the villagers soon become jealous. They force him to leave his home but eventually a mother’s love conquers all and they are reunited together. This story is based on a traditional Inuit folktale.

The children have been asked to complete some work based on the book to display in our infant winter wonderland corridor.

Literacy

In phonics we have been learning our consonant blends. Miss Mudd’s group have been looking at pr, fr, gr, cr, br. We worked in partners to build words with our magnetic boards. We continued with our class novel ‘The Christmasaurus’ and set up stations with different activities for our learning showcase. We enjoyed having our special adults in to see us for the learning showcase. We used description from the story to draw the North Pole Ranch,  made Christmas lists and added up different amounts of money, designed and described new elves for Santa and used snow to practise writing our tricky words.

This week we also started our ‘Trapped in a Snow Globe’ imaginative writing pieces. Miss Mudd took photos of us pretending to be trapped and we used chalk and black paper to create our snow scene. We had to use our imagination to help us with our writing. We used our senses to help us describe the setting and used talking partners to help us come up with a mini story.

Numeracy

In numeracy we have been looking at subtraction stories for 11, 12, 13 and 14. We used our knowledge of addition to help us with our take away sums. We have learnt how to use a number line to subtract and how to use the Numicon. We have been doing a Christmas maths challenge each day to develop our ability to talk about our strategies. We were also applying our addition and subtraction knowledge to Christmas maths problems and we had to identify which operation we had to use.

Other

We made Christmas cards for our families this week. We used finger prints to create wonderful Christmas pictures. Well done to BW for moving up a group at his martial arts class. He also got a new tab. We are very proud of him for working hard to achieve this. A huge well done to all of P2A for winning class of the week again! Miss Mudd has seen a big improvement in behaviour and this has been recognised by other staff members too.

Have a lovely weekend

 

Miss Mudd and P2A

Literacy

We have been learning how to give feedback to each other and how to peer assess each other’s work. We were working on using different sentence openers and used a highlighter to identify the openers our partner had used. We then coloured in the smiley face that we thought they had achieved. We said what we thought was good about their work and gave them a next step.

It was Scottish Book Week this week so we were reading some of the Katie Morag books. We read ‘Katie Morag and the 2 grandmothers’ then compared the characters in the story. We had to find words in the book to support our answers. We read a different Katie Morag story each day and talked about the different characters that we met. We also created a giant Katie for our topic corner. We thought of words that described her and added them to our display.

We finished our BFG story this week and we have loved every second of it! We used the story as a stimulus to talk about bullying and being kind to each other. The Giants are not kind to the BFG and it makes him sad so we talked about what we could do in that situation. We made posters to help people remember what to do if someone is being unkind to them.

Numeracy

In numeracy we were using our knowledge of number bonds to 10 to help us recall the bonds to 20. We noticed a pattern! We used a rhyme to help us remember the number facts. We made number socks to show the pairs that made 20. We worked with a partner to make our socks symmetrical. We are going to hang them on our washing line.

 

Other

It was our last week of rehearsals for the Nativity. We are all very excited to perform to a proper audience. We have been very busy sorting costumes and props. Well done to Harrison for winning the Enjoyaball trophy. We are very proud of your achievement. Well done to Zara for moving up a level in swimming. So nice to hear about everyone working hard outside of school.

We have also been busy doing Christmas crafts this week. We have made ribbon wreaths for the Christmas Fair. We also made paper plate angels to hang on the Christmas tree. It was very sparkly with an explosion of glitter in P2A!

Have a lovely weekend

Miss Mudd and P2A

 

Literacy

In phonics we have had a consolidation week. We have been revising all of the digraphs we have learnt and practised using them in our writing. Miss Mudd put up some pictures and we had to write interesting sentences using our sounds.

This week we were talking about different types of dreams. We looked at examples of dreams in our BFG book. Miss Mudd even made her own dream jar and told us all about her dream of being a superhero and saving the world with her sidekick Scrabble. We used our imagination to create our own dreams. We drew detailed pictures and discussed our ideas before we started to write. We worked with a writing partner to check each other’s work. Some of the children then went home and created their own dream jars. We loved looking at them in class. What a talented bunch! We made dream catchers out of paper plates and wool. The threading really helped us develop our fine motor skills.

We also created our own giants! We came up with some wonderful ideas then wrote descriptive sentences about our scary giants. We worked in partners to highlight the adjectives we had used and gave feedback to our partner about their work. We were very supportive and showed respect to each other.

 

Numeracy

This week we have been looking at the numbers 13, 14 and 15. We created number rainbows to show all of the number facts for that number. We also used our new whiteboards to write fact families for these numbers. We were linking our knowledge of addition and subtraction.

Other

A big well done to Jacob for coming second in his Taekwondo competition. Nico also brought in her swimming certificate to show us. She talked about the skills she had been working on and we are very proud of her for moving to the next level. The JRSO came to visit this week to talk to us about keeping safe when crossing the road. Thank you for looking after us!

Have a lovely weekend

 

Miss Mudd and P2A x

Literacy

In Phonics we have been learning about the au/aw sound. We wrote our own stories and tried to use as many ‘aw’ words as we could. We were using alphabet stampers to write words and revised some of our sounds using our new board games.

We continued our work on Katie Morag and learnt how to summarise a story. We read Katie Morag and the New Pier together. We then talked about the most important events and picked out 5 key events to write about. In our groups we all wrote a sentence and joined them together to make a summary chain. Mrs Miller also helped us create a life size Katie Morag picture for our classroom. We drew around Emma Turton and painted our picture of Katie.

We are really enjoying our class novel ‘The BFG’. We did a visualising task based on the description of the BFG. We look at adjectives to describe what he looks like and thought about what kind of person he was. Miss Mudd challenged us to give examples from the story to support our ideas.

Numeracy

We have been busy making patterns on our peg boards. We talked about our patterns being symmetrical and looked at how they repeat over and over again. We have continued our work on addition and looked at the story of 11 and 12. We used number bond rainbows to show the pairs that add together to make 11 and 12. We continued to practise our doubles and we are now super speedy with our recall.

 

Other

On Friday it was Children in Need and we all dressed up in spotty clothes to raise some money for charity. A big thank you to the Pupil Council and Mrs Gordon for organising the bake sale. We loved eating all of our goodies.

Well done to all of P2A for being class of the week AND winning the peg challenge. What stars! Hard work certainly pays off.

Have a lovely weekend

 

Miss Mudd and P2A x

This week we all found out our parts for the Nativity. The room was full of cheers and excitement. It was a very special moment and we are all taking our roles very seriously! P2A have been singing their hearts out this week.

Miss Mudd was blown away by our fantastic writing this week. We wrote a diary entry pretending to be Sophie from the BFG. We looked at examples of other diaries and Miss Mudd showed us a WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like). We came up with a great word bank and did lots of discussion about our feelings. Mr Wells and Miss Baillie couldn’t believe that Primary 2 had written the pieces we showed them. They had used such fantastic description and so many wow words. Miss Mudd was SO proud. We then watched some of the original film version of the BFG and compared this to the book.

In Phonics we have been focusing on sentence writing this week. We have been using our digraphs in sentences and sounding out with our phoneme fingers.

 

In Maths we have continued our work on addition. Miss Mudd introduced the problem solving mats and we had to work in groups to convince the rest of the class we had the right answer. We had to show the strategy we used, draw a picture, use concrete materials and write a number story. We were also learning how to add on 9 this week. We had to add on ten then take one away. We then applied this strategy to bigger numbers and used a number line to help us.

 

We started our new topic of Katie Morag. We explored the Isle of Struay which is based on the Isle of Coll. Katie took us on an interactive tour of the island. We then created our own maps of the island and used Lego to build some of the key landmarks.

On Friday we learnt about Remembrance day and we did our minute silence. We wrote acrostic poems to tell people why we wear poppies and we watched the story of the poppy. We showed respect to the soldiers who fought for us to keep us safe.

Have a lovely weeked

 

Miss Mudd and P2A x