Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School

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

A massive warm welcome back to all our learners in Primary 6A. It has been a busy fun first week back. We have enjoyed spending time  learning more about our class mates and familiarising ourselves with our new classroom.

We  started our week off designing a name tent for our tables, this has helped Mrs Matos and Miss Hardie to help them learn our names much quicker.  Our name tents allowed us to be creative with our names, we also wrote three truths and a fib and everyone needed to guess which one was a fib. This was great fun, with a lot of laughter but we also learnt a lot more about each other.

To help us set our expectations for Primary 6, Mrs Matos wrote  various questions on a large sheet of paper , e.g. What can we do to make our class run smoothly and how can Mrs Matos help me be successful this year? Mrs Matos gave us time to think and reflect on these questions. We wrote our answers on a post it note and stuck it under the questions. We then worked in groups to organise the answers and we displayed the responses in a bar graph.

Our first week in Primary 6 has been a real ‘sweet’ week. One of our favourite activities this week was the M&M ice breaker game. Can you believe we got to eat the M&Ms too?? We played the ice breaker game in pairs. We were also given a list of the instructions. Each colour M&M was a different topic that we needed to tell our partner about, for example, if we chose and orange M&M we needed to tell our partner our dreams and hopes for the future. This was another activity that helped us learn more about each other.

An important part of our learning is being able to work together in a group. To help us learn what makes group work effective, Mrs Matos set us on a challenge. We were given three large sheets of tinfoil and some pipe cleaners. We were only given 45 minutes to come up with our own creative structures. For us to complete this challenge we needed to make sure we communicated effectively and that all team members agreed on the design, we had to plan our design and then ‘build’ it, all of this in just 45 minutes!! We all quickly learned as the clock was ticking how important listening and co-operation was in order to complete the challenge. There were some really creative designs. We all had an opportunity to vote for our favourite and the winning group was Mack, Morven and Luke with their house design, well done.

Our final highlight of the week was our trip to the Edinburgh Book Festival. We were fortunate to have an interactive author talk from Dave Rudden and J R Wallis. The talk was not only funny and entertaining but we learned from these two authors that writing is like a muscle, the more you practise the better you will become. We were spoilt with a £3 book voucher which we were able to use towards purchasing a new book. We finally had the opportunity to get our books signed by the authors.

After a busy week, we can only wonder what next week will have in store for us.

P6A and Mrs Matos