We are planning to go ahead with our sports day plan tomorrow and are looking forward to inviting our parents and carers in to see their children race. A few gentle reminders…

Please ensure that all children come to school dressed for sports day – they should not come dressed in school uniform and should wear sports clothing (as always – no football colours)

Please ensure that the clothes the children are wearing are weather appropriate – sensible shoes and a jacket if needed.

Please also ensure that the children have enough water for the day, they will be busy all day and have a timetable full of events.

Parents of classes are invited in as follows…

Primary 1 – 9:10

Primary 2 – 9:40

Primary 3 – 10:10

Nursery children – 11:00

Primary 4 – 11:30

Primary 5 – 12:00

Primary 6 – 1:30

Primary 7 – 2:10

We ask that when the classes have finished their races that the parents please leave swiftly to allow the next class set of parents to come in.

As always, we thank you for your support. Here’s hoping we get some sunshine!

#teammc

Primary 5 showing their competitive sides during their class bowling championships this morning

Parents and friends of Mount Carmel would like to thank you for all of your wonderful donations for our house hamper.

We still welcome any more donations this week and next and hope to raise a lot of money through our raffle tickets.

Raffle tickets can be bought through parentpay for £1 each as well as on sports day. Raffle winners to be drawn during our fun day on the 26th June.

As always, we thank you for your support

Parents and Friends of Mount Carmel 💙

We kindly ask that all children bring in their costumes ASAP as we are hoping to fit in a couple of dress rehearsals next week before our big performances. The chorus for our show are wearing white shirts, grey trousers or a skirt, white socks and black shoes.

We do really appreciate your support with this and without it we would be unable to put on such a spectacular show.

With thanks, always,

MC staff 😊

With our rehearsals well under way we wanted to share a little sneak peek with you all. I think you would agree the children are all excellent. We cannot wait to welcome you in to see our performance. Remember, get your tickets on Parentpay as we have limited numbers available.

We would like to give a great big thank you to Beth from Take A Bow who is giving up her own time to choreograph our dancers.

We have a new stage!!!

Our amazing Parents and Friends of Mount Carmel used some of their funds to buy the school a new stage, just in time for our MATILDA musical next month. The stage is built and looks amazing. We have a few very big thank yous to make. First of all, our Parents and friends of Mount Carmel. Thank you for providing the funds to buy the stage. Next we would like to give a big shout out to Stuart and Graham who travelled quite a distance to collect the stage. And finally, a big thank you to our very own Mr Leslie who spent this afternoon building the stage. It is now ready for the children to rehearse on tomorrow.

We cannot wait for you all to see our show!

#teammc

Primary 4 – 7 children have been busy rehearsing and getting every thing ready for the big show. The children have been given a letter home today with information regarding costumes. We are asking for your help with providing your son/daughter with what they need; however, if for any reason this is causing issues or you require support for this then please do not hesitate to get in contact with the school office and we will do everything we can to ensure that the children have everything they need to perform.

As always, the staff at Mount carmel would like to thank our parents for their ongoing support. Without it, we would be unable to put on these awesome shows.

Thank you!

#teammc

With less than 3 weeks to go until our opening night, rehearsals are well underway. We hope you have the popcorn ready… You are in for a treat!!

Our advertising group for Matilda paid a visit to our friends and neighbours at Crossgates yesterday to invite them along to our community performance of Matilda. The group got to meet some of the wonderful residents and staff. We can’t wait to see you at the show everyone 💕

Primary 5 have had a brilliant morning making snores and den building. We also took our reading outside to enjoy in the sunshine as well as creating some transient art with natural materials.

On Wednesday, our Primary 4 and Primary 5 classes will be taking part in outdoor activities to celebrate Natural Scotland week. We were hoping to go to the Dean Park; however, due to the Mayfest the park will be closed. The classes are very excited to be den building, making smores and roasted marshmallows in the morning and then we can continue with our rehearsals for MATILDA in the afternoon.

Please ensure that the children have suitable outdoor clothing on (jogging bottoms or leggings) with school uniform on top. They should also have suitable outdoor shoes on as we will be on the grass.

Thank you for your continuing support,

Mrs McCreadie and Mrs MacKinnon

A gentle reminder that our Primary 5 class are heading to the North West Bowling Club on Monday morning. The class will be leaving at around 9:15am. Please ensure that the children have suitable clothing on (including flat shoes for the bowling green) as we will be walking there and back. The children are very excited to be taking part in this experience for the next few weeks.

That’s rehearsals underway today with the main cast having their very first read through.

Get your dates in the diary … Tuesday 11th June evening performance and Wednesday 12th June afternoon performance.  Tickets on sale soon. Keep your eyes peeled!!

Primary 5 Curricular update – Term 4

Welcome back and I hope you all had an excellent Easter. The children have settled well back into school and are ready for the term ahead. Please find a brief overview of the learning that will take place in the term ahead as we approach summer.

IDL

The children are thoroughly enjoying their continents topic. This will continue for a short time after the holidays before we complete our final topic of P5 – A night at the movies. This is an enterprise topic in which the children must budget and plan an event in order to make a profit. My current thoughts on this are to hold a movie night for P1-4 in late May/early June. The P5 children will plan a night with popcorn, juice and show a movie at a small cost to the P1-4s. I have not discussed these plans with the children yet; therefore they might change as the term progresses.

Literacy

Throughout our grammar this term, we will be learning about pronouns, proper nouns, adverbs and metaphors. We will also be looking at onomatopoeia. These skills will be transferred across our learning in writing as well as reading.

We will continue to learn about our comprehension skills such as prior knowledge, metalinguistics, visualisation etc. We have already began to take notes when watching or listening to a piece of media. We will explore this skill so that the children can decide what style of note taking they prefer.

Primary 5 will continue to proof read and edit all writing tasks. The children find this task difficult and can often skip over their mistakes. This skill takes a lot of concentration and patience. We will be practising this for the rest of the school year.

Our writing focus for the term ahead will be on report writing and recounts. The children will continue to work on their spelling rules through active spelling activities such as diacritical marking and definition spelling.

Our listening and talking skills to be worked on this term are our ability to present to the class. The children will create a SWAY (an online power point) and then present this to the class. They will work towards achieving specific success criteria throughout this process such as good eye contact, pace of speech etc.

Numeracy

After an extremely busy term between January and March, the children are ready to begin division after Easter. Division links well with the teaching of fractions and decimals which is the reason behind them being taught together. Our beyond number topics will include data handling and measurement. The children worked very well on learning their 24 hour time. Although there is good understanding of this, we will continue to practise this skill as the majority of the class did find this topic difficult.

Our learning through number talks will continue as the children develop their ability to solve calculation mentally.

Health and Wellbeing

Our P.E. days will be on a Monday and a Wednesday. Our topics that will be covered this term are dancing (this will be completed through our summer show), tennis, athletics (in preparation for sports day) and outdoor games as we approach summer.

Primary 5 have also been lucky enough to have Bob from the North West bowling club into school to teach us how to play lawn bowls. When the new season of bowls starts up in April, Primary 5 will also be visiting the North West bowling club to play bowls on the actual green. We are very excited.

We will also continue our Do be mindful programme of work which encourages us all to be more mindful of our surroundings and provides us all with strategies to stay calm. As we progress through the term, we will be learning about substance misuse and the consequences on our health and well-being that substance misuse can cause.

We will also be looking at what it takes to be a parent/carer. The children will discuss what it means to care for someone the way their adults care for them.

Religious Education

This term will focus on how God reveals himself to us through Jesus and how we can nurture our relationship with God. We will also learn how our relationship with God can be deepened through prayer and placing our trust in him. The class will also look at the Holy Spirit and how the Holy Spirit can help guide us through life’s difficulties.

During the month of May, we celebrate the mother of God Mary. We will look at Mary’s importance in our everyday lives and how important she was in Jesus’ life.

The class will also learn about the rosary. We will look at the joyful, sorrowful, glorious and luminous mysteries of the rosary.

Technology

The children’s I.T. skills are growing every day. They can now confidently send emails with attachments in them. We have been working on creating sways of our choice. Next term, we will be using our research skills to create a SWAY about our continents topic. The children will then present this to the class.

Expressive Arts

This term’s expressive arts will be completely covered during our summer show. We will complete art, music, drama and dance through this. Staff are already busy getting ready and re looking forward to inviting you all in for the final show. Keep your eyes peeled for all the important information on the blog.

I, as always, thank you for your ongoing support. If there is anything you are concerned about please do not hesitate to get in contact.

Many thanks,

Mrs McCreadie

A busy meeting after school today (in the sunshine)…

All cast members and roles to be announced tomorrow….

Keep your eyes peeled for updates ☺️

To all parents and carers of p4&5 children,

Myself and Mrs MacKinnon have been keeping an eye on the forecast for our trip to the Dean Park tomorrow and in true Scottish fashion, it has to be rainy and windy. We have made the decision to postpone this trip until the last term. We have made this decision based on a few reasons. First and foremost, this trip was a treat for the children and we don’t want them being cold, wet and miserable. Secondly, if it is raining heavily, we will be unable to access the park (the slide in particular) as it will not be safe for the children to access. And lastly, we had already heard from the rangers at the Dean Park to say that they were unable to accommodate our inputs of mammals and den building tomorrow due to unforseen circumstances (although they are more than willing to change the date for these). We were happy to go ahead with our trip regardless of this, however we feel that with the added restrictions due to bad weather, we would be better to go at a later date. We are very sorry to have had to make this decision, but as always, the children’s safety is paramount. I hope everyone understands and we will definitely get looking at another date for the trip in the next term.

As always, we thank you for your support,

Mrs McCreadie

What a day we had to raise money for SCIAF on Tuesday. Thank you to all of our parents and carers. We raised an amazing amount of money for SCIAF and the children (and staff) had a day full of fun activities too. 

On Tuesday 19th March, Primary 5 are organising a SCIAF fun day for the entire school. We are asking all our children to bring in a donation to take part in this day full of activities. The money raised will go straight into the charity boxes in each class. On this day, we have our active schools co-ordinator Mark Devlin providing a golf input for every class, we have gardening with Mr Leslie, litter picking, egg decorating and much more. We are also going to have some outdoor play and with this ask that your child brings in an outdoor toy such as a bike or a scooter for this time. They must bring a helmet due to health and safety reasons.

We are also asking that children wear old clothes on their bottom half due to the nature of these activities as we may get mucky during them. School jumpers should be worn on top.

Please give a small donation to this wonderful charity.

We can’t wait!

Thank you, Primary 5

Curricular update term 2 – Primary 5

The children have been working very hard in term 1 and are ready to begin term 2.

IDL

Our interdisciplinary topic for the term ahead is Knights and Castles. We have already began learning about castles and their purpose throughout time (with a particular interest in Scottish castles). We will look at the different parts of a castle and what purpose they serve. In terms of a Knight, we will learn all about their lifestyle, their job and how they ended up in such a position.

Literacy

They thoroughly enjoyed our class novel “The Butterfly Lion” and the tasks that complimented this text. Moving forward into term 2, our reading tasks will come from our bug club books. We will be looking at lots of comprehension strategies including visualisation and metalinguistics as well as different styles of questioning which will allow the children to explore their understanding of literal, evaluative and inferential questions and how each of these should be answered correctly. Our writing genres that we are learning about this term are narrative writing and response writing. The learning that took place last term (descriptive writing) will compliment these genres and allow the children to up-level their writing using the knowledge already gained. The tools for writing will also extend to speech marks, commas as well as the children’s opinions on what they are writing about.

Numeracy

The children will be learning about addition and subtraction up to 4 digit numbers whilst exploring carrying and exchanging. We will look at decimal numbers and their place within number and link this to our money topic (this will then be represented by pence). Throughout the year, we will be learning how to tackle word problems. This means using our existing knowledge, taking apart the question and only using the information that we need to solve the calculation. During their learning, the children will also be developing their ability and understanding of using the correct mathematical language when discussing their number work and learning. The class will be working with Mrs McIntyre for part of the week and will be looking at time and angles in particular this term.

Health and Well-being

This term will focus on food health and what makes us healthy. We will be learning about portions of food whilst examining what a good portion size is for each of the food groups. We will be looking at current healthy eating messages from the Scottish government (i.e. lowering salt and sugar or how to avoid obesity)

Our P.E. days remain a Monday and a Wednesday for now; however this ay change as the term progresses. Our topics for P.E. this term are gymnastics, football and social dancing in preparation for our Christmas party.

R.E.

Our R.E. focus for this term will consist of Saints during November and Advent during December. During P5 there is a constant theme throughout all religious lessons linked to the Gospel of Mark and the class know that it is this gospel that provides us with our learning this year.

Expressive Arts

Art – We will be painting from observation using a range of materials and techniques. We will also be building a castle as a homework task which will link to our class topic of Knights and castles. There will have to be a design brief prior to building this.

Music – All music for the term ahead will have a focus on the Christmas show and party.

Drama – Our learning through drama will revolve around our topic (knights and castles) as well as PATHS when the children act out specific situations.

Dance – Social dancing in preparation for our Christmas party.

Science

We will be learning about water during science this term. Within this topic, we will be exploring how water is collected, cleaned and transferred to our houses for us to use. We will also link this to the different ways a family uses water as well as how we can conserve it.

Technology

The children are now much more confident in accessing their own school accounts as well as their online accounts (such as GLOW, bug club and sumdog). We will continue to work on this as the year progresses as well as practising our word processing skills. We will be practising how to save and retrieve documents as well as editing their work before printing.

I am thoroughly enjoying teaching Primary 5 and look forward to the term ahead. As always, I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for your continuing support. I hope to see you all in November at our pupil progress meetings.

Take care,

Mrs McCreadie

Primary 5 are working hard alongside our active schools co-ordinator, Mark Devlin. We are learning how we can support the children in our school with play.

Primary 5 – Term 1

Hi everyone. This is the first term’s update on Primary 5’s learning. The class are already working very hard and are eager to learn. This is a quick snapshot of what will be covered in the term ahead. There is lots to do and I am sure that there will be lots of fun along the way.

IDL

Our interdisciplinary topic this term is knights and castles. We have already started this and the children are enjoying learning about what castles are nearby and what knights did. I am hopeful to take the class to visit the Dean Castle.

Literacy

The class have already started reading our class novel, ‘The Butterfly Lion’ by Michael Morpurgo. They have been completing tasks relating to the text and I am already impressed with their comprehension skills. Within reading this term, we will be looking at the main purpose of a text as well as the different genres of books. We have an extensive class library that the children can access for personal choice and enjoyment, as well as our school library which we will also be visiting. The children will continue with bug club and this will have a learning focus of metalinguistics and visualisation. The children will develop their understanding of what they are reading and I am hopeful of your support at homework time to complete their reading online. All children will be encouraged to read their texts with expression and fluency.

Our writing genres for the term ahead are descriptive writing and narrative writing. The class will be working on writing their piece, editing it and re drafting it, focussing on layout in order to engage their reader. This is when the children will access ICT in order to type their re draft piece of writing.

In terms of our listening and talking element of literacy, the children will be focussing on listening to and for instructions. This is something that the class find difficult at times. They will work on their ability to show respect to everyone in the class by giving good looking eyes and listening ears when it is appropriate to do so.

The class will complete handwriting every week within class and we would ask that this is promoted at home in terms of homework also.

Numeracy

The entire class will continue to work on their times tables throughout the year.  We have already began working on our understanding of place value and what value each digit holds within the columns. Depending on what group the children are in for their numeracy, they will be working on place value using units, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands and hundred thousands.

We will also be looking at rounding to the nearest ten, hundred and thousand. This will enable the children to develop their skill of estimating so they can then find approximate answers to calculations and problems.

The children will develop their knowledge of shape. Some of the things that the class will be investigating through shapes are describing triangles by their sides and defining what kind of triangle it is, for example, equilateral, isosceles and scalene. The class will investigate the symmetrical values of each shape, looking for a line of symmetry, and will learn how to make patterns and designs using these symmetrical properties. This topic will be covered by Mrs McIntyre on a Wednesday.

Our whole school will concentrate on number talks throughout the year. These lessons encourage children to solve calculations using different strategies. This allows children to have ownership of their own learning by using the strategies that suit their learning style best.

Health and Wellbeing

Our P.E. days are a Monday and a Wednesday. We are currently learning about hockey and developing our ability to dribble, pass and shoot to target. After this topic, we will hopefully be moving onto to rugby and the skills involved with this.

Primary 5 already participate in mindfulness every day, this is something that the entire class benefit from and have been doing this since the beginning of Primary 4.  It is my intention to train all children in the massage in schools programme which will enable the children to develop another skill in managing their mental health on a day to day basis. I will, of course, be seeking parent’s permission before this would be introduced and further information is available on request.

Our PATHS programme will help the children to develop positive relationships within the class and school.  Delving into the emotions that the children feel will help them to understand why they are feeling this way as well as giving them the tools to cope with these emotions.

Our core health and wellbeing teaching will focus on good diet, how much sleep a child of their age needs to stay healthy and how they can rest. We will also look at the skills that are required to manage changing relationships focussing on tolerance and mutual trust.

R.E.

In order to link our R.E. with our health and wellbeing, we will be learning about friendship through bible stories. The class will earn some of the miracle stories that allowed Jesus to show that he was the son of God. We will continue to pray to God and ask for forgiveness when we need it and say thank you for things we are grateful for.  In preparation for mass throughout the year, the children will be learning new hymns and prayers.

Expressive arts

This term, the class will be focussing on art through drawing. We will look at the use of lines and texture within a drawing and what materials we can use effectively. Our music this term will be focussing on singing. This will be completed through our hymn practises and drama will be explored later in the year.

ICT

Now that the children have access to their usernames and passwords for the network, we will spend this term practising logging in and accessing the computer network, bug club, Sumdog and glow. The children will also be looking at re-drafting some of their writing which will develop their word processing and formatting skills. They will then to encourage to save this work to their own desktop.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support so far this term and look forward to everything that is to come.

Take care,

Mrs McCreadie