Class Assembly Reminder

Just a reminder that our Class Assembly is tomorrow afternoon at 2:45pm.  Come along and hear what we have learned about Skara Brae!  Phone the school office to book a seat or seats!

Sorting Sorting Sorting

This week we are continuing our learning about information and we are sorting items using different criteria.  Miss Shearer gave us different items which we had to sort into two groups.  If we were sorting by a colour, such as red, we had to sort the items into ‘red’ and ‘not red’.  We began by choosing easy criteria such as colour but then we looked in a bit more detail at the different items and the ways they could be sorted.  It was interesting and we showed a good understanding of sorting items.  It was also good fun! 

 

Tag Rugby

Today we had our first Tag Rugby session with Mark Sinclair.  It was great fun!  We headed up to the 3G pitch first thing this morning.  Thankfully it was nice and sunny although a little bit windy at times. 

We started off with some warm ups.  We had to run around and swap places in a circle.  Then we had to move like a t-rex, an emu and an ostrich!  It was funny!

Next we got to use rugby balls and learned how to score a ‘try’.  We had to place the ball on the ground carefully and then run.  If we dropped it on the ground then it didn’t count as a try and we wouldn’t have scored any points.

Finally, we used our skills to play Stadium Ball.  We had to try and get our opponents tag before they scored a try.  It was lots of fun too!  We are really looking forward to our next Tag Rugby Session!

Relaxing in the Library!

We have really enjoyed our Library sessions in Primary Two this year.  We have been working on thinking carefully about what books are suitable for us to read and we know that if 10 or more words are too tricky for us to read on the page then it’s not the right book for us.

We were very excited this week as the Library has just received some new books through the school book fair because parents and pupils bought so many books from the P7’s.  We enjoyed looking through them and deciding which one to take out.  We are also using our new library system to scan out books so the computer knows which books we have out to read! 

Here are some pictures of us enjoying the new books and the facilities in the school library!

Timing Primary Two

This week we are learning about time in Primary 2.  We are thinking about how long it takes us to do different things and starting to learn about seconds, minutes and hours.  We have been doing some very active activities to help us with our learning. 

1.     How many times can you write your name in a one minute?

2.    Can you wash your hands in 30 seconds?

3.    Can you make a tower in 10 seconds? What about 20 seconds?

4.    How many star jumps can you do in 30 seconds?

5.    Can you close your eyes and open them after exactly one minute?

 

Why not give some of these a try at home and see how you get on!  If you can think of any more let us know!

Skara Brae Food

We have been learning about what they ate when they lived in Skara Brae.  We found out that they ate the same kinds of groups of things as us such as meat, fish and fowl but that the things in those groups were very different.  We have been thinking about how different the food would have been and we were interested in the fact that they had to catch or make all their own food – they couldn’t just go to Flett’s and buy some sausages! 

 

To help us think about the differences between our food now and in the Stone Age we made up two different plates – one with our favourite foods from now on it and one which showed what they ate in the Stone Age.  Most of us agreed that we would rather have our plate from now rather than Skara Brae!

Just a Drop Week

Last week all the pupils of SPS were busy raising money for ‘Just a Drop’ – a charity who helps to provide clean, safe water for people in countries where they don’t have clean water to use.  We learned a lot about why it is important to have clean water.  We enjoyed drinking our bottles of safe, clean water and then filling them up with coppers to raise money.  Some of us also got our face painted and wore blue on Thursday.  As a school we raised over £300 which will provide a lot of clean water for people in Kenya.  Well done SPS!

We learned that boys and girls the same age as us have to walk quite far to get water and even then it isn’t even clean, safe water.  To give us a feeling of what it is like to have to walk for water we walked around the school to the distance of 1km.  We had to walk around the school 4 times to make the equivalent of 1km.  We carried some water with us as the boys and girls have to carry around 20kg of water back with them.  We all decided that we are glad we don’t have to walk for water.  We were tired after our 4 laps but if we did the same distance as the boys and girls in Kenya we would have had to walk around the school 26 times!!  We are glad we can get water so easily but we were feeling proud we had raised money to help other boys and girls.  Here are some pictures of us on our walk.    

 

 

 

Sharing Sweeties

This week we have been learning about sharing.  We have been taking a large group of items and putting them into smaller groups by sharing.  Today we made sweeties from paper and shared them in groups.  By doing this we have learned how many groups certain numbers can be made into.   

We have also learned that sharing items into groups is the opposite of what we were learning about last week – making small groups into a big group!  This is all helping us to learn about multiplication and division and we are showing a good understanding of it all!  You can help us by asking us questions like’ 4 groups of 2 equals?’  or ‘8 shared between 4 equals?’.  We might need some real items to share!

Here are some of the groups sharing out their ‘sweeties’!

Just A Drop

Just a reminder that it is ‘Just a Drop Week’ at SPS this week.  We are collecting ‘coppers’ to put in our bottles. As you can see we are doing well however, any more coppers would be very welcome!  Tomorrow is also Wear Blue Day where pupils pay 50p to dress up in blue for the whole day! 

 

Unfortunately we didn’t manage our Just a Drop Walk today because of the rain but hopefully we will manage to do it at some point during the rest of the week. 

Skara Clay!

Yesterday we created our own Skara Brae clay pots.  We moulded some clay into pot or bowl shapes and then we decorated them with our own pattern.  We did this because we think that each house at Skara Brae would have had it’s own pattern on any pottery so that it did not get mixed up with other people’s pottery.  We used lots of different objects to make our unique patterns.  We also made sure we imprinted our thumb well into the pot just like the one found at Skara Brae.  We were thinking that maybe in the future someone might discover our pottery and wonder how we made it and what we were like! 

Lots of Learning!

There has been lots of great learning going on in Primary 2 this week!  As well as our visitor on Monday we have been doing spelling, writing and also learning about tens and units in maths.  As Monday was such a beautiful day we decided to do our spelling words outside!  We used chalk to write as many ‘ck’ words as we could on the ground outside.  It was great fun!  We all did really well in our spelling this week so it must have helped us to learn our words! 

We continued our learning about Skara Brae and the interesting jobs of Archaeologists.  We learned that they have to look very, very carefully at objects to find out the clues about them and to find out what they are.  We were all given an object to look at carefully and draw.  We used magnifying glasses to help us pick out the really little details. It was quite tricky! 

Then we had to look at some mystery objects and guess what they were!  It was really difficult and we had to think really carefully if we had seen these things before.  Here’s a picture of them – can you guess them all?! 

Primary 2 are Archaeologists!

Today we were very fortunate to get a visit from Elaine Clarke, a Historic Scotland Ranger.  She came to talk to us about Skara Brae and she took a ‘magic box’ with her which was full of items from Skara Brae.  These items were very interesting and we were able to be archaeologist detectives and think about what all these items tell us about the people who lived in Skara Brae.  We came to the conclusion that although there are quite a lot of different things about how we live now some of the basic ideas are still the same as those who lived in Skara Brae.  They wanted to have a nice house, a cosy bed, pretty things and to play games – much like us now!  We were very excited to see a piece of pottery which was made by someone who lived in Skara Brae and they left their thumb print on it!  It was tricky for us to think that this thumb print was over 5,000 years old!  We really enjoyed our visit from Elaine and we are now very excited about hopefully going to Skara Brae to see it for ourselves! 

Amazing Puppets!

Last week we were very lucky to take part in a puppet workshop!  It was brilliant fun.  We learned all about puppets and how to use one and make it talk.  We got to use a real puppet, name them and ask them questions to find out about them!  We were really good at putting on different voices and thinking up interesting facts about our puppets.  Then we watched and took part in a puppet show of the Three Little Pigs.  Some of us got to take part in the show and the rest of us made our puppets join in with the songs.  We laughed nearly the whole way through!  It was great fun and we really enjoyed ourselves!  Here are a few pictures. 

Supermarket Sweep!

Primary 2 have been busy learning about money!  We have been looking at coins and paper money and thinking about the value of each of them.  We also learned about using Debit Cards, Credit Cards and also loyalty cards and how we can use them in banks or shops.  To help us with this learning we have set up a shop outside our classroom.  First we had to plan out or shop and decide how we were going to set it up.  Then we created signs, labels and price tags for our shop.  We had to think carefully about where items went in our shop as we thought it wasn’t a great idea to have shampoo next to our food! 

Now our shop is up and running we are having great fun in it!  Miss Shearer's Uncle has kindly given us a real till to use in our shop.  It really works and we are enjoying getting the receipts printed in the till! 

We are going to continue our learning about money for the next week and any discussions at home about money will help our learning!    

Ross Collins Visit

Today we had a fantastic afternoon with the Author and Illustrator Ross Collins!  He visited us to tell us about being an illustrator and author.  It was very interesting and we really enjoyed his visit.  He told us that he really enjoys doing the illustrations for books and he drew us some characters which we have put on the wall.

 

 

 

He read us some of his stories then showed us his portfolio which had his drawings from all the different stages of his books.  He showed us the first drawings he does and then the ones he puts all the colour in.  They were very nice drawings and it was interesting seeing them on a big sheet out of the books!

 

 

Ross spoke to us about his book Dear Vampa - it's one of our favourites.  He started off by telling us that he needed to do a lot of research about Vampires and that he couldn't understand how much children knew about vampires.  He said the only reason he could think why children knew so much about vampires is because we are all vampires!  Then he tested us with some 'holy water'!  If we flinched we were vampires!  It made us all giggle!

 

 

We really did have a great afternoon and Ross really inspired us to think about being authors and illustrators when we are older!  We hope he will come back and visit Stromness Primary again!

Super Sports Relief

On Friday we had lots of fun raising money for Sports Relief.  Primary 7 had organised a great afternoon of events in the school.  We all dressed up in sporty clothes  - we even had a jouster in Primary 2!  We had a go on lots of the stalls but our favourite was Soak the Teacher!  Mr McIntosh was the prime target and although some of us in P2 didn’t look strong we got the sponges right on target!  A big thank you to Primary 7 and Mrs Leitch for organising such a great afternoon and raising money for a very worthy cause.