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!