Author: Mrs Dick

Preparations for our Nativity performances are well underway!  The children are sounding great.  All the children have now received information regarding costumes and any relevant speaking parts.  We are getting so excited to surprise you with our amazing singing and acting.

In class this week we have been continuing to focus on subtraction in our numeracy learning.  We completed another find it and fix it piece of  about Winnie The Witch.  Winnie at witch school completed a worksheet but she got some wrong.  We had to find the ones she got right and fix the ones she got wrong.  It was great fun!

We used our Mighty Writer to help us retell the story of Tabby McTat.  We tried really hard to use connectives; but, and, because.  We had some super results.  Our star writers this week were Micah, Ibad and Amelia.

We have been learning all about hospitals this week in Our Community Topic.  We talked about a picture and then we wrote some sentences about all the different people who help in a hospital.

In PE with Mr McCurdy we were doing races.  In the races we were jumping and dancing to help keep us fit!  It was very tiring.

Have a lovely weekend

Mrs Currie

In P2 it is definitely Cool To Be kind!  The children have been learning all about choosing to be respectful this week and I loved all the odd socks!

On Tuesday we had a great trip to the cinema.  We watched the film “Flying The Nest”.  SPOILER ALERT! It was about a young bird called Ploey who could not fly yet and for a few reasons he missed his chance to migrate south for the winter.  So he had to try to survive in wintry conditions and not be caught by the mean bird of prey Shadow!  He learned that through building friendships and being kind, as well as having a growth mindset, he could do anything!  In the end he was reunited with his friends and family.

We were all so inspired by this story that on Thursday we used the Mighty Writer board to help us recount the story.  We tried really hard to use the connective “because” to link our sentences.  Thank you to Leon and Kayla who gave us two WOW opening words in our writing; Meanwhile and Just then respectively.  The results were super and our star writers this week are Christopher, Hannah S and Chloe, well done.

In numeracy we have continued to learn and apply subtraction skills this week.  We created our own calculations and have started to try to work out how we can find a missing number in a calculation.  Try these calculations out at home, if you work out an answer you can post a reply.

12 – 7 =                         15 – ? = 9                      ? – 4 = 8

In PE Mr McCurdy was working on core strength with the children and they were learning about their abdominal muscles.  The children all rose to the task well and demonstrated skill and control on the gymnastic equipment.  Jiya and Chloe had great spring in their work and Oliver demonstrated super strength and control on the rings.  Well done everyone.

What a super week.  Have a lovely weekend.

Mrs Currie

This week our learning has been sparkling, as we rocket our way through our lessons, glowing as bright as the stars!

In numeracy this week we have started to look at subtraction.  We learned that there are different words that mean take away; subtraction, less than and fewer.  We have been using cubes, counting beads, number lines and our heads and fingers to help us solve calculations. We noticed that if you are using the number line you have to count in the opposite direction (to the left) because taking away makes a number smaller!  Great learning everyone.

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button

Use the above link to go the game Hit The Button, and choose subtraction within 20 to practise some more.

For our spelling this week we have revised our vowel house story and focused on three of the patterns, oo, ee and ai (ay at the end of a word) and we learned the following words – book, look, shook, sheep, keep, seek, rain, pain, gain (play + day).  We completed a range of practical activities to help us learn these patterns.

In our “Our Community” topic learning we have been creating a Map Of Me where we learned about our place in our world.

These flip books start with a picture of ourselves, then a picture of our house, then a picture of our community Livingston, then a picture of Scotland and finally a picture of the Earth.  Thank you Mrs Burchill for helping us produce these.  They have really helped us to understand where our community Livingston is and how it is part of the community of the world.

Next week we will be visiting the cinema on Tuesday, please remember to complete the permission slip and return it to school.  Our writing next week will be all about this trip and the film we see.

Have a lovely weekend.

Mrs Currie

It has been a spooktastic week in P2!

We completed some spooky Hallowe’en art this week.

Firstly we made hallowe’en lanterns.  This focused on our cutting skills.

Then we used the outdoors to inspire some skeleton making.  We went into the school garden and foraged for useful material which we could turn into skeletons in class.  This was so much fun and it helped us to develop our creativity skills.  We hope you don’t get too frightened checking out these pictures!

In our Numeracy we had a chance to be the teacher.  We did a Find It and Fix It lesson.  Winnie the Witch was at witch school and she was given a worksheet of addition calculations to solve.  We had to check Winnie’s work  for her and fix anything that she got wrong.  We put a big version on our Maths Working Wall and used tickled pink and green for growth to help her.  We hope Winnie will grow from her mistakes just like we do in class.

For our Literacy we did a character a study from our reading books.  We all had to choose one character from our book and draw a picture of them, then list some adjectives to describe our chosen character and say what they did in the story.  This really helped us use our higher order thinking skills as we had to Understand our reading books and then Apply what we had found out to complete a character study.

Our Alien story this week was so much fun, we had to describe what an alien would see if he landed on our planet on 5th November.  We used our Mighty Writer to develop our story.  Here are the star writers from this week; Kayla, Jiya and Leon.

Next week we will be writing a story about a police officer and the jobs they have to do in our community to keep us safe.  This will be part of our Community topic and will help us answer Ibad’s pupil voice suggestion for this topic (“What are the jobs of a Police Officer?).  Have a chat at home about the types of jobs a police officer in Livingston would need to do.

As an extra try this Number Talks at home with your child.  How many beads are there on the left hand side, how did you count them?  Did your doubles knowledge help you at all?  As always if you get answer and a strategy feel free to share it with me by replying to this blog.

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Currie

It has been great being back this week.

We have started our new class topic – Our Community.

Within this topic we are going to be learning about the jobs and skills of people in our community.  The children have identified the areas they would like to learn more about;

Yasmin – Learn about vets

Amelia – Sports in Livingston

Evie – Dentists

Ibad – what are the jobs of a police officer?

Kayla – hairdressers

Amelia – working in hotels

Oliver – what kind of scientist jobs are there?

Abigail – working in the Vue cinema

Cooper – Universities and West Lothian College

Eve – Learn about St John’s Hospital

This week in Literacy we have started to use our new writing resource called Mighty Writer.  Here is photograph of what it looks like.

We use the pictures, punctuation and sentence starters to build up a sentence.  This will really help us with our learning about how to extend our stories to include a beginning, middle and end.  It will also highlight clearly when to use punctuation in our stories.  One of the main areas of focus this term in our writing is imaginary stories.  Next week we are going to write about a little alien who comes to our planet for the very first time just in time to see fireworks.  Have a chat with your child about what they might include in their story.

In our numeracy learning this week we have been practising our addition skills.  We have been using all the concrete material in class to help us prove our answers!  We then became the teachers and showed others in class how we could prove our answer.  In our Number Talks we have started to use the interactive Rekenrek.  Our focus for this is doubles/near doubles (within 20).  Here is an example of one of our Number Talks from this week.

In PE we are focusing on Fitness.  This will include core strength, stamina and flexibility.  We can’t wait to see what new ideas Mr McCurdy has for us to develop these skills.  Our PE days will remain the same for this term; Tuesday and Thursday.

Have a lovely weekend.

Mrs Currie

It has been another superb week in P2, there have been a lot of interesting and valuable learning experiences.  Here is an overview of what we have achieved.

Topic – Science (Water); We have now all had a chance to do ice painting and observations of water in its three states.  To link this learning to real life skills we undertook the task of making Vegetable Pasta (with the help of Mrs Burchill – thank you!).  When we were making the pasta the children all observed how we use water in our every day lives to cook, they also were able to apply their learning about how heating water up can turn it from liquid water into water vapour.  The children were so excited when they started to see steam as they knew this was the water boiling (and boiling over oops!).  They then learned how to chop, peel and grate vegetables.  The best bit was the tasting!

Numeracy – We have started to recap our addition within 10 skills.  We focused on the number bonds to 10 and how we can show these using concrete material and pictorially on a number line.  We then asked the question, if these are number bonds to 10 how can we adapt them and add to them to make number bonds to 11.  Again the children used a wide variety of resources to show this.  We discussed switchers too, ask your child to explain to you what a switcher is.

Literacy – On Thursday we wrote some instructions about how to make our Vegetable Pasta dish and Mrs Smith joined us for this lesson and she was so impressed with our learning.  We focused on numbering our instructions and trying to start each instruction with a verb opener.  Look out for a consolidation home learning task next week about writing instructions on how to make your favourite breakfast (bowl of cereal, toast with jam, boiled egg etc).  This week we completed our first block of spelling lessons which focused on our P2 key words and today we completed a check up task to see how we are getting on, it’s great to know if we are making any mistakes because this is the best way to learn!

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Currie

 

P2 have had a great week.  We had our first successful trip to the local library, thank you to our adult helpers who came with us.  The children were all able to choose a book to bring back to school and they then used their book to inspire them to record a drawing or piece of writing.  Well done everyone.  In class we have also been learning about the power of the word YET when we are learning.  The children are recognising that they can achieve anything through celebrating mistakes and using them as an opportunity to achieve great learning…we don’t say I can’t do it! We say I can’t do it YET!

We watch this fun song before our learning to help us remember this valuable message,

Here is an overview of our learning from this week,

Literacy – We read the book “Billy Monsters Daymare” for our boost work this week.  We thought it was really funny when we discussed that it is the opposite of our lives; Billy had nightmares about children! The children were then challenged to try to use any of the boost words when talking to me, I was so delighted when Jack told me he had a “tiny” lunch! Well done Jack.  We have also been working hard on using a wide variety of spelling strategies to help us learn our sight words.  We particularly enjoy using worms and snakes spells was and sally anne is dancing spells said.  You and your child can try making up some of your own mnemonic stories to learn tricky spellings.

Numeracy – Which number is largest?  Which is smallest?  Put these numbers in order starting from the smallest. These were the questions the children were answering this week in numeracy.  The children were using the numbers to 100.  We applied our knowledge of place value and looked at the tens digit first when comparing or ordering our numbers and if the numbers had the same tens digit then we looked at the units digit for more information.  We have been using the game Coconut Ordering (Topmarks website) to help practise this skill.  Here is the link to this game

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/ordering-and-sequencing/coconut-ordering

Science – Water water all around… We have been discussing water this week and looking at the three states of water (liquid, steam and ice).  We split into two groups and one group watched a short film about an ice festival and then used ice paints (poster paint and water mixed together and frozen over night) to colour some Artic animals.  The other group completed some practical work on observing water in its three states and learning the science vocabulary of SOLID, LIQUID and GAS to describe these states, we played a fun game outside to demonstrate the structure of a solid, liquid and gas (ask your child to explain it to you).  Next week the two groups will have a chance to swap over to experience both activities.

Have a lovely weekend

Mrs Currie

It has been a hard working week in P2, here is an overview of our learning this week.

Numeracy – Maths week has been a real success!  The children had so much fun and great learning experiences using all the maths games and activities set up in our area.  They were able to explore numbers in a wide variety of contexts for example in our ‘Ninian Shop’, Snakes and Ladders and a range of building and counting games.  They also explored shape through the use of pin boards and 2D shapes to make patterns and pictures.   In class we have continued to develop our knowledge and understanding of double digit numbers up to 99.   We have been learning how to make a double digit number ten more and ten less by using the place value system.  We have been using cubes, counting beads and 100 squares to help us do this.

At home you can practise counting forward and backwards in tens to 100 and for some extra practise try these at home,

What is ten more than 40?          What is ten less than 80?

What is ten more than 23?          What is ten less than 65?

Literacy – The common words that we have focused on this week are, have, him, his, new and my. We had a lot of fun using a variety of different activities to help us learn to read and spell these words such as finger painting, chalk writing, word processing and play dough writing. Can you think of any other ways to learn these spellings?  This week we wrote our instructions about looking after a dog and the children all had some great ideas.  Next week we will conclude our Charlie and Lola focus by reading the story Whoops, It Definitely Wasn’t Me.  From this we will write a personal story about a time when we have broken something by accident and we will try to include some detail about what, when and how in our story.

Health And Wellbeing – This week in PE we played a brilliant game which has been helping us learn to throw a bean bag/ball accurately, ask your child to explain the game to you.  Our PE days are Tuesday and Thursday.  We have been continuing with our Ready, Respectful and Safe charter in class to help us be the best we can be, and the children are all really trying their very best, the Smile Chart is full every day!  It was also great to spend time with some of our parents and family during Ninian’s Natter which was the children’s first chance to share their learning experiences and successes.

Have a lovely holiday weekend,

Mrs Currie

The children have all been given a challenge worksheet home with them today.

The rules of the sheet are,

1. Roll two die and mark in the values into the addition calculation boxes and then add to find a total
2. EXTENSION : Roll two die and use the two numbers to make a double digit number. (For example if you rolled a 2 and a 6 you could make the number 26 OR 62) Mark this number in the first box and then repeat to get a double or single digit number for the second box. Then add together.
3. You could work out which total you get most often, is there a pattern?
4. Encourage your child to talk about the strategies they used to reach their answer.

Your child can use any material that you wish to help with the addition calculations (these can range from cubes, coins, beads…)

If you don’t have any die DON’T PANIC! Here is a link to a website with interactive die for you to use.

https://www.random.org/dice/?num=2

Check out the weekly update for more fun Maths family learning activities and ideas.

Happy counting,

Mrs Currie, Mrs Caskie and Mrs Scott