Category: Primary 2

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

Primary 2/3 would like to share their learning highlights with you:

Aiden loved writing his story about a fire fighter  in Mighty Writer.

Casper loved working with number lines to 1000 in maths.  His number line was very very big!

Daniel loved doing handwriting because he likes writing letters.  He noticed that his letters were very neat this week.

Abby loved learning about our community this week.

Abigail loved finding numbers on number lines in numeracy this week.  She would really like to make her own big number line.

Freda loved story writing because she loves using her imagination.

Rutendo loved topic because she enjoyed using the netbooks to research the work of the fire station in our community.

Rafay loved spelling words with ch at the end this week.

Bernice loved climbing in PE.

Abu Bakr liked doing number talks because he was blown away by the strategies.

Paul loved maths because he loves addition.

Mark D. loved using a number line to help him round.

Joshua did really well on Sumdog and liked evaluating his reading book.

Oliver loved going to the cinema because it was so much fun.

Lloyd, Wiktoria and Marcel loved PE because they were climbing and playing a game with the nerf gun.

Blake liked making a number line in numeracy.

Poppy liked thinking about strategies in number talks.

Seren enjoyed our revision week in Word Boost because she could remember loads of words.

Isla loved Spanish because she can count really well.

Mark K loved Sumdog and reading.

Nathan loved writing about a fire fighter using Mighty Writer.

Everyone has enjoyed updating their profiles and we’ve tried using the OneNote app to help us.

Congratulations to Casper and Mirren who were our Star Writers this week and loved reading their stories to the nursery.

Have a lovely weekend.

From Mrs Keegan and Mrs Caskie.

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