Author: Mrs Scott

This week in P2B we received a special letter. Miss Boyes left out some magic reindeer food at our classroom door on Wednesday evening. On Thursday morning we were sent on a mission to find something that had been left for us in the classroom.
      
It was a letter from SANTA!!!
               
Can you couldn’t believe it? We’re not sure if it was Santa who left the letter or if it was the elves.
Together we sat in a circle and read the letter aloud for all to hear!

We wrote a letter back to Santa. We learnt all about sentence openers and our aim was to use them in our writing this week.

Santa knows all about our dojo points and he even knows how many we have. He also said we have being doing a fantastic job in the nativity.

Miss Boyes was extremely impressed and proud of our performances at the nativity. She knows how much hard work we have put in to learn our lines; sing our songs and play the musical instruments. I’m sure we will still be singing the songs at home! PERFECT PERFORMERS!

 

In numeracy this week we have been learning all about fact families. We have used our knowledge of addition and subtraction sums to complete the fact families. We have been learning about the inverse of addition and subtraction sums.

In maths we have been learning all about measure, so far we have measured with our feet and this week we used the scales to find out objects that weighed the same or different.

 

We have continued to learn our Scottish country dances. We have been learning the Virginia Reel, The St. Bernard’s Waltz and the Military two step.

 

Our confidence is growing with each dance and we can’t wait to show off our moves next week at our Christmas party!!

 

 

 

To start the week we learnt about St. Andrew and watched a clip which told us the story of his life. Following this Scottish theme we listened to the story “Sweetieraptors.” The book is written in scots and it is all about different dinosaurs.

We found the story very funny! We worked in pairs or trios to make up our own dinosaur names.   

Since we enjoyed the story so much Miss Boyes then read us “Wee Animal ABC”. This book let us learn scots words from A to Z.

 

We worked together to pick out our favourite Scots words in the story and we took a guess at their meaning.

In writing this week we wrote imaginative stories.  To begin the lesson we watched the clip from the song “We’re walking in the air”. We got to pretend that we had just built a snowman and it had come to life. We had to write about where we went with the snowman and what happened when we were there.

Everyone came up with a wide variety of fascinating ideas for the snowman adventure.

We have been trying super hard to beat our big maths score. We have been practising our learn its lots during numeracy and smart starts. We are becoming faster at answering the calculations. We have continued to learn about place value and have now moved onto adding in tens. Miss Boyes was happy to hear during our learning conversations that we have really been enjoying numeracy and learning about the tens and units.

 

Our science lessons this week have been super fun! We completed an experiment to find out how a polar bears blubber keeps them warm. We put oil into two bags and put our hand in the middle of each bag. We dipped our hands into the chilly water and pretended we were polar bears diving.  We compared the difference of having the blubber to protect our hands and not having it. From this experiment we have discovered that our hands did not get cold when we had the oil (blubber) protecting them.
                                   

We then found out about what polar bears eat to gain this fat that protects them from the cold. We listened to a piece of non-fiction text which told us about the food chain of a polar bear. We then recorded the information that we learnt. An interesting fat which we learnt from the book was that polar bears are “omnivores”. We have learnt that an omnivore is “an animal which eats other plants or animals.”

Another science activity which we completed was all about icebergs. An iceberg is a large piece of ice from a glacier. We had a short discussion on what global warming means and how it affects the polar bears.  We thought of different ways that we could get the ice to melt. We decided to put 1 at the window, 1 in hot water and 1 near the radiator. The largest piece of ice we wrapped in a piece of cloth.

We made predictions about which piece of ice would melt first. Half of the class thought the piece wrapped in cloth would melt first because it would be too warm. However we were fascinated to find out that this was not the case. This was the only piece of ice that did not melt.  We found out that the ice did not melt because the cloth acted as an insulator keeping the heat from getting to the ice.

Keep posted for more fascinating finds in P2B! We are super excited about our nativity shows next week!

 

 

 

When we went into class on Wednesday an igloo had been built in our library corner. We were extremely excited and we cannot wait to read our books in the igloo.
 Zuzanna- I love the igloo lots!

This week we learnt about the northern lights.  After looking at images of the northern lights on the smart board we created our own chalk drawings. We focused on line and shape throughout our drawings. To begin we outlined a template of the hills and trees to create the landscape. We then chose different colours of chalk and used our finger to smudge them together.

Look at our beautiful chalk drawings displayed on the wall.

In numeracy this week we have continued to learn our subtraction sums. We played a new game at one of our carousel stations. We called this game “subtraction skittles”.

This is how you play the game.
First you have to roll the dice to find out which bottles it will hit. –Aaron.

You read the numbers on the bottle which you have knocked down and then you do an addition sum. –Cameron

Find the total number and take away how many fell down. – Kate.

This was such a fun way to practice addition and subtraction sums.

 

For our writing lesson this week we watched an animated video clip of an Arctic explorer walking through a blizzard. This video clip was our stimulus for our writing. Before we began writing we thought of lots of different words that could be used to describe the explorer’s adventure. We wrote them down on our whiteboards.
Then we pretended to be Arctic explorers and we wrote a diary about our adventure. – Emma
We had to include dates and write them in chronological order.

Also this week we had a visit from the SSPCA. The officer told us lots of interesting information about her job and the equipment which she uses to help the animals.

Our new topic has been unveiled and it is “The North Pole”. We are super excited to learn all about it. We had a whole class discussion and thought about what we already know about the Arctic/North Pole and what we want to learn. We put all of our ideas on a big poster.

This week we began our writing lesson by watching a video clip which showed the Inuit people building igloos. We had to listen to all of the information given in the documentary and then we used it to write our own instructions. We now know that when writing instructions you give each step a number and you give the instructions a title. We will try to use our instructions to build an igloo in our story corner.

Miss Boyes: 3 boys in class showed a real interest in writing instructions of how to build an igloo. Their enthusiasm of the topic also showed during golden time. Calvin asked me “Can you come and take a photo of our Jenga igloo Miss Boyes?” I was more than happy to as I thought this was fantastic. Jakub, Calvin and Seamus had worked together on the construction and they were able to link this straight back to their writing lesson from Wednesday. I asked them how they built their igloo and they informed me that

” you pretend that the jenga blocks are ice.” Calvin.
“You start at the bottom and build them in a spiral.” Seamus.
The boys were extremely proud and so they should be too!! I hope they have a nice surprise to see that their jenga igloo has made it onto the blog!

 

In numeracy  we have been continuing with our subtraction sums. Miss Boyes is super impressed by how confident we are becoming with completing these calculations.

We are now using our number lines more independently and we can subtract single digit numbers from teen digits.  We have been working together in groups on different activities around the classroom. We really love the dice game because Miss Boyes lets us write our sums on the big board like we are the teacher.
To check our learning from the lesson we use our special spinning wheel. It is really important that we go over what we have learnt at the end of a lesson and we think this is super fun. Sometimes Paulo the parrot joins in too as he likes to make sure we have been listening to Miss Boyes.

Here we are showing off what we have learnt.

Keep posted to find out more about the clever clogs in P2B.