A very happy New Year to all the wonderful children, family and friends of Primary 2 Alpha! I hope that you all had a wonderful break over Christmas and a lovely New Year with your loved ones.

The New Year has certainly kicked off in style as the children have been exceptionally busy and working very hard in many different ways! In Literacy we have been continuing to develop our reading skills, phonological awareness and spelling strategies. The children are making such wonderful strides and it is fantastic to see their confidence and fluency in their reading and creativity in their writing continue to go from strength to strength! Our context for learning this block is Katie Morag and the children have loved sharing and exploring the Katie Morag stories in class. We have been developing our note taking skills to help us to jot down important information, retelling a story, while also comparing characters and settings within each of the books. We have also started to investigate grammatical structure, looking at proper and common nouns and "playing teacher" by correcting sentences, looking for capital letters, full stops and making sure that each sentence makes sense.

In Maths we have been covering a variety of different contexts for learning, from fractions (halves and quarters), measure (cm and metres) to missing number calculations! We have also had a little go at grid referencing, creating our own island maps and answering questions about the Isle of Struay too. We know that to find an area on the map we need to go along the corridor and up the stairs and have so enjoyed working together to problem solve too. The children have thoroughly enjoyed exploring how island life differs from our own lives here in Maidenhill and created some super Venn Diagrams to compare life on the Isle of Struay to life in Maidenhill.

In P.E. we have been learning all about how our body changes before, during and after exercise. The children have had lots of fun building their general fitness through lots of active games and using a variety of equipment. We even had a little go creating our very own fitness routines too! We used our notes to help us to write our instructions in a sensible order and then performed our routines to the class. It was so lovely to see the children transfer their learning from one curricular area to another and having such fun in the process. We certainly have a class full of Mr. and Miss. Motivators! Well done 2 Alpha!

If all of that hasn't kept us all busy enough, we have also been learning a little bit about Lunar New Year which has filled our afternoons with lots of fun and excitement. The children have absolutely loved having the Primary 7s down to visit us to teach us a little Mandarin and to help us with some Lunar New Year arts and crafts activities. Our role play area has been completely transformed with traditional Chinese dress and accessories and adorned with our own beautiful artwork and collaborative Chinese dragon! The children were excited to learn which year they were born (... we have lots of year of the monkeys in this class!) and what their lucky numbers and colours would be too. It has been wonderful to hear the children share their experiences of their own and other cultures and to see how much enjoyment this mini context for learning has brought.

A wonderful start to the year, keep up the good work team 2 Alpha!