Primary 2 – Page 40 – St Ninian's Primary School

P2M Weekly News

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.

P2M Weekly News

Another exciting and busy week in P2M.

Have you heard all about the game we played in PE this week? It was called dice dash. This game incorporates a range of skills from social interactions to speed and stamina. Ask your child about this game.

We are continuing with our number topic of multiplication and everyone is working really hard with this topic… Miss Meechan is really impressed! Our learning this week focused on ‘switcher’ sums. Sophie ‘switched’ the sum ‘2 x 4 – 2 groups of 4’ around because we can’t count in 4’s. She switched this sum to ‘4 x 2 – 4 groups of 2 because we can count in 2’s’. Great work, Sophie.

We have also been learning about ‘arrays’ to help us with multiplication. Last week we learned about arrays and this week we consolidated that knowledge through a range of activities. One of our activities was a competitive game with a trio or partner. In this picture you can see Robbie, Ethan and Imogen using the array flashcards to create and practise ‘times’ sums. Well done!

We are continuing to practise counting in steps of to help us with our multiplication knowledge of skip counting to count quickly in groups. We really enjoy playing the ‘pass the ball game’ to help us count in steps of. Did you enjoy the homework task this week? I loved reading your comments on the blog about what numbers you counted to… great work! We listened to and sang along with a new ‘counting in 2’s’ song this week. Have a listen and sing along at home too.

We finished off our maths topic of money this week. We completed a money assessment to show off how much we had learned over this 5 week topic. As well as completing this assessment we played 2 games to showcase the skills we have learned. One of these games was an ‘Orchard Toys’ board game called ‘Pop to the Shops’. Do you have this game at home? This is a fantastic game which requires children to recognise coins, count coins, pay for things with the exact amount and give change too. If you have this game at home I would love to see some photographs of you playing. You could post them in the comments section or bring them to school. As well as playing a board game we played a game on the ipads using an app called ‘Moca GPB’. Why don’t you download this app on a device at home and have a go. Let me know how you get on playing this game.

I’m sure you have heard all about our topic of ‘Transport’. All children have shown such enthusiasm with this topic and have loved learning about a range of different modes of transport from old to new. This week we watched a video of the first moon landing. Here is the video we watched:

After watching this video we wanted to make our own rockets. We had to work with a partner to create a design, develop that design into a model and think of a name for our rocket. We then took our rockets outside and launched them using our very own rocket launcher… we even remembered to do the countdown just like we watched in the video. Check out the school facebook page for some of our rocket launching videos.

Lots of the children have been interested in cars as part of our topic. We know that the roads around our school can be very busy with lots of cars… vans and lorries too. Therefore, it was important that we learned about road safety. We crossed a road outside of our school gates and remembered the important points when crossing… don’t stand too close to the kerb, look and listen for vehicles before you cross and when it is safe to cross the road remember to keep looking and listening for cars.

We had a look at the main road outside the school and spotted some ‘islands’ in the middle of the road. We know that these can help us cross one part of the road at a time. But do you know we don’t even need to use these islands? Some of us knew about the underpasses around Dedridge. These go underneath the roads which make getting to the other side of a road even safer. We also learned about ‘crossing patrol – lollipop man or lady’ and we learned how these people could help us when crossing a road. Sophie was playing a spelling game on the iPads and found this picture of a lollipop man and managed to spell the word ‘stop’. This game is called ‘spelling bug’ if you want to download this at home.

When we got back to the classroom we created posters with all of our knowledge about road safety and we even received a certificate to show that we know how to safely cross a road.

Our posters were so good that we decided we would like to share our learning with some other children in the school. We showed the nursery, P1D and even P4 our posters and gave them some tips and advice about road safety.

What a busy week. I look forward to seeing you all again on Monday for more exciting learning experiences.

P2M Number Homework

Please find the link for our number homework for this week:

http://www.ictgames.com/whackAMole/

Use this blog to tell everyone what steps you were counting in and what number you counted up to.

I can’t wait to read your comments.

Miss Meechan

P2M Weekly News

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?

A Tricky Week for P2M

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.

P2M Weekly News

P2M have had a great week and have really enjoyed learning about technologies as part of ‘technology week’.

Our number concept this week has been ‘odd and even’ numbers. We used lots of socks to help us with this. If we had 3 socks, 2 of them would be paired and there would be one odd sock, which mean that 3 is an odd number.

We played an online game about odd and even numbers. Have a go at this at home:

Odd and Even

Katie said: “2 is an even number so 32 is an even number too.”

Alexis said: “1 is an odd number.”

Sophie D said: “3 is an odd number.”

Teegan said: “9 is an odd number so 19 is an odd number too.”

We loved our trip to the apple store on Tuesday.

Jack said his favourite part of the trip was “getting t-shirts.”

Maliha said “I liked getting the wristbands with photos.”

Bartosz said: “I liked throwing the aeroplanes.”

Richard said: “I liked recording the planes flying.”

Have you checked out all of our pictures on facebook?

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.905296499586058.1073741829.342275069221540&type=3

When we came back from the apple store we continued the technologies theme by looking at internet safety. We learned about how to stay safe on the internet. Ask your child how to stay safe online.

We also completed a food technologies task. As it was pancake day we were given pancakes and we had to choose a tasty topping for the pancakes.

Sophie YM said: “I put chocolate on my pancake, it was really tasty.”

We also learned about what ingredients were needed to make pancakes.

Pawel remembered that you need “eggs and milk to make pancakes.”

Huda said “I put a smiley face on my play-doh pancake.”

We have also began our multiplication topic this week. We have done this by putting objects into different groups.

Sophie R said: “we had to count how many were altogether in the different groups.”

Michael said: “If you have 4 groups of 2 that is the same as 2 groups of 4 because they are switchers.”

Emily said: “I made 6 groups of 5 and there were 30 altogether.”

We have also began a new ‘maths topic’ this week. This topic focuses around money. The first week of this topic we have been working on adding together a range of different prices of objects. We set up a shop to help us with this.

Jack said: “We had to add items together, I bought beans and a book and had to add them. I added 30p and 50p, this was easy because 5+3=8 so 50p+30p+80p.” – Super maths Jack!!

Robbie said: “there was a shopkeeper who had to figure out the sum.”

Have a lovely long weekend and I will see you all on Wednesday.

Miss Meechan

Showing off our artistic flair in P2B!!

This week in numeracy we have continued to learn about equal groups and we have progressed onto relating this to repeated addition. In class we played a game were you had to find how many groups there were and how many in each group. We learnt this game at one of our carousel stations and have really enjoyed it. The game has been included in our homework for next week.

In counting we have been learning to count in one hundreds up to 1000!! On Thursday we refreshed our memory of tens and units. We feel more confident with place value so Miss Boyes gave us extra challenge and we learnt about Hundreds, Tens and Units. We will continue to work on this!

Miss Boyes is extremely impressed with our learn its progress. We are saying our learn its as quick a click! Our learn its will be updated again to match our progress!

In reading this week, we read about the two Grannie’s from the Katie Morag stories. We had to work in trios to think about different adjectives that could describe the grannies.

Previously we have learnt to write instructions for a recipe and this week we were learning to write instructions for a different purpose. We learnt to write instructions for “How to Wash your Hands”.

To begin the lesson, we looked at some examples of instructions for washing hands.

Afterwards we completed our plans and read our Learning intentions and Success criteria.
Our instructions were super and Miss Boyes was very impressed by how many different openers we used.

The P2B boats are complete!!! We have worked very hard on our boats and we have reflected back on our designs and mind maps every step of the way.

We were very excited to find out if our boats would sink or float. Our boats were a success and they did float in the water! We think this was because we used mostly plastic and not cardboard which would become soggy.

Last week we looked closely at the illustrations in the Katie Morag books and then we sketched some of the images.

Rachel said the next step would be to “colour in the pictures like in the books.”

Therefore this week we used water colour to complete our artwork. To begin the lesson we watched a clip of an artist painting with water colour.

Then Miss Boyes gave it her best attempt and had a go at demonstrating this technique.

She gave it a good try but our finished pieces are definitely better.
Practise makes perfect Miss Boyes!

This week was Catholic Education week in school and the theme for the week was Learning to be Merciful! We learnt about the story of the Prodigal son. Calvin, Kornel and Cameron acted out the story to the class and then we completed a comic strip to write what happened at the beginning, middle and end of the story. We spoke about the importance of forgiveness and were able to give examples of times when we have forgiven someone or when you might forgive someone.

We have started to practise our lines for our assembly next week which will follow a technology theme.

Check out our blog to find out about everything we learn in Technologies week.

Have a lovely weekend!
Miss Boyes and P2B!

P2M Weekly News

Another busy and exciting week in P2M.

Our week started off as usual with our spelling lesson on Monday morning. This week we were focusing on the ‘y’ sound e.g. my, cry, reply. Mrs Purdie came to see our spelling this week and she was very impressed with how good we are with this, we loved showing off our skills to her.

Our number lesson this focused on partitioning (breaking up numbers). We done this through the use of hundred blocks, tens sticks and units cubes. It was quite a tricky task but with lots of practise we soon got to grips with this and were ‘building’ numbers using this resource in no time! We even played an online game to further our knowledge with this – look out for this game in the homework next week!

We have done lots of practise with our learn-its this week. Have you been using your new individualised learn-its for practising at home? In class we completed a matching task with some learn-its which are quite tricky, we were working to match these up as quick as a ‘CLIC’.

We have come to the end of our addition and subtraction topic and this week we have been working on problem solving. Miss Meechan would read us a problem and then we had to decide if it would be an addition or subtraction problem before solving it. This was quite tricky but very satisfying when we found the correct answer. We also played a new board game called ‘bus stop’. Why don’t you ask your child about this game.

This week was Catholic Education Week and this year was focusing on ‘learning to be merciful’. Ask your child what ‘being merciful’ means? We took this theme and focused on 2 parables – the lost sheep and the prodigal son. Firstly we listened to the parable of the lost sheep and then Miss Meechan told us that there were some lost sheep in our classroom and it was our task to be good shepherds and find them. We then created our own ‘lost sheep’ and made this into a new display in our classroom.

Next week is ‘technologies week’ at St. Ninians. However, we decided to start this theme early. As part of our Katie Morag topic we wanted to learn about transport to and from the island – boats in particular. We looked at a range of images of different types of boats – fishing boats, rowing boats, cruise ships and even catamarans. We then used a range of recycled materials and created our own boat as part of a group. We had to think about what materials would help the boat float and what materials might sink. Floating was very important because we would be taking our boats to the pond to test them out!

We love working as a team and we are very competitive in P2M so we decided to turn this into a competition… a boat race! As you can see from the pictures Miss Meechan and Mr McCurdy took this challenge very seriously… and won the competition!

Our writing lesson this week was all about writing instructions. To do this we made crispy cakes. After we made the cakes we had to think about the different steps that were involved from washing your hands all the way to letting the cakes cool down before eating. We had some extra cakes left over so we shared these out with Mrs Purdie and some other teachers who thought they were delicious too!

Finally this week we welcomed Miss McCormack into our classroom and we are pleased that she is going to be working with us for 6 weeks! We look forward to sharing our learning with you Miss McCormack.

Sailing our way through the week in P2B!

Relating back to our previous learning we used our notes from our topic lesson to make leaflets in writing this week.
We had taken notes about the transport and weather of The Island. To begin our writing lesson, we watched Katie Morag give us a tour of The Isle of Struay. We had to listen really carefully so that we could think about what information we would like to include in our leaflets. Our leaflets were encouraging people to visit the Island. Miss Boyes had lots of different examples of leaflets and we had looked at them before we began our lesson.

After reading our leaflets we are sure people will change their minds and book a holiday to one of Scotland’s fabulous Islands rather than a break in the glorious sunshine across the pond!

Our new topic in maths is multiplication.
To begin this topic we have been learning about groups of objects.
We have been thinking about how many objects are in each group and how many groups there are.

There are 3 flowers in each vase and there are two vases. How many threes are 6?
“Two threes are 6.”

There are 2 coins in each treasure chest and there are 5 chests. How many twos make 10?
“That means that 5 twos are 10”. – Maya.

There are beautiful illustrations in the Katie Morag books. We had looked through some of the illustrations this week. Miss Boyes showed us a clip of an artist sketching. We noticed that the artist was sketching some parts darker and some bits lighter. The artist was sketching different tones. We took time during the lesson to walk around the room and view the progress of our peers artwork. We gave feedback:
“Emma has used a lot of detail in her sketch.”- Aaron
“Lennon has detail because he has drawn smoke coming from the chimneys and he has given the windows curtains.”- Kate

Working in groups we referred back to our individual boat designs to gather all of our ideas to make a mind map of all of the resources we would need to make our boats. We all took on different roles in our groups to work effectively as a team. A key role in the group was to create a sail for the boat so that It represented our group. We thought of some fantastic ideas: faces of each person in the group; our names; Scottish flag and the St. Ninians logo. Our boats are still are work in progress!

Superstars in P2M

We started off our exciting week by learning a new sound as part of our phonics: ‘igh’. This was a great task as we used a new vowel house resource to help us with spelling the ‘igh’ soon. We had to find the correct picture and put this sound into the correct place in the vowel house. We were successful learners at this task and Miss Meechan was very impressed with our spelling – some of us even managed to spell the word ‘frightened’ – WOW!

This week in our number challenge groups we have been focusing on halving numbers. We are all so good at doubling numbers and we were now looking at the similarities between doubling and halving. We started this task by cutting a plate to half to remind us that when halving an item or number we are splitting it into 2 different groups. With a partner we were given a number of cubes and we had to half the cubes with a partner. We also played ‘hit the button’ on the smart board to help us answer these questions as quick as a ‘CLIC’. Please find the link below to have practise at home too.

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

We are now coming to the end of our subtraction topic in number and we were finishing this off by finding the missing number in subtraction sums. The triangles group were using the number line and our tiger to help find the missing value. We also enjoyed playing a challenging game on the smart board which involved us finding the missing numbers – have a look out for this in next week’s homework. We also played a new game in our number groups called ‘magic cauldron’. Why don’t you ask your child about this game? We all enjoyed playing this game.

On Tuesday we were lucky to have a visit from a librarian who read us a story. She showed us three story books and we had to vote which story we would like to listen to. 23 of us voted for ‘Mouse’s First Night at Midnight School’. Have you heard this story before?

Would you believe it that P2 have been learning about coordinates?! Yes… you read correctly! As part of Katie Morag topic we wanted to learn about reading a map. We now know that in some maps you have to use coordinates to find a specific place. We had a map of the ‘Isle of Struay’ and had to find certain coordinates as well as planting objects in other coordinates. We worked with a partner on this task and it was so much fun!

We continued our maths topic of measuring on Wednesday. This week we were focusing on measuring weight. Again, we were using our estimating skills and estimated how heavy certain objects would be using non-standard units of measurement (cubes) i.e. how many cubes would it take to balance an object on a set of balance scales. We were also working on the language used in measuring weight (heavy, light, heavier and lighter). Finally, we measured using real measurements – kilograms. We done this through an interactive game on the smart board – here is the link to try it out at home.

http://www.ictgames.com/mostlyPostie.html

What a fantastic writing lesson we had on Thursday. To start off our instructions writing lesson we made a sandwich. As a class we put the steps involved in this process into the correct order before writing our own instructions. It was so tricky for Miss Meechan to pick a star writer this week.

Don’t forget to check out the school facebook page on Friday afternoon for a video of our assembly!