Author: Mrs Davenport

 

This was just a short week for us but we managed to cram a lot of exciting learning in! When we returned on Wednesday we had PE with Mr McCurdy and everyone is really enjoying learning and participating in athletics. This is part of our interhouse championship and all the children are loving the competitive side to this block of PE. We also enjoy outdoor learning with Mr Hunter on a Wednesday. This week with Mr Hunter we learning all about lifeboats and their important job. We then thought about what would make a good lifeboat and made our own using tinfoil, we tested our boats outside in the water tray.

We continued with our current project of building a ‘People Who Help Us’ town. Our buildings are now complete and we enjoyed playing with them in our structured play this week.

Our structured play block finished this week and we are very excited to find out our new stations structured play next week. Watch this space…

To finish off our busy day on Wednesday we went to the library to return our library books and choose a new one. Did you ask your child what book they picked?

We all enjoy our story writing lesson on a Thursday. This week, we tried out a new concept in our writing. Everyone was given the same story starter: “Suddenly there was a loud bang and the moon fell from the sky. I was…” The stories were all fantastic and everyone has super imaginations. Have a look out for these stories next time you have the opportunity to look in our jotters.

We wanted to learn about vets as part of our topic. On Friday we had some special visitors to our classroom. We learned about how to care of pets properly and what to look out for in case our pets need to go to the vet.

 

What a fun week in P2M.

Our spelling is beginning to get a little bit trickier. We now know all of the original long vowel patterns in the vowel house and their alternatives. Have a look at how full our vowel house is.

So, we are now beginning to learn about the differences between these patterns. This week focused on the ‘ai’ and ‘ay’ sound. We learned that the ‘ai’ sound is used at the beginning and middle of words and the ‘ay’ sound is used for the ending of words. We played lots of fun games to helps us remember this rule.

Our big maths focus this week was on ordering numbers from smallest to largest as well as rounding numbers to the nearest 10. We completed some active maths games, written work and some online games to help us develop our knowledge of this. Have a look out for these games in homework after the long weekend.

We have started our new number topic of division – we are calling it sharing for just now! Everyone has been working very hard with this topic and have all grasped the idea of this very quickly. Why played this game in class yesterday – why don’t you have a go at home too? Choose from the moveable objects column in the middle.

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Flash.aspx?f=sharingv2

Did you hear about what happened to us this week? During the week we read a story that Katie had picked from the Lanthorn Library, it was called ‘Ten Flying Brooms’. Then, during lunch time one day some children saw witches and brooms in the sky! Miss Meechan couldn’t believe what had happened! The spooky part is still to come… on Thursday when we came into our classroom there were 2 brooms and a witches hat!! We couldn’t believe it. We were all so excited about this and decided to write some fantastic imaginative stories about witches. What an exciting day!

We are really enjoying our people who help us topic and we have so much to look forward to as part of this but as usual structured play is a firm favourite amongst the children so here are some pictures from this week’s structured play session.

We will be returning to the library next week to return our books and choose some news – check back next week to see what books we have picked!

Have a lovely long weekend!

What an exciting week we have had in P2M this week.

We started our new topic of ‘People Who Help Us’. All children have shown great enthusiasm for this IDL topic already. We began the topic by thinking about jobs; why jobs were important; what jobs people in our families have; what jobs could help other people etc. After our class discussion we created our topic plan. Have a look out for it on our new topic plan next time you are in our classroom. This first person who helps us that we have been learning about is a librarian. On Wednesday we visited the library at the Lanthorn to find out all the different ways a library could help us now and in the future.

The librarian read us a book called ‘Dewey the Library Cat’. This story helped us learn about all the different jobs a librarian has to do. If you would like to listen to the story again you can watch it here:

We were also given a class library card and we all picked a book to take back to school. We learned how to work the check-out system and we look forward to returning to the library shortly to return our books and choose a new one.

It was such a sunny day when we went to the library that we couldn’t resist a play in the park on our way back to school.

Our structured play has been updated to meet our new topic. What was your favourite part of structured play? What are you looking forward to doing next week?

 

 

We came back to P2M refreshed after our Easter holidays and ready for more exciting learning. There have been a few changes to our learning, one of which is our personalised tricky words. The children were really excited about this challenge in class and were keen to practise their tricky words. We spend 10 minutes every day Monday-Thursday practising reading these words with our partner. Have you enjoyed practising this at home too?

We started our new PE topic of athletics on Wednesday, each different event is a competition with all points going towards our interhouse championship. On Monday in PE, we finished off our ball games topic in PE by having a benchball tournament. It was lots of fun and all teams were very competitive.

Our number topic of multiplication is coming to an end but not before working on some really tricky sums! We were using our multiplication sums to find the missing number in a multiplication sum. Miss Meechan was very impressed with how quickly we all managed to find the missing number.

Have you heard about our ‘Creative Industries’ week? We have participated in a range of activities for this week. On Tuesday we were lucky to join in with a music workshop. It was lots of fun! We learned a new song to sing; kept the beat of the song by clapping and played lots of different instruments.

We also finished our ‘mod rock’ cars. What do you think? We have really enjoyed making these and love the finished results.

On Thursday we created a comic strip with a partner. We had to choose 2 different characters and think about an adventure that these 2 characters could be involved with. After making our comic strip we used our ideas to out on a puppet show to the rest of the class using our new puppet theatre.

We are still learning to tell the time in our maths topic. This week we were learning how to tell the time on ‘half past’ the hour. We then worked out the difference between o’clock and half past.

The game for our maths homework next week is based on this school. Please use this link below for next week’s homework:

http://www.iboard.co.uk/iwb/Set-the-Clock-Getting-Started-1432

Finally, we would like to show you everything that we have bought using the money we made from our bake sale. Thank you to everyone who bought some goodies from our bake sale.

P2M had a fantastic week. We had a few visits from the review team this week and we were more than happy to show off our learning and our skills. Here are some of our highlights…

We have been working really hard with our ‘big maths’ – our version of ‘mental maths’. We are working on evaluating our own learning and thinking about what particular ‘big maths’ we personally need to improve on. Therefore, we have had the opportunity to choose what we do in maths lessons. This week we had some different stations to choose from. We could work on our ‘counting’ by playing ‘whack a mole ict games’ on the smart board (last week homework game) or by playing an app on the ipads. This app is called ‘skip counting’ if you want to download and use at home. We could also work on our learn-its through a range of different games. One of these games is also on the ipads and is called ‘math racer addition’ – why don’t you have a go of this at home too? One of the trickiest parts of our ‘big maths’ is ‘it’s nothing new’ and recently in this section we have been working on: if 7 – 2 is 5 then 50 – 20 is 50.

   

We have started our new maths topic of ‘time’. This week as an introduction to time we consolidated our knowledge of time from p1 and extended this further. We ordered some daily routine cards from the first thing we do in the morning to the last thing at night. As a challenge we tried to order these cards backwards too! We love a challenge in P2M. We also made clocks using a split pin to keep the hands in place so we can use this clock to learn how to tell the time. The first ‘time’ we learned to tell was ‘o’clock’ – it is ‘o’clock’ when the big hand points to the 12. We used time fans to play a ‘show me’ game. Miss Meechan thought we were so good at this game that she decided that we should be the teacher. Have a look at Miss Roy and Mr Quinn showing off their teaching skills. Miss Meechan wasn’t very good at the game and kept showing the wrong time… we had to help her find the correct time. We played a game on the smart board to help us with telling the ‘o’clock’ time. Have a go at home using this link: http://www.oswego.org/ocsd-web/games/StopTheClock/sthecR.html

    

Transport is such a fun topic and we are really enjoying our range of learning experiences. As you can guess we are very excited about our class trip on Wednesday to the transport museum in Glasgow. Remember to hand in your letter back to Miss Meechan if you want a school lunch to take on the trip with you! This week we began making cars using mod-rock. We don’t have any pictures of this as it was such a messy task our hands were all too dirty to take any! Check back next week to see the finish product. As promised from a few weeks ago here are our pictures of our paper mache hot air balloons. Can you spot anyone familiar?

 

Did you hear about the fairy door that magically appeared in our classroom this week? We all had some super ideas as to how it got there and we turned these ideas into imaginative stories. Ask your child who they thought put the door there?

This week was a new session from structured play with 8 new stations. Miss Meechan and Miss Boyes had a look at our self-evaluation forms from our last structured play to check what the favourite stations were and these were slightly changed to make them even better. Have a look of our photos of our new structured play session.

 

We raised over £150 at our bake sale meaning we have £51 to spend on some things for our classroom. Have a look back after the holidays to find out what we bought.

Finally, we say goodbye to Miss McCormack who has been working in our class for 6 weeks. Thank you Miss McCormack for all the exciting learning experiences you have provided us with… we are going to miss you.

 

We started our week off by focusing on another sound in the ‘vowel house’. This week we focused on the ‘oi’ sound. Some of our words this week with the ‘oi’ sound are coin, join and toilet. We practise our spelling words throughout the week through a range of activities. Here are some of the different activities that we’ve been doing this week: we have our spelling words printed off in our letter join handwriting – this helps us with our fancy handwriting. We also practise writing our spelling words using different writing methods – play-doh and ‘doodle app’ on the ipads. We also enjoy some active games. This week we played a game called ‘obb’ and ‘bob’. Ask your child how to play this game and have a go using the link below. You will find this ‘oi’ sound in ‘phase 3’.

Katie said “I like using the ipads to practise my spelling words because it’s fun.”

Sophie D said: “The smart pals are really fun.”

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/PicnicOnPluto.html

 

We love our reading carousels in P2M. We complete a range of different activities in our reading carousels. Each day we enjoy reading aloud in a group and we are all working really hard trying to read with some expression. Reading is fun so we still enjoy playing some different games during these lessons. We were introduced to a new tricky words reading game this week – each pair got 3 50 balls with tricky words on them. If you read a word correctly you keep it in your basket, the person with the most at the end is the winner. Bartosz is playing a reading game in this picture too; he was reading lots of different words which feature in his reading book. Once a week we complete a ‘task map’. Tasks maps are related to our reading books and help promote our higher order thinking skills. Our ipads have also been recently updated with new games on with, we played a new tricky words game on them this week. The better we got at this game the harder it got!

Emily said: “the game is fun because you learn more words.”

Richard: “you learn to red more words.”

Ola said: “I like the new ipad games.”

   

Our first CLIC session this week focused on the L part of CLIC – Learn-Its – and we looked at number bonds to 10. We completed 3 different activities to help us with this. The first activity was on the smart board and we had to choose which alien pairs made 10. Why don’t you try this game at home? Here is the link for you to play:

http://www.iboard.co.uk/activity/Alien-Pairs-to-10-733

We also worked with a partner to complete a matching task. The aliens and their spaceships had numbers on them and we had to match them up. If an alien had a number 4 on it, the matching spaceship would have number 6 on it. Finally, we completed a written task to check that we understand our number bonds to 10. You could check how quickly you know your number bonds by playing ‘hit the button’ and selecting ‘number bonds’. Here is the link for you:

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

Sophie YM said: “maths is my favourite work.”

Huda said: “you used the aliens to make numbers up to 10. 1 and 9 make 10.”

 

We have been working really hard on our learn-its this week. As part of a CLIC carousel we completed lots of fun activities to help us learn these sums as ‘quick as a CLIC’. We played the ‘hit the button’ game on the smart board to work on our doubles. Use the ‘hit the button’ link above if you want to play this at home too. We also worked on a timed challenge focusing on adding on 2 or 3 to numbers between 2 and 9. We used a 1 minute timer to see how many learn-its we could match in that time – we want to try and beat that score next time we play. Finally, we played a game on the ipads also working on adding on 2 and 3 to numbers between 2 and 9. This game is called ‘math racer addition’. If you have an iPad at home you could download this app and practise.

Levente said: “I was beating other cars in the racing game by adding numbers together.”

  

We have all been working so hard with our multiplication topic in number work. This week we focused on repeated addition. We know that 3 groups of 2 is also the same as 2+2+2, we can count in 2’s so we quickly found that the answer was 6. Have a look for a fun multiplication game to play at home in next weeks homework.

 

 

We started our transport topic this week. Did you ask your child what they wanted to learn as part of this topic? I would love to read some comments about their suggestions to add to our class topic plan. We have began an art project as part of this topic – we have started to make paper mache hot air balloons. Have a look at what we have done so far… check back next week to see the finished results!

Teegan said: “Paper mache was all gooey and it was messy fun.”

 

We started the daily mile this week… how tiring! The first day we completed this mile we walked the route (5 times around the school) but we now have started to run round. It is lots of fun and it helps us get fit too.

Sophie R said: “I like running fast in the daily mile. I run super fast.”

Jack said: “we do the daily mile to help us get healthy.”

As we started a new topic of ‘transport’ this means new structured play stations. Ask your child if they can remember what stations you could choose from at structured play and what ones they participated in?

This week in P2M we haven’t had any reading books, however we have been working really hard with our tricky words. Have a look at some of the different activities we have been doing.

 

We play a game on the ipads which helps us to read tricky words. We love trying to beat our best ever score on this game.

We have also been using our POP game. In this game we have to choose a piece of popcorn and read the word on that piece. If you read it correctly you get to keep it, the person with the most popcorn at the end wins.

We have also been playing a tricky words snakes and ladders game. We have to work in pairs on this task and peer assess of our partner managed to read that word correctly.

We have also been working on our vowel house. We are now learning alternative vowel patterns and it was time for us to complete an updated vowel house which included these. Miss Meechan covered the big vowel house so we couldn’t peek at it!

We love word twister in this class. The words on the twister mat were all of our spelling words from last week which had the ‘y’ and ‘igh’ sound. We are now ready to add these to our tricky words wall in the classroom. When we play this game we count how many words we read correctly using tally marks and the winner gets a dojo point.

 

We also played pass the word this week. Ask your child how we played this game.

 

Miss Meechan and P2M.