Maths – Page 3 – St Ninian's Primary School

End of term in P2/3

What a fantastic week it has been in Primary 2/3! Lots of learning to finish a super term. It was lovely to have so many parents visit during Ninian’s Natter to share the children’s learning.

We were thinking about World of Work during Ninian’s Natter and all drew a picture of our dreams for the future. Watch out for us becoming football players, doctors, you-tubers, super heroes, artists, gymnasts, teachers, tennis players, rock stars, clothes designers, basket ball players, karate players and astronauts. Some of our work is below.

During Ninian’s Natter we also took the opportunity to reflect on our work over the term. You’ll spot lots of green and pink post-it notes in our jotters where we’ve highlighted the work that we’re really proud of and areas we’d like to improve.

Numbers all around

On Thursday we went outside to work on our maths skills. We were working on number sequences to 100 (and beyond!), skip counting in twos and in tens. Can you see our fabulous numbers in the playground?

Library visit

On Tuesday we went to the library to choose new books. We’re loving reading our new books and even managed to sneak in a quick visit to the park on the way back to school!

Our international education continued this week when we got an amail from our link school in Spain, CEIP Maria Immaculada. We were so excited to learn all about their carnival traditions.

Other highlights include:

Annayah, Oma and Dominic – I liked drawing Cleopatra because we learned how to be real artists.

Chloe – I liked PE because we did the bleep test and its going to make me faster in the Daily Mile.

Maya – I loved drawing numbers outside.

Alishba – I liked comparing numbers. I like it when I make a mistake because it helps me learn more.

Maeve, Harry and Andrew – I liked decorating eggs in art and thinking about patterns and colours.

Kuba – I liked writing the letter from the Easter Bunny thanking the animals for helping save Easter. I worked with Aaron and that improved my writing.

Pawel – I liked making 3D Easter bunny baskets.

Michelle – I liked writing because I used interesting vocabulary.

James – I liked writing the letter from the Easter Bunny. I tried hard to use connectives.

Brooke and Carly – I loved the literacy carousel because we read with partners.

Have a lovely holiday!

From P2/3, Mrs Howley and Mrs Keegan

P2/3 Weekly update

In maths we have been using coins to 99p then using our number skills to pay for items up to 99p. We’ve had to use our skills in counting in tens too. We enjoyed playing this game to practice using and counting money http://www.topmarks.co.uk/money/toy-shop-money

We have also been working on our counting skills, counting forwards and backwards from any number up to 100. This is a good one to work on at home. A handy activity is http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Flash.aspx?f=NumberSequences We’d love it if you leave a comment to let us know how you get on!

In Spanish we’ve been working hard to learn the months of the year now that we’ve mastered the days of the week. We’ve had great fun playing this game http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primarylanguages/spanish/my_calendar/games/magic_cards_months/ Try it at home and see if you can beat the magician.

Everyone worked really hard in our Literacy Carousel on Wednesday. One of our highlights was reading in pairs then giving each other feedback. We also worked on spelling using pipe cleaners, improving our handwriting skills and finding interesting vocabulary in our reading books.

Pupils from P2/3 and P3 paid a visit to St Philip’s chapel on Thursday for their Sacrament of Reconciliation rehearsal. Some of the children have been a little worried about the format so it was really helpful to have the opportunity beforehand to go along. All of the children have worked really hard completing their Sacramental lessons in school as well as their homework tasks. They know their prayers and the hymns well, so we have been reassuring the children not to worry about anything at all!

Some of our other highlights include:

Michelle – I liked writing about my friend. I used lots of connectives.

Matthew – I liked doing Sumdog because I got lots of coins. My maths skills are improving.

Kuba – I liked the maths carousel because I worked hard with number lines.

Oma and Maya – I liked the Health and Well-Being committee because we went outside today.

Alishba – I liked singing with Mrs Steele.

Chloe – I liked it when Mrs Smith came to do maths with us. I learned how to find the difference between numbers.

Levente – I liked learning about responsibility in Health and Well-Being. We thought about it in the school and in the community.

Brooke – I liked the STEM committee because we worked on the laptops to design eggs.

Carly and Angel – I liked preparing for my First Reconciliation on Saturday.

Maeve – I liked learning about Cleopatra and looking at her face so we can draw it in art next week.

Aaron – I liked Technology when I switched on the netbook, logged on, found a website then played a maths game. I used loads of skills.

What a busy week in P2/3. We’d love it if you would leave us a comment.

From Mrs Howley, Mrs Keegan and P2/3.

Amazing P2/3 News!

What a busy week it has been in Primary 2/3!!

One of the highlights of our week has been the West Lothian Sumdog Challenge. Everyone has worked so hard to achieve a great score. We’ve been working at home, working in school and even had to set up a relay team in class. We were delighted to achieve 34th place out of 211 classes.

The children would also like to share some more highlights:

Oma – I liked our maths carousel because we get to self-assess our work and this helps me learn.

Harry – I liked doing PE because we were working on tennis skills.

Maya Kasia and Annayah – I liked Sumdog because you can play games at the same time as you learn.

Michelle and Dominic – I liked working on ‘green for growth’ because it helps me learn.

Maeve – I liked researching the history of the Egyptian Pharaohs. We used Google to help our research.

Brooke and Andrew – I liked watching the P3 assembly today.

Kuba and Pawel – I liked the literacy carousel because I worked on handwriting, spelling, reflective reading and guided reading.

Levente – I liked working on writing subtraction sums and subtracting tens and units. It was hard at first but it got easier.

Chloe – I liked spelling today because it helps me learn words to use in my story writing on Thursdays.

Alishba – I liked handwriting because it helps me join letters and I get better and better.

Carly – I liked when we wrote about our friends in Big Writing.

Angel – I liked my learning conversation because we talked about my learning and mummies and pyramids.

Signs of spring

This week we have been continuing to look for signs of Spring or new life during our RE lessons. Many children have spotted some new flowers growing near our school or in their gardens. We decided to do some planting of our own in the classroom. We made lots of links in our learning when doing this:

RE – new life, Lent, preparing

Science – growing seeds, what will we need, what are the best conditions for growing things, seasons, weather

Literacy – sequencing, writing instructions

Numeracy – counting seeds, measuring soil

In phonics we learned about ‘ng’ and ‘wh’, we all agreed that they were quite tricky. Ephraim has been great at spotting ‘ng’ throughout the week in reading books or on the smartboard – well done Ephraim. We tried a new activity at our choice station this week – the ‘wh word hunt’ – we had to use magnifying glasses to spot the tiny wh words hiding in a colourful picture, it was good fun. We have also been using magnetic letters, playdough and written tasks to help us learn these new sounds. Another station was the peer assessment station, one of us read the words and the other person had to spell the words on the whiteboards, we loved taking it in turns to be the teacher! Next week we are moving onto the rude clown sound -Th.

In numeracy we worked on number names to 10 as this was something we chose as a next step after learning about money. We played games to help us do this, eg. Matching names to numbers, spelling number names games on the spelling bug app, number name wordsearches. We are all more confident now in reading number names and are ready to move onto something new next week. Remember to log onto Sumdog to take part in the West Lothian Contest this week. We will also make time at school next week during Smartstart and numeracy to do it too.

In IDL we learned about mapping and made our very own treasure maps for our pirate adventures. We discussed what you would find on a map: symbols, a key, a compass, a route. This will help us during Outdoor Learning Week where we will have a go at following some maps outside.

Pupil voice:

Dexter- I liked playing the sky phonics app on the iPads.

Klaudia-In PE we were playing hockey.

James-I enjoyed learning about Lent.

Amber- I liked learning about subtraction.

Isla- We made a treasure map.

Brooke- I liked our RE work this week.

Ephraim- I liked learning about number names.

Mark- We were planting seeds.

A busy week in Primary 2/3

It has been another busy week in Primary 2/3 with lots and lots of learning going on! Some of our highlights are:

Andrew – I liked designing a coffin for a mummy. We had to do lots of research first.

Michelle- I liked using the new Heinemann textbooks because I’m getting better at numbers.

Matthew – I liked taking away numbers this week. I used a number square to help me.

Carly – I liked doing our spelling test because it helps me learn words. We keep learning from our mistakes.

Brooke – I liked doing chimney sums in maths. We’re getting really good at them!

Jakub, Annayah, Pawel, Levente, James and Harry – I liked Big Writing when we wrote book reviews for the Killer Cat

Rachel – I liked today’s assembly because pupils from St Margaret’s came to talk to us about SCIAF.

Alishba – I liked when we were doing music with Mrs Steele. We got to dance!

Dominic – I liked doing Sumdog and I’m excited about the West Lothian contest.

Chloe and Maeve – I liked doing art when we made pictures of camels and pyramids.

Maya – I liked working in pairs on Heinemann Active Maths. Its fun working in pairs and it helps you learn.

Zuzanna and Kasia – I liked PE because we were learning tennis skills.

Oma – I liked investigating mummies in Ancient Egypt.

Calvin – I liked working in teams to make posters showing a healthy school in health and well-being.

Have a great weekend!

from Primary 2/3, Mrs Howley and Mrs Keegan

Bookworms in P1R

What a busy week it has been, we have lots of things to share with you this week.

As the title suggest books have been a big focus in school as we celebrated World Book Day, lots of us dressed us as characters from books.

Our P7 buddies continue to visit us weekly to do paired reading during smart start time. We always look forward to their visits. The PM nursery also visited us this week for a shared reading session with Mrs Young. The boys and girls from the nursery have started their transition programme so will be visiting us more often. James commented that he remembered coming to P1 for World Book Day when be was a nursery boy. How time flies… We decided to become authors in our writing lesson and made our very own picture books. We had to remember to put a title, author, page numbers and pictures, just like in real books. Here are some of the titles chosen by the children:

Lloyd – The Busy Road

Lucy- The Busy teacher

Brooke – The wizard of Oz

Nathan- The tornado

Everyone wrote independently and some even took on the fantastic challenge to add sentences to their stories. Dawid asked if we could go and share our stories with Mrs Purdie AKA Gangsta Granny so that’s what we did. We have also downloaded some new ebooks on our iPads, ask us what ones we have read this week.

Money has still been the main focus in mathematics. We have been learning about more coins this week, 20p, 50p,£1, £2. We all agree that the pounds are the trickiest to remember. Next week we will focus on number names to 10 as we noticed that many coins have the words written on them but we sometimes found it tricky to read them. One of our favourite activities was coin rubbing although sometimes the coins moved around as we rubbed! Try some more rubbing at home, this is one of the homework tasks on the maths menu this term.

In PE we continued to practise our skills in hockey, dribbling, passing, tackling and shooting. Mr Mc Curdy was so impressed with us that he let us play small matches.

On Tuesday we learned about Shrove Tuesday, a day when we have a feast before the beginning of Lent. Mrs Caskie kindly brought in pancakes for us to join in with the celebrations. Then the next day we changed our altar colour to purple as this is the colour for Lent. We also added some daffodils to our altar to represent new beginnings, a sign of Spring, thank you to James for bringing these in. We all joined in with the Ash Wednesday service then came back to class to do some self portrait pictures using pencils and charcoal for the ashes on our foreheads. P4 also did their class assembly about Lent helping us understand more about this important time in the church year. The week ended with a visit from some boys and girls who go to St Margaret’s but used to come to St Ninian’s, they told us all about Malawi and how we can help children who love there. During Lent we are going to try to fill some bags with gifts for the Malawi children.

One last thing to share, we had some visitors in our classroom on Tuesday, they were impressed with how hard everyone was working on their phonics tasks, well done boys and girls, Mrs Roy is very proud of you all! You are all super stars!

Money, money, money

This week we have continued to celebrate Catholic Education Week in our school and discussed how we are developing as a community of faith.

We thought about how we could develop as a faith community at home, school and in our parish. We also made a beautiful display ‘Recipe for a faith community’ then wrote our very own recipes. We finished the week with a whole school faith assembly.

Real life contexts have been the focus in maths as we have started learning about money. We have learned to recognise coins from 1p to £2, ask us what colours they are or to find some in your purse! We have also been working out different ways to make totals, Paul M knew that 100 pennies makes £1 and Ephraim knew that 200 pennies made £2 – aren’t they clever!! Our pirate sweet shop opened this week which has allowed us to use money in a real life context and we have been sorting coins in the emergency money banks. Mrs Roy also let us look in her purse to identify what coins she had, this was great fun. She taught us about notes and bank cards too.

In literacy the sounds are getting harder, this week we learned ‘qu and j’, everyone worked really hard to learn these new sounds through our carousel activities – letterjoin magic words on the ipads, choice and challenge tasks, making jellyfish, qu bingo and lots more! Ask your child what challenges they chose this week in literacy and how they self-assessed themselves.

Mr McCurdy tried something new this week, you had to use a large stick and a ball…..it was hockey. We all impressed him with our dribbling skills and keeping our eyes on the ball when moving around the hall. Nathan really got the hang of this and earned an extra dojo point.

Mrs Purdie asked to see some of our jotters this week, she was really pleased to see how hard everyone had been working and how busy everyone had been. Thank you to the families who came along to Ninian’s Natter to have some learning conversations in the classroom, the children were really proud to show off their learning!

Next week we will be welcoming some visitors to our school and are looking forward to them visiting our classroom to join in with our learning.

Primary 2/3 Weekly News

It has been a short but really busy week in Primary 2/3. Our highlights included celebrating Catholic Education Week by creating recipes for our Community of Faith and making jelly then writing instructions to help others make jelly too. Everyone loved the Daily Mile today as we saw lots of signs that spring is coming.

These are some of the children’s thoughts:

Maeve ‘We made jelly as part of our Anniversary celebrations. We wrote instructions for how to make jelly then we ate the jelly. It was very tasty!’

Harry ‘Yesterday we had a maths carousel. I was learning how to subtract by playing Sumdog, using the iPads, playing games and figuring out tricky sums.’

Rachel ‘I liked writing instructions for how to make jelly. I was thinking about using openers and connectives.’

Brooke ‘We had a lovely assembly with Father Kenneth and he told us all about his visit to Jerusalem and where Jesus was born’.

Chloe, Carly and Brooke ‘I liked setting goals for the rest of the term. It helps me to remember to focus my learning.’

Levente ‘I liked playing Hit the Button with Kuba in maths’.

Kuba ‘I liked writing a recipe for a Community of Faith. We wrote instructions and I’m good at instructions. ‘

Oma ‘We did check ups in maths. It helps us learn.’

Michelle ‘We learnt about the River Nile in our Egyptians topic. We made notes in our Learning Journals and made signs for the wall.’

Pawel ‘I liked running the Daily Mile when I was running fast’.

James ‘I wrote my name in hieroglyphics. I felt really happy.’

Have a lovely weekend.

From Mrs Keegan, Mrs Howley and Primary 2/3

International week in P1R

This was the theme of the week across the school and the children took part in various learning experiences to explore the word ‘international’ and Global Citizenship. We looked at friendship as an important value for all to have and shared what we thought were good qualities in a friend. Here are some of our suggestions:

Klaudia-someone who plays with you

Lloyd-someone who likes the same things as you

Brooke- someone who is kind

Abigail-someone who loves you

We then asked some of our friends in the classroom to share their culture and mother tongue language with us. Klaudia and Dawid taught us some Polish phrases which we tweeted about! We continued this international theme by looking at children who lived in Malawi as we are linking up with St Margaret’s Academy during Lent to do some work with them on Malawi.

In addition to the above we also continued with our core learning and IDL learning throughout the week.

In phonics we learned all about the ‘ee’ and ‘oo’ sounds who live in Vowel House. We played sorting games, practised writing them and lots more. Did you know they are joining letters but only make one sound? We are really good at joining them and letter join helps us with this.

In writing the focus was to use our imaginations and think about he title ‘If I were a pirate…’ We listened to a song and a poem to inspire us then all had a turn at sharing our thoughts.

Lucy would shoot the cannons.

Dexter would sail the seven seas.

James would steer the ship.

Well done to our 4 star writers this week, check out your dojo messages to see if you were one of these!

Maths was great fun as we learned all about pattern and symmetry. We did lots of practical tasks, sponge pattern painting, smartboard symmetry, pirate symmetry using the smart pals, finish the pattern activities, Pom Pom patterns, peg board patterns. We all agreed that it was easier to stick with 2 colours when making patterns as using 3 got a bit tricky.

PE was exhausting as we have a started a new block of gymnastics, this weeks focus was on balancing and rolling. Ask us about the space shapes we learned and try some of them at home, the squatty alien was the trickiest!

Pirates have taken over the classroom, aarrrr…we’re all enjoying our new topic and have made a start at transforming our classroom and area into pirate territory. We did some fantastic pirate portraits using paint and oil pastels, they are on display on our new Art Gallery wall. We also drew pirates based on the descriptions we were given, they turned out well. We learned about the pirate code and some of the jobs the crew did. Check your letters in future, if you see a black spot it means the pirates are after you!! It has been great to see some of the activities you have been doing at home too-keep up the good work!

Finally we had something sad to think about on Friday, we had to say goodbye, Adios, Au Revoir to Miss Smyth. We have really enjoyed her visits to our classroom and playground and will miss her smile and laughter. Thank you for all your help and we wish you luck on your next adventure!

School-Home Learning: Here are some apps, websites and videos we have used to support our learning in class this week.

http://www.ictgames.com/dinosaurEggs_phonics/index.html

http://resources.hwb.wales.gov.uk/VTC/simple_patterns/eng/Introduction/StarterActivity.htm

http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/math/games/preschool-kindergarten/pattern-matcher/

http://resources.hwb.wales.gov.uk/VTC/simple_patterns/eng/Introduction/MainSession.htm

http://www.abcya.com/shape_patterns.htm

iPad app: spelling bug

iPad app: doodle app (use this to practise writing the sounds you know – make sure you use the correct colour)

Videos:

Primary 2/3 News!

What a busy week it has been in Primary 2/3. We rounded off the week with a lovely farewell assembly for Miss Smyth. We’ll all be so sorry to see her go and wish her lots of luck in her new job.

Everyone has participated so well in International Week and we loved drawing pictures and introducing ourselves in Spanish to our friends in a school in Spain. We hope that they write back to us!

Some of our highlights have been:

Brooke ‘Learning a song for Miss Smyth from the Trolls movie’.

Andrew ‘Learning about pyramids in Ancient Egypt’.

Hasan ‘Maths carousels were my favourite’.

Levente ‘I liked writing the story of Jack and the Beanstalk because I used lots of connectives’.

Aaron ‘I liked learning about the pyramids and the River Nile in Ancient Egypt. I can’t wait to make a pyramid next week’.

Rachel ‘I liked drawing a picture of myself and writing in Spanish to send to our friends in Spain’.

Oma ‘I love our Ancient Egyptians topic and I’m excited to learn about mummies’.

Chloe ‘I liked scribble spelling because I like writing my words in different colours. It helps me learn my words’.

Carly ‘I liked handwriting because we are getting faster at joining letters’.

Our writing focus next week is the Story of ‘The Snail and the Whale’. It would be really helpful if you could share the story with your child. You can access it at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B0kSTA-ma90 When we are writing, we’ll be concentrating on spelling common words and using different openers for our sentences.

Have a lovely weekend!

From Mrs Howley, Mrs Keegan and Primary 2/3