Author: wls.alloway-mudd@glow

We added to our seaside this week. We painted a lighthouse to go in our classroom. Some of us also started helping to make our ‘Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch’ display and created light up lighthouses and paper plate seagulls! Thank you to Mrs Miller for helping us with this.

This week we were studying a book called ‘Beegu’. It is about a little alien who comes down to Earth and gets lost. On Wednesday we had a surprise visit! Miss Mudd had got a text from Mr Wells saying there were aliens spotted in our classroom. She rushed from Stirling to come and see them but must have just missed them. They left us lots of learning activities in the classroom and some tasks to do. Here are a few…..

• We were building with moon sand
• Writing with our digraphs in moon dust
• Practising our fine motor skills by using the spoons to fish out alien eyeballs from the soapy water
• At the Finger Gym we were decorating underpants with patterns using the tweezers and pompoms/beads/counters.
• Moulded foil to make moon rocks
• Reading words and sorting them into real words and alien words

We were also writing postcards from Beegu back to her family on her own planet. This was our last lesson on postcard writing so we had to try and remember all of the key features of a postcard.

We used fabulous describing words to create and describe our own aliens. We watched a short film by Andy Martin called ‘The Planets’. It is a short animation showing 12 different planets. We then created our own planets and labelled them. Miss Mudd was so impressed with our creativity. We then stood up and described our planets to the rest of the class.

We used question starters to come up with key questions that we would ask Beegu if she came to visit us. We then used ‘hot seating’ to get into character and practised interviewing Beegu.

In PE this week we continued our work on movement and ball skills. We practised using the rugby balls and did some obstacle courses and team games at the end to apply our skills. We also played some games to speed up our reaction times. We had to listen for the whistle and get up as quick as we could starting from different positions.

A big well done to all of the children who have brought in their owls for Miss Baillie’s competition. We have some wonderful entries. Here is Thomas showing us his owl baby.

In ICT we were practising how to log on independently. We played some keyboard typing games and practised our mental maths on Hit the Button.

In Maths we were looking at 2D shapes. We were talking about their properties and counting their sides and corners. We used the faces of the 3D shapes to create our own 2D shape aliens!

P2A were named class of the week! Miss Mudd is so proud of them. What stars!!

We hope everyone had a lovely long weekend. It has been a short week in P2A so just a few pictures this week.

Literacy

We were busy setting targets and talking about our next steps in writing. We have target targets to help us to improve our writing and we have to try and get 3 ticks on our target cards. Some of us have got a tick this week already!

We were writing newspaper reports telling the world about George’s marvellous medicine and telling them what has been happening at the Kranky farm! We were great at remembering key details and sequencing the events from the story.

We received a postcard from the kindness fairy as she is away on holiday in fairyland at the moment. It sounds very magical! We evaluated her postcard and created a check list to make sure she had included everything she needed. We then used this to write our own postcards talking about one of our favourite holidays.

HWB

In PE we played rats and rabbits to speed up our reaction times. We enjoyed chasing each other and had to listen carefully for the whistle. We then started to use some of our ball skills in a game of benchball. We practised our chest pass and held our hands our ready to receive a pass.

We wanted to say a big thank you to Chloe and her lovely family for making us all a beautiful gold ribbon for childhood cancer awareness month. We talked about raising awareness and why it is important for people to help and support children battling cancer. P2A showed a lot of love and kindness so the kindness fairy will be very happy to hear this!

Numeracy

We continued our work on place value and practised using the base ten blocks to build numbers. We were able to identify how many tens and units were in each number.

Have a lovely weekend!

Miss Mudd and P2A x

This week started our class novel ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’. We used our predicting skills and became book detectives to try and look for clues as to what the story may be about. We were introduced to the character of ‘Grandma’ and came up with a list of fabulous describing words. We then put these into sentences and drew some detailed pictures of Grandma. We also created our own Marvellous Medicines. We made a list of some rather disgusting and unusual ingredients then created a revolting recipe for other people to follow.

In phonics this week we have been revising some of our digraphs from last year. Miss Mudd’s group were looking at the wh and ai sounds and Mrs Burton’s group were looking at the oo and ew sounds.

In Maths we have been learning our numbers to 100. We have learnt to recognise them, read them, write them and order them. Miss Mudd gave us a team challenge and we had to help her piece together the 100 square as it was all in a muddle. We had to race to put it back together and we had to work as a team. We also revised 3D shape and talked about the different properties of shapes. We looked at the faces, edges and corners. We used the shapes to create models and identified the shapes we had used.

Our P2 Pals came to say hello and helped us with our ICT skills. We practised how to log on and even created our own wild characters online.

We got a little surprise in P2A this week. Paddington Bear was away on his holidays so he sent us a postcard telling us what he has been doing. We looked at lots of examples of postcards and came up with a list of things we would need to include when we wrote one. We practised using interesting describing words in our sentences to help us describe different places.

This week we started our new IDL topic ‘From Front Door to Sea Shore’. We planned the topic together by looking at what we already know, what we would like to know and wrote down questions we would like to answer. We used google maps to look at where we live and compared Springfield to seaside resorts that we have visited. We talked about what was similar and what was different about these environments. Mairi even showed us a beach she used to visit when she lived in Australia.

Formation Friday has returned! We have been pracisiting our number formation as Miss Mudd noticed some of us have been writing our numbers backwards. We worked around the active stations to make sure we were getting our numbers perfect!

Another busy week for us.  Miss Mudd wanted to thank you all for coming and showing your support at our ‘Meet the Teacher’ evening. She is really excited to work with you all this year and always appreciates your support.

Have a lovely weekend!

Miss Mudd and P2A x

The kindness fairy paid a visit to P2A and set us a challenge. She wanted us to spread kindness and love across Springfield Primary. She even left us a little bag of kindness to spread in our class. Miss Mudd sprinkled it over us!! She left us little slips of paper so we can write about the kind things we have seen and done and put them on our display. The fairy sent us ‘The Kindness Project’ to do in class. We talked about thoughts that we should say out loud and thoughts that we should keep in our heads. Miss Mudd gave us examples of words and actions and we had to sort them into kind and unkind things. We also made a class promise that we are all going to follow this year.

This week we have had a growth mind set week to prepare us for the year ahead. We read the story ‘My Fantastic Elastic Brain’ and learnt all about the different parts of the brain and the jobs they do. We learnt about the neurons in our brain and how we can make them stronger when we learn new things and practise new skills. This makes our brain grow bigger and stronger. We made a collage of these neurons with wool, string and straws to show the strong and weak neurons.

We compared our brains to an elastic band. When we stretch it, it grows bigger. Here are our brains at the beginning of P2…….Here they are at the end! We are going to work hard and learn new things to stretch our brains!

We also made a brain hat to show the different parts. We talked about things we can do already and we all chose something that we can’t do….YET! We learnt a song about the power of yet. It taught us that with a bit of hard work and practise we can stretch our brains and we can achieve.

We have been revising some of our Maths concepts from last year to get back into the swing of things. We practised our number bonds and addition/subtraction strategies.

We read a story called ‘The Most Magnificent Thing’ about a girl who wants to create something magnificent. But making her magnificent thing is anything but easy, and the girl tries and fails, repeatedly. Eventually, the girl gets really, really mad. She is so mad, in fact, that she quits. But after her dog convinces her to take a walk, she comes back to her project with renewed enthusiasm and manages to get it just right. After watching the story we tackled the rubber band challenge. In teams we were given 20 rubber bands and had to work together to create something magnificent. When things got hard we had to persevere and not give up! We made necklaces, ropes and even a butterfly!

We also read a story called ‘The Dot’. It is about having confidence to believe in yourself and encouraging and nurturing others. We all struggle at some point and feel like we just can’t do something.  The Dot by is a wonderful story that helps to show that with a little perseverance and a change of perspective, amazing things are possible. We used paints to create dot pictures. We used lots of different objects to create different sized dots – corks, stones, bottle lids, cups, pencils, cotton buds. Miss Mudd also set us a challenge to help us see mistakes as a positive thing. We had a piece of paper with a giant black smudge in the middle…whoops! We had to use our imagination to create a picture using the smudge. We made a mistake into something wonderful!

“Just make a mark and see where it takes you”

What a busy week in P2A!

Wishing you all a fabulous weekend!

Miss Mudd and P2A

xxx