Hurlford Primary School and Early Childhood Centre

Good morning Everyone,

I hope that everyone is well rested after a super Easter holiday and that you have been enjoying the beautiful sunshine.

Our first week back has so far been busy with a fun outdoor activity on Monday afternoon where we built some rockets using twigs for the East Ayrshire Trip to the Moon competition.  Thank you to those of you who collected twigs for us.

In Numeracy this week, we have been learning more about the coins which we use everyday here in the UK and also the four main monetary notes which we use most frequently too.  We have been using our amazing addition and multiplication skills to work out how many coins we would need to pay for items with specific price tags.  In particular, we have been trying to find the fewest number of coins needed to pay for the items.  It has been very interesting to see how familiar pupils are with coins because there are so many reports now of people using cards to pay for our shopping these days instead of notes and coins.

In Literacy we have been learning about Summarising and read the next two chapters of our Class Novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to practise our new skills.  Summarising is not easy to achieve and over the next few weeks we shall continue to practise this skill.

Under the amazing guidance of Miss Gibson, pupils continue with their Lego Challenge and this week there has been some coding involved which I am sure they will be most excited to tell you about.

For now I wish you all a happy Thursday,

Best wishes,

Miss Steedman

Good morning everyone!

I hope you all had a great holiday and we’re off to great start for the last term of Primary 4. Here’s a peak at what we’ve been up to:

In Maths we have been starting to look our new focus of fractions. We have done some revision on what fractions are and tested our prior knowledge on halves and quarters. We have found that fractions is linked to our multiplication and division knowledge and so continuing to practice our times tables in class and at home is important!

In Literacy we have been continuing our novel from last term “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and developing our metalinguistics skills and how we can find the meaning of new or unfamiliar words. Yesterday we got our hands dirty and planted our sweetcorn seeds, which provided a focus for our instruction writing. Everyone worked really hard to provide extra details to make sure their instructions were easy to understand.

In other areas, we have found out our new topic is going be the Egyptians! Everyone was really interested in different areas of the topic including finding out how they built the pyramids, what their daily life was like and how they made mummies. Now everyone has had a chance to say what they would like to learn about, we hope to dive in next week. We have also set ourselves some good targets to achieve this term, I’m sure we can do it!

For Outdoor learning we took part in the Mission to Moon competition and joined forces with P4S to design and build a rocket out of natural materials found outside. Pupils gathered sticks, grass and rocks and used their critical skills to help them create their designs. Great job and fabulous fun!

We’re off to a great start, can’t wait for the rest of term!

Have a great weekend

Mrs Barclay x

Welcome back to Term 4!
I hope everyone had a lovely Easter holiday and you’re ready for the last term of P5, can you believe it!?

This week has been all about settling back in and having a fresh start, which means new topics, new class novel and new challenges! Here’s a summary of our week:

In maths, we have been continuing our learning on times tables. So far we have covered the 2, 4, 5, 10 and 3 times tables. Please continue playing games to practice these at home this will help with the work in class! We also began to investigate compass points and directions and enjoyed using our knowledge to locate places on a map of Scotland.

In literacy, we started our new novel by Michael Morpurgo called “The Last Wolf”. We used the cover and blurb to make predictions about the book and read chapter 1. We discovered that part of the story is set in the Highlands of Scotland and are intrigued by the mysterious setting! Chapter 1 also mentioned family trees which the pupils found interesting. I wonder what will happen next!? This week we enjoyed doing some free writing to explore our creativity. The pupils love doing free writing as it allows them the chance to put their learning into practice but using their own ideas.

In other areas, we started our topic about “The Scottish Wars of Independence.” We asked our Big Questions and then used maps to investigate significant places for our topic. We also explored timelines and created a timeline of significant events. This week we also learned about the composer Rachmaninoff and discussed his style of music. We have also been finding out about the Eat Well guide and looking at the different food groups in our diets.

The sun has been shining and we’ve had a lovely first week back. Hope you all have a super weekend!

-Mrs McDonald x