Class of 2022d

Since returning back to school in mid-March we have settled back in and are all loving being back together. We have been working so hard and can’t wait to share with you everything we have been learning in class.

Maths

Since returning from our Easter Holiday, the Circles have been learning about time, the Squares have been learning about algebra and the Triangles have been learning about angles. We have been working very hard on our mental maths skills and are very competitive when we play active maths games!

Literacy

We are coming to the end of our class novel ‘The Heartstone Odyssey’. We have been exploring and discussing some very important themes including diversity. All of the children have been extremely respectful and have linked our lessons to Art, Drama and Writing. During comprehension lessons we have been developing a variety of skills such as skimming and scanning, visualisation, predicting and summarising. We have really been focusing on our Talking and Listening skills and will soon be presenting our group projects based on our Science topic ‘Space’. In writing lessons we have been working poetry, imaginative writing skill and created ‘Earth Day’ posters. We have been also been continuing to learn our weekly spelling rules.

RE

Prior to the holiday we had been learning about the Easter Story and created storyboards retelling this important story. We have also been continuing with our Pope Francis Faith Award and are currently learning about the gathering point ‘Fear of the Lord’. This theme focuses on appreciating our world and the beauty of creation and we have linked this to Outdoor Learning, Writing and Art. Throughout Primary 6 so far, the children have also reflected upon Knowledge, Piety, Wisdom and Fortitude, identifying ways that they have used these gifts in scenarios at home, school or their place of worship.

Social Studies

Our topic this term is based around Rights Respecting Schools. Our first theme is ‘The Power of Peace’. We have been learning about peaceful protesting and learning about some key figures in history who demonstrated peace when campaigning.  We always love discussing our ideas and thoughts with one another.

Expressive Arts

Throughout the year, we have been learning about a variety of different genres of art and in particular different artists. Most recently we have been learning about ‘Pop Art’ and looking at contrasting colours. Look out on Twitter this week to see our finished pieces!

We are so looking forward to our final term in Primary 6 and we look forward to sharing more of our learning with you next month.

P6d and Miss Igoe 🙂

This month we have been getting into the Christmas spirit in Primary 6d!

During RE lessons we have been learning about the significance of the Advent Wreath and have also been creating PowerPoints about how Christmas is celebrated around the world. We also linked this to our Outdoor Learning and created Advent Wreaths made from natural materials in the forest. We have really enjoyed getting to explore the Upper Forest in the last few weeks. For the Pope Francis Faith Award, we have also been researching and sharing information about different faiths.

In Maths, the Circles have been learning about 2d shapes, the Squares have been learning about volume and the Triangles have been learning about symmetry. We have also been doing Christmas co-ordinates and problem solving with Mrs Lindsay.

For Literacy, we have written a letter to Mrs Claus asking for a gift for someone special to us, Miss Igoe thought that they were very thoughtful and kind letters.  We have also written a Christmas poem using lots of descriptive words.  We have been continuing to read our novel the Heartstone Odyssey and linked this to our drama lesson. We made freeze frames of scenes from the book and the audience had to guess what we were acting out. We also had a spelling competition to see if we could remember how to spell our words from this term correctly.

We hope you all enjoyed watching our Christmas video, we made up the dances ourselves and we had lots of fun filming it! We have also been doing lots of art activities this term, Miss Igoe is always so impressed with how good we are at drawing!

We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas this year and a well-deserved rest! We will see you again in the New Year!

Primary 6d and Miss Igoe.

Hello from Primary 6d.

We have been learning lots of new things this month!

Literacy

For writing this month we were focusing on Climate Change , we made posters and wrote letters to the First Minister which were displayed in the hall on World Children’s Day, we were very proud. For spelling we have been learning our words by making up our own multi-sensory activities and we have been working really hard on our talking and listening skills. We are currently reading The Heartstone Odyssey in class, we linked this to our drama this week and had to work in groups to make 3 freeze frames from scenes from the book.

Maths

We have been focusing on decimals, fractions and 2-digit multiplication and continuing to play lots of active maths games to help with our Times Tables!

Australia

We are now coming to the end of our Australia project. As part of our homework task, we had to create a PowerPoint presentation focusing on one aspect of Australia. Some examples of things that we chose were sports, animals, history, the Great Barrier Reef etc. We were then asked 3 questions from the audience and were given 2 stars and a wish for our feedback. Miss Igoe was very impressed with how confident we were.

RE

To mark the beginning of our Pope Francis Faith Award, Canon Eddie came into our class to celebrate a mass with us. We have been learning about the gift of Knowledge. We delivered a quick presentation to our class about our favourite hobbies and also made mind maps about what we would like to work as when we were older, we had to think about the skills we would need to do this. During ICT we were researching information about a saint of our choice and have also been creating PowerPoints about different faiths. We are really looking forward to the start of Advent this week!

Outdoor Learning

We have been busy exploring the Upper Forest in the last couple of weeks. We really enjoyed going through the river although we got very wet! Some activities we have done include working with a partner to build a mini-den.

We hope you have enjoyed reading about what we have been doing in class!

P6d and Miss Igoe 

This month we have been doing lots of exciting and fun things in class!

In Maths, we have been learning about fractions, decimals, estimating, rounding and 3D shapes! We have been continuing to practise multiplication and division though active maths games. This week we worked in pairs to solve a Halloween mystery problem solving which was very fun!

During writing lessons, we used the notes from our private research during I.C.T to create a leaflet for an Australian city of our choice. We had to come up with a title and sub-headings and draw lots of pictures to make it eye-catching. We have also written a spooky Halloween imaginative story. We worked as a class to come up with lots of adjectives to create a scary setting with Halloween monsters.

For our Australia topic we created an Aboriginal painting using pointillism techniques, we think they look great and can’t wait to see them up on the classroom wall display! For our homework task, we will be making a PowerPoint at home to present to the class, Miss Igoe can’t wait to see our work.

We really enjoyed doing our Beat the Street walks this month, we loved going for a big walk to keep us fit whilst looking at all of the lovely Autumnal colours. We have also really liked taking part in orienteering for Outdoor Learning with Mrs Lindsay.

As October is the month of Our Lady, we have also been learning about the rosary.

We have had a great month and we are really looking forward to learning more things in November!

Primary 6d and Miss Igoe

Welcome to Primary 6d’s first blog! We have all settled in really well since returning in August and have been working very hard.

This year in Primary 6 we have been doing lots of Outdoor Learning. We are very lucky to have Cadoc’s Wood so close to our school and have enjoyed working in pairs and groups to complete activities such as making a birds nest, investigating symmetry in nature and creating an obstacle course in the Muddy Mover’s area. We have also linked Outdoor Learning to our writing and created wonderful Haiku poems about nature. A Haiku poem is a special type of poem which has three lines, following a 5-7-5 syllable pattern.

At the beginning of term we did a vote and decided that our new topic was going to be Australia! We wrote down things that we would like to learn about and used our researching skills on the Chromebooks to find out information about an Australian city of our choice. We also learned about some terrifying spiders!

In Numeracy, we have been learning about fractions, time and addition and subtraction. We have also been playing lots of active games to practise our multiplication tables and division. One of our favourite games is Popcorn Odds and Evens.

Keep checking Twitter to see photos of our learning, we are very excited for the year ahead!

Primary 6d and Miss Igoe.

On Wednesday this week we celebrated Fairtrade Fortnight, looking at stories from across the world of farmers harvesting bananas, cocoa beans and more and how Fairtrade helps them to earn a decent living wage. We created posters to help persuade shoppers to buy Fairtrade products and also engaged in debates surrounding the topic of Fairtrade. It was difficult to argue against Fairtrade, but we learned to think of counter arguments and ask questions to keep their other team thinking about their own arguments.

We dressed up on World Book Day as some of our favourite book characters while also creating our own versions of book covers and using our own names as the author.

In Numeracy we looked at area, volume and multiplication, while in our Writing we learned how to write a diary entry, being mindful to include our emotions and informal opinions.

Next week is STEM week and we are very much looking forward to being scientists for a week.

Enjoy your weekend!

P5D

With snow threatening to appear and black ice refusing to melt quickly, February, with all its 29 days (2020 is a leap year don’t you know), is finally over and hopefully, fingers crossed, the poor weather goes with it.

This week in writing we looked at how to write instructions, and tying in with our China topic, we looked at how to make a Chinese Chow Mein. We used time openers and imperative (bossy) verbs to write our recipe for a classic dish.

Sticking with China, we revisited our Health and Wellbeing topic from last term of positive thinking and used the Chromebooks to research positive words like Joy or Peace and found the Chinese characters for these words. In Art we then used paintbrushes, black paint and long brush strokes to paint these symbols to decorate our class and topic wall.

With Read Aloud week, we have been spending 20 minutes each day reading books and even took a trip to the nursery to read with the children there. It was great fun interacting with the younger pupils and sharing an important skill with them.

This week we also continued our improvisation focus in Drama, creating scenarios for each other to act completely in the moment and unscripted. It was a lot of fun.

‘Till next week.

P5D

After a getting back into the swing of things with a two day week (apologies for the missing blog post), we have braved every season this week from torrential rain, hail and patches, albeit not a lot, of sunshine.

This week in numeracy we looked at time, how to tell the time on an analogue clock and change from 12 to 24 hour time.

In writing this week we attempted a first draft of our 500 words challenge, helped when we looked at direct and indirect speech during grammar.

As part of our topic this week we worked in pairs to read a map of China and answered questions using our investigative and map reading skills.

The highlight of the week was definitely drama, in which we looked at the art of improvisation. In pairs we looked at various scenarios such as trying to sell something to someone.

In RE we continued to learn about Islam with two members of our class answering questions and giving a keen insight about the Muslim Holy Book, the Qur’an.

Fingers crossed the weather improves.

Have a great weekend.

P5D

This year is whizzing past at some speed and we are already at the February break. How did that happen?

We tested our current knowledge of our topic country China – did you know half of all the world’s cement is used in China each year? – and then used our investigative skill to research the correct answers using the internet. In Art we also made paper dragons and refreshed our memory about the mythical race that gave birth to the Chinese New Year. Happy Year of the Rat!

In Maths we continued to look at time and division while focusing on possessive adjectives in grammar such as my, his, her and our.

In Science we learned about Non-Renewable Energy and the dangers of using Coal, Oil and Gas, also known as the fossil fuels.

On Thursday, our final day before a well deserved break, was of course CRAZY HAIR DAY. You can imagine how much fun we had seeing everyone’s fantastic designs.

We hope you have an amazing break and use the time to recharge the batteries and we’ll see you next Thursday.

P5D

PS Enjoy our hairstyles on twitter 🙂

Can you believe it, it’s the end of January already!

We continued our study of portrait drawing, using pictures brought from home to draw self portraits. Hopefully we’ll see a few up on our walls.

We started our new topic this term – China – by asking ourselves what we wanted to learn about and in our groups we created posters detailing our most pressing questions.

In PE we continued to practise our forehand and backhand shots, competing in pairs to see how long we can keep short distance, no-bounce, rallies going between us.

In Numeracy we covered time, adding and subtracting with money and division. This week we also had the choice of redrafting either our iambic pentameter poem or our Thank You Letter. We know redrafting is difficult but so important to improve ourselves as both readers and writers.

In Science we started to learn about energy and its different forms such as thermal, sound, light and nuclear energy.

We also had an assembly on Thursday with our campus cop. This was an important presentation as it dealt with serious topics such as social media use and violence towards others. We know what our responsibilities are as pupils and as a class and now we are further armed with the knowledge that our actions can have serious consequences.

Here we come February.

P5D