Welcome back to term 4! I hope you have had a restful time over the Easter break. I am looking forward to a wonderful new term involving lots of new learning, more fun, trips, school shows and many more new experiences for our fantastic P4 class.
Literacy
For our reading focus this term, we will focus on our Class novel ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ linking in to our recent Fairtrade Topic. We will continue building expression and fluency when reading aloud to others, as well as, developing our comprehension through enhancing our inferential skills. We will continue to work on different comprehension strategies we have learned, develop our questioning skills and how we can use the text to help us with this. Please ensure your child accesses their Bug Club weekly for homework to support their reading or accesses personal reading material to forge these skills.
In writing this last term, we will look at Persuasive writing, focusing on our use of persuasive language and how to style and structure this piece of writing to enable us to convince others. As well as this, we will briefly cover Procedural writing which is Instructional e.g. a recipe, How to…). Lastly, we will continue to develop our descriptive language in our writing in relation to our class novel and topic, and start to incorporate the use of ICT for re-drafting some of our pieces of writing.
Spelling will take the form of active spelling activities and the children will experience phonemes and blends at their working level.
French This term along with developing our basic conversational vocabulary, we will look at ‘Sports’, ‘Our home’ and ‘Famous French People and Landmarks’.
Numeracy & Maths
The Class will continue our interactive mental maths input each day and number talks. This term, we will continue to build on our work with the four operations, in particular, how Fractions are related to Division. We will look at the meaning of the numerator and denominator and will be able to order, compare and look at equivalent fractions within our working groups and developing our division strategies.
In Beyond Number, Miss Campbell will complete our Money focus with P4 in April. In May, we will focus on Measure looking at length, mass and area. Pupils will learn to recognise estimates of length, height, mass and capacity, as well as record measurements accurately and convert between appropriate units e.g. m, cm, mm or litres. In June, pupils will then move on to look at Information Handling where children will explore collecting, analysing and recording information. They will present their finding in a graph.
Health and Wellbeing
We will continue with our PATHs programme, looking at problem solving and the idea of fair/unfair and accident and on purpose. We will continue with our Pupil of the Day, so keep a look out for your children coming home with their compliment sheet!
The class are also engaging in a mindful activity each day. Through our Do Be Mindful programme and other class activities, we are learning about building and developing life enhancing skills, tools and habits that will foster emotional and mental wellbeing.
PE
PE is on a Wednesday and Friday. This term we will be covering:
Tennis /Badminton racquet skills Athletics
Football Input (Kilmarnock FC) Outdoor Team Games
PE kit must be brought in and left at the start of each term. Before the holiday, the kit was sent home for washing to be freshened up and should now be returned for the current term. Lessons will be outdoors if weather permits, so remember to pack extra water and sunscreen if Sunny this term. No jewellery please on PE days.
IDL – Social Studies & Science (Apr/May)
P4 will be complete our Fairtrade topic this term looking at Food production. We will complete a comparison study between food production in Scotland and in another country.
We are very excited to visit the Scottish Maritime Museum in Irvine this term as a class, to build our STEM skills and take part in some workshops linking to previous learning and topics such as boat building (Vikings) as we explore our Scottish history and engineering past. We are really excited for this visit and it will be a lovely ending to our recent P4 topic.
IDL / Expressive Arts (Apr –June)
Our exciting main focus and topic for term 4 will be our forthcoming summer school show – ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’. We will link themes and our learning across all subjects in the curriculum to our show.
Religious Education
This term we will mainly be focusing on the importance of the Eucharist, linking to the Last Supper. We are all very excited to support our P4 children who will prepare for and celebrate their First Holy Communion later in our term, on Sunday 22nd June.
During May, we will focus on ‘Our Lady’ and learn about the Rosary to become familiar with this beautiful prayer. In addition, as we approach the end of May, we will also look at the Feast of the Ascension and Pentecost in June. As a school, we will continue to attend Mass this term.
As part of our God’s Loving Plan focus, Primary 4 will reflect on the story of creation and friendships. As the children develop their understanding of hygiene and the human body, they will learn that their bodies are a gift from God which must be respected and cared for. We will also be exploring the negative results of substances such as tobacco, drugs and alcohol. Pupils will discuss how to stay safe and be cyberaware.
RRS/UNCRC
This term as we continue our RRS journey, we will focus on the following Articles as a Rights Respecting School through…
- May – Mental Health Awareness Week – Article 24
- June – World Day Against Child Labour (12th June) Articles 32 and 35
- June – World Refugee Day (20th June) – Articles 10 and 22
Homework will be distributed on a Monday to be completed, signed and returned by Friday. Keep an eye on the class blog for regular updates to what is happening in class, recent learning and relevant upcoming events.
Thank you for your continued support and I look forward to an exciting and wonderful last term together with P4!
Mrs McIntyre.