Primary 2 – Page 6 – St Ninian's Primary School

P2B weekly news

In P2B we have been checking our knowledge of written number names and matching it to the number. We played a numeracy game (Fruit splat numbers to words) on the smart board which helped us recognise the numbers and their names.

http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/mathgames/earlymath/fruitShootNumbersWords.htm

We have been learning our two times table.

We have been listening to a song to help us learn our two times table.

We listen to the song during our Big maths CLIC session, Miss Boyes pauses the song after each multiplication sentence and we work in pairs to write down the answer to the calculations as quickly as we can. We will continue to practise this so that we can complete each calculation as quick as a click.

Our spelling words this week were tricky words and they had the “I” sound for inky mouse. We had to take a picture of our spelling words and then we completed different spelling activities.

In handwriting we have really progressed with our letter-join. We have been learning to write our spelling words by using letter-join. We have been practising writing out spelling words in a sentence.

In writing this week we wrote a food advert. We had to use our senses to describe our favourite food. We were persuading the reader to buy the food at the supermarket. Miss Boyes wanted to buy all of the food after reading our writing.

In reading we have continued to use different skills to complete our task maps. This lets us show our understanding of our story. We read the questions together as a group and then we write our answers in sentences.

We have started our transport topic this week. To begin our topic we discussed what we already know about transport and what we would like to know. Together as a class we made a mind map of all of our ideas.

We came up with some fab ideas…

Maya asked “How does transport move?”

Kasia “What transport do they have in other countries.”

Aaron “I want to learn about the transport which takes you to the moon… Rockets.”

Brooke “I want to use different materials to build transport.”

Miss Boyes has transferred some of our ideas onto our learning wall.

We started the topic off by learning about transport from around the world. “We found out that in Venice they have boats called Gondolas because Venice has a lot of water.” – Maya.

“To travel to Islands called the Maldives you have to go on a sea plane, I think this is because they don’t have space for big planes to land.” – Andrew.

“In Thailand they have tuk-tuks,”- Calvin. “In San Francisco they have trams because it is very hilly there.”- Jakub.

This week we have started our daily mile. The daily mile is a run which we complete around the school.

The daily mile helps us keep fit and healthy.

Our structured play has been updated to reflect our new topic. We are really enjoying completing the new activities throughout the different curricular areas. P2B really enjoy learning with P2M.

Storm P2B has hit Scotland!!

In numeracy this week we have been learning about repeated addition and how it links to multiplication. We have also been learning about arrays and how we can track our array in different ways along the number line. We made up multiplication sentences to talk about the arrays.

We played a fun game to help us learn about our multiplication sums. You have to draw two circles on your whiteboard or paper. Then your friend gives you a number (same number for each flower) and you draw that number of petals on the flower. This has helped us think about how many flowers there are… how many petals and how many petals altogether. Then for additional challenge we had to write the multiplication sentence.

This is a fun activity that could also be completed at home.

Many different storms have hit Scotland recently but we bet you haven’t heard of “Storm P2B!”

This week we have listened to the story of “Katie Morag and Tiresome Ted”. In the story there is a big storm on the Isle of Struay. To begin our writing lesson we watched 2 short film clips from “Pocahontas and The Little Mermaid”. In the clips a big dark storm hits the boats in the sea.

We used this as our inspiration (along with the Katie Morag story) to write our own storm descriptions. As part of our success criteria we had to use wow words to describe what a storm would look like and sound like.

Miss Boyes has really enjoyed reading all of our storm descriptions. Lots of great wow words were used such as: crashing, splashing, gloomy and screeching.

Following on from this lesson, after lunchtime we had an “exciting” music lesson. We began the lesson by listening to a piece of music written by Beethoven called “The Storm.” We had to guess what the music was about and we spoke about the loud and quiet parts of the music. Then we were split into two groups and took part in two different stations.

Our learning intention for station 1 was: “I can sort instruments into the different ways we use them.”

At station 1 we sorted different musical instruments into two hoops. We had to decide which instruments you could bang and which instruments you could shake. Zuzanna made a good observation and said “Where would I put this instrument because I can bang it and shake it, would it be in the middle?” This showed great identification skills.
After this we moved onto working in pairs and played an instrument sorting game on the netbooks.

At station 2 our learning intention was:
“I can explore the different sounds that the instruments make.”
To do this we looked back at our writing of the storm from before lunchtime. Miss Boyes helped us pick out different descriptive sentences and we used these to build our music around.

We all had a turn of playing the instruments.

We presented and evaluated our musical creations by watching our recordings back and using peer and self-assessment evaluation sheets.

Have a lovely weekend and we hope you don’t get caught in any stormy weather!

Miss Boyes and P2B!

P2B Gadget show!

This week we wrote instructions on how to brush our teeth. Firstly, we brushed our teeth in groups following the instructions Miss Boyes gave us. Then we had to write our own instructions remembering each step that was taken.

Maya “I thought it was good because we were brushing our teeth round and round.”

Kornel “You need to remember to put tooth paste on your brush and do a circular motion”.

This week we learnt spelling words that had the “ow” sound.

Some of our words were “Owl, the ‘ow’ sound is at the beginning.”- Brooke

“How, has the ow sound at the end of the word.” – Andrew “Crowd has the ow sound in the middle of the word.” – Seamus

Miss Boyes has told us that Paolo the P2 puppet parrot said he finds numeracy tricky and asked if we could help him. We have been writing down our strategies for Paolo and we will be using our talking book to help him with his number work!

We used our own positive attitudes to develop Paolo’s growth mind-set. We wrote our positive thoughts on speech bubbles!
We have been taking different steps to build our understanding of the concept of multiplication. We have been learning how to combine objects in a number of equal towers and say how many together. We are progressing really well! We have also been looking at arrays and marking the arrays along a number line to identify the multiplication sum. Marking the multiplication sum along the number line was quite tricky but because we have positive attitudes we will continue to work on it!

This week has been technologies week in school. We have had great fun practising our assembly. Miss Boyes was super proud of us for our fantastic singing and remembering our words. We spoke about gadgets from the past, present and the future at our assembly. We also showed off our boats that we designed and made in class. At the end of our assembly we received some really good questions from our peers in Primary 1, 2 and 3. They had been listening very hard and we answered the questions with confidence.

When learning about technologies we had to sort pictures of different gadgets under the headings past and present. For the heading “future” we had to use our imagination to think about the different gadgets we might have in the future and what they will be able to do.

We thought of… televisions that listen to you “turn to channel 2 please?”

We also drew televisions that float in mid-air with wings!

We have learnt about Alexander Graeme Bell. “He invented the first ever telephone with his assistant Thomas Watson”- Kate.

We watched a video clip about Alexander Graeme bell and then we had to use the information to decide if the statements were true or false. We enjoy visual literacy tasks!

We thought about how we use different pieces of technology. We had to identify which pieces of technology you can use to: listen to music, take a picture, write a letter and send a photo.

Hope you all have a lovely long weekend!

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!

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!

Designing our week in P2B!

Miss Boyes started our writing lesson by showing us a film clip of a boy pushing a rocket into his garden. Next he climbed into the rocket. Miss Boyes challenged us to write the ending of the story/what happened next?

We took time to share our ideas and then we made a word bank which was visible on the whiteboard.
Here are a few of our great ideas:
– “The boy went to space in his rocket to see Mars.”
– “The boy went to space in his rocket and saw twinkling stars.”
– “He went to space but had to come home because he missed his mum and dad.”
– “The boy was scared and excited about going to space.”

Once we made our word bank we planned our own writing. We have been learning the importance of making a plan and then using our plan to support our writing.
This week we have been introduced to a new spelling pattern. We have been learning words with a consonant cluster at the beginning, short vowel and diagraph. We used our new cubes to build our words. The cubes are colour coded so that we could identify the different parts of each word.

Although we have progressed very well in addition and subtraction Miss Boyes thought it would be valuable for us to have some time to practise addition and subtraction word problems. This involved us using the mathematical language we have learnt in different contexts.
We now feel more confident about answering word problems and discussing our understanding of mathematical language. This will feature in our homework next week!

Other areas:
We used technology to research the weather and transport from The Isle of Coll. Through doing this we also learnt how to take notes from information. We successfully worked in trios and pairs to support one another in reading the information and writing the notes.

We loved this and as you can see by the pictures we were fully engaged in the lesson… you could’ve heard a pin drop!

We would like to tell you about our art lesson. We were learning how to plan and design an arrangement to make our own tartan pattern.
To begin the lesson Miss Boyes showed us examples of different tartan pattern designs. We discussed the different colours used in the patterns and how they blended together.

We also noticed that there are lines running through the tartan. We learnt the special words for the lines going down the way (vertical) and the lines going across the way (horizontal).
After our discussion we used the online tartan weaver to make our own designs and then we used different coloured paper to make our arrangements. This linked well with our topic as Katie Morag wears a green tartan skirt. If she ever fancies an update she can check out our designs!

Whilst researching transport on the Isle of Coll website we found pictures of boats. Using our creative skills we designed our own boats.

Miss Boyes- “Some of the children were so interested in designing the boats that they went home and made one. However, we will be using our designs in class next we to construct our boats from recycled materials.”
The recycled materials that we included in our designs were: water bottles, paper, straws, buttons, boxes and milk bottle lids.
We had to think of materials which would float best and decided that wood will be too heavy and plastic will perhaps be a good solution.
Check out our blog next week to see our boat designs turn into models.

Have a lovely weekend, from Miss Boyes and P2B!

Mapping our way through the week in P2B!

In numeracy we have been learning how to identify, sort and order even and odd numbers. Miss Boyes showed us lots of patterned gloves. We were wondering why she had all of these different gloves. However, Miss Boyes challenged us to find the odd gloves and the even gloves. We put them into the correct categories and then had to count how many odd gloves and how many even gloves there were.

There are 2 special rhymes which we have learnt. These rhymes help us to remember the odd and even numbers.
0, 2, 4, 6, 8 even numbers are GREAT!

1, 3, 5, 7, 9 I love odd numbers all the time!

This rhyme tells us that if a number ends in 0, 2, 4, 6 or 8 then it’s an even number.
If a number ends in 1, 3, 5, 7 or 9 then it’s an odd number.
In our maths carousels we have been completing many different activities to develop our learning of odd and even numbers.
We played an interactive odd and even number game on the netbooks. At another station we had to match the patterned socks and find out which ones were odd.

We have enjoyed reading our new books. To show our understanding of the stories we have been completing task maps. This involves us using a variety of different skills to complete the tasks. We complete two tasks each time and we have come up with some great answers.

In literacy we have been learning how to use openers in our writing. We know that our writing will be more interesting and make sense if we use different sentences openers. We wrote a summary for the story “Katie Morag Delivers the mail.” Here are some examples of the words we used to start our sentences: first, last, next, after, at the beginning and at the end.

Through topic we have been learning lots about geography. We have been learning about the differences and similarities in human and physical features of mainland Scotland and the Scottish Islands.
We worked together to find the Island of Coll in the Atlas, we then used technology to compare looking in the atlas to looking at google maps.
On Google maps we wanted to find Livingston. This then lead us to making our own whole class maps for The Isle of Struay and Livingston (We will show you the maps next week once they are complete.)

Structured play was great fun this week. We really enjoyed completing different activities with our friends from P2M. There were lots of different stations such as, completing subtraction sums in the shop, learning new words (related to Katie Morag stories) at the playdoh station and using the smartboard to complete different Katie Morag challenges.

Have a lovely weekend and check out our blog again next week!

Miss Boyes and P2B!

Terrific start to 2016 for P2B

In writing this week we have learnt how to write a personal account. Part of our success criteria was to write in first person. We chose a day from the Christmas holidays to write about. It is very important to include finger spaces, capital letters and full stops.

In numeracy we completed information handling tasks. We had to analyse a chart to find out what the most and least favourite toys were.

Working together in groups we gathered data by asking each other what our favourite toy was. We recorded the data by writing tally marks and then we made a bar graph.

We have learnt that for five tally marks you need to draw four and then draw one line through the middle.

Our new topic is Katie Morag. Miss Boyes asked us what we would like to learn about the topic.
Have a look at our mind map, it displays all of our ideas.

We spoke about New Year resolutions! We thought of different resolutions and chose one each to write on our star.
We also discussed our aims from term 1 and 2 and then decided on a new aim for our “Aim high app”. We had to think about one or two areas of our learning which we would like to work on. We thought about the steps we can take to meet our aim.

In PE we have started gymnastics. On Wednesday and Thursday we were doing different balances and exercises to develop our core muscle strength. If we make our core strong it will help us to balance. We traveled in different ways around the hall and then stopped to hold our balance.

This week focused on our vision and values. We chose to focus on the values of friendship and teamwork. To achieve this we went to visit our friends in P2M. We worked together in teams to present out favourite toys. We know when working as a team you must respect your peers. We used our listening skills to respect our peers whilst they discussed their toys.

Have a great weekend!

Merry Christmas from P2B!

We have had a fantastic last week in P2B!

We have been super arty this week and have enjoyed making Christmas plates, Santa Claus faces and Christmas trees.

Tuesday was terrific, we wore our lovely Christmas jumpers to our Christmas dinner and in the afternoon we had a special visit from Santa and his elf.
We put on our dancing shoes and showed off all of our Scottish dancing. (Check out the P2 Christmas party blog for photos and the facebook page for a video of us all Scottish dancing).

Since we made snowflakes last week we wanted to make our very own snow. This was amazing and we loved seeing the snow expanding!

The Jack and the Beanstalk pantomime was great! Miss Boyes had to get up with the characters and join in on the dances; this was definitely one of the funniest parts!!

We are getting ready to sing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” at the top of our voices at the Christmas sing-a-long today! We can’t wait for such a lovely way to finish off the term!

Have a wonderful Christmas!!

P2B Performers!

This week in P2B we received a special letter. Miss Boyes left out some magic reindeer food at our classroom door on Wednesday evening. On Thursday morning we were sent on a mission to find something that had been left for us in the classroom.

It was a letter from SANTA!!!

Can you couldn’t believe it? We’re not sure if it was Santa who left the letter or if it was the elves.
Together we sat in a circle and read the letter aloud for all to hear!

We wrote a letter back to Santa. We learnt all about sentence openers and our aim was to use them in our writing this week.

Santa knows all about our dojo points and he even knows how many we have. He also said we have being doing a fantastic job in the nativity.

Miss Boyes was extremely impressed and proud of our performances at the nativity. She knows how much hard work we have put in to learn our lines; sing our songs and play the musical instruments. I’m sure we will still be singing the songs at home! PERFECT PERFORMERS!

In numeracy this week we have been learning all about fact families. We have used our knowledge of addition and subtraction sums to complete the fact families. We have been learning about the inverse of addition and subtraction sums.

In maths we have been learning all about measure, so far we have measured with our feet and this week we used the scales to find out objects that weighed the same or different.

We have continued to learn our Scottish country dances. We have been learning the Virginia Reel, The St. Bernard’s Waltz and the Military two step.

Our confidence is growing with each dance and we can’t wait to show off our moves next week at our Christmas party!!