On Friday 30th October, the children had a fancy dress day and party. The class had fun taking part in a "Skeleton Drive." The costumes were super, there was some fantastic dancing, lots of laughter and a great time was had by all.  

The children all settled back in well to the start of a new school year. They were very excited about now being in Primary 3 and moving to a classroom upstairs !!

Early in the term, they have had the opportunity to participate in a Judo taster session, which everyone enjoyed.

The class topic this term has been "Minibeasts" and the children have been very enthusiastic about this. They have learned about life cycles and the different characteristics of a variety of minibeasts. This topic also allowed the class to enjoy many art and craft activities. As well as making a minibeast of their choice as a homework challenge, in class, we have created caterpillars, butterflies, snails and bees. We also had a visit from Brian and Gillian, from the Countryside Ranger Service, who gave the children lots of information, answered their questions and allowed them to look at and handle some minibeasts. Father Ken also kindly permitted P3a to use the church gardens, to go on a minibeast hunt, which was great fun !!

Also this term, the children have attended cooking sessions, where they made pizzas, which certainly looked and smelled delicious !

Please see gallery for further photographs from Term 1.

We visited Maxell Garden and planted carrots and potatoes. In school, we learned all about planting, about the life cycle of plants and about which parts of plants we could eat. We planted sunflower seeds and were delighted by our fast growing shoots.

We learned about symmetry in maths, painting butterflies, creating symmetrical shape pictures and making peg pictures.

In term 3 we learned all about Castles. We learned about parts of castles, what it would be like to live in castles and jobs and roles of those who lived there. Pupils made some truly fabulous castle models and we were all very impressed!

We imagined what it would be like to live in a castle and wrote in the role of a person from long ago. Learning all about Knights and attacking and defending castles really caught our interest and we made our own Knightly shields with our parents during the open afternoon.

We loved reading fairy, fantasy and traditional tales - from Cinderella to Julia Donaldson's Zog. To celebrate World Book Day we made Cinderella Sandwiches!

This terms Primary 2a have been learning all about the dark. We have read some terrific books in which "the dark" is a star feature, including "Funnybones",  "The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark", "Owl Babies" and "Can't you Sleep Little Bear?". 

We have been learning about adjectives and sorted these into "good" and "bad" ways to describe the dark. We used Wordle in IT to create a "Word Picture" of our dark adjectives.

We thought about the fun things which can be done in the dark and learned all about fireworks and bonfire night.

This inspired us to do some writing of our own about how we feel about the dark - is it exciting or scary? Fun or gloomy?  Enchanting or eerie?

In Science we learned about the earth's position in relation to the sun which causes the dark and had fun with our globe and flashlight trying to recreate "night" and "day".

Pupils in P2a enjoyed their recent trip to the Maxwell Community Garden. They spent some time learning about the plant life cycle in the outdoor classroom before taking a tour of the garden to explore and identify some of the plants and vegetables which are grown there. They spied raspberries, carrots, onions, runner beans, pumpkins and a sweetcorn plant before heading to the polytunnels to find tomatoes, courgettes and a peanut plant.

The class have been exploring numbers using a 100 grid. They have been finding the numbers before and after and the number in between. This was tested in a class challenge where they were given out of order number cards and had to put themselves in order. Could they do this? Of course they could – and in good time too!

The children in P2a really enjoyed the judo taster session in which they took part on 20^th August.  They donned judo jackets and practised some of the moves under the careful supervision of the expert instructor.