Class of 2024a

Welcome to our May 21 Blog- I can hardly believe that this will take us to the final month of Primary 4!

The month of May is especially dedicated, by the faithful, to Our Blessed Lady. With faith and love Catholics in every part of the world pay tribute to our Queen of Heaven. Throughout the month we prayed the Hail Mary as Pope Francis had asked us all to do. At lunchtime on each Wednesday of the month, we came together to pray a decade of the Rosary for an end to the pandemic. Finally, before our holiday weekend the class held a beautiful service where we spoke about Mary and crowned her as the Queen of the May. Fittingly, the sun shone brightly! I hope you enjoyed watching the children on google classroom and I am sure you will agree it was a lovely opportunity to pray together as we prepare for their First Holy Communion on Saturday.

Our preparation for this very special day continues and we have been joining live stream Mass from St Cadoc’s Church each week to help the children participate fully in the liturgy. Your ongoing support is critical as the children take this next step on their faith journey. It really is a very exciting time for the children and so important that we help them to remember the real meaning of the day.

Thank you so much to our families who shared their special celebration of Eid with us. It was a real privilege to hear and see the wonderful traditions which we have discussed as a class, brought so close to home!

A busy time as always and it was great to see the sun finally out in time for the long weekend. The children have been outside learning in all weathers in the playground and the forest. Although the weather was slightly soggy, the children loved their Sport’s Day at Crookfur Pavilion, and gave all the activities their very best effort! Congratulations to our race winners in particular!

We have completed the Scottish National Standardised Assessments (SNSA)(P1/4/7) during May. The data from these assessments will be implemented to inform planning, learning, teaching, and further assessment during the remainder of the term and moving into Primary 5. Pupils were able to access the support they daily in the classroom for the assessments.

In numeracy this month, we have explored data handling, multiples, factors and primes, and number processes. Initially we gathered items from the forest during Outdoor Learning to sort and create pictographs. The children then successfully completed surveys with each other to gather data, which they then sorted and presented in different formats before analysing. We took this one step further, when we used Excel during our ICT time to create graphs while developing our digital literacy.

In literacy the children have been developing the skills required to create non-chronological reports. They all created a report on a topic of their choice, and I loved learning about everything from golf and space, to light and dinosaurs, and their knowledge and enthusiasm was fantastic! Given the current world in which we are living we decided to carry out a scientific experiment to highlight the importance of washing our hands. We learned all about microbes and the good practices needed to keep us all safe. The children made comprehensive notes during our learning and then used this information to create their reports with mature and informative results. We will continue to monitor our bread experiment and keep you posted on our findings!

Each child has almost finished their personal Time Capsule, charting the events of the past year and most importantly their emotions. As well as being a cathartic and enjoyable process for the children this will be a lovely snapshot of this quite unbelievable time which the children will reflect on in the future. I am sure you will enjoy reading them.

As a Rights Respecting and Laudate Si school we were able to recognise the part that we all must play in healing our common home for our, and future generations, benefit. We are working towards achieving our gold award by the end of term and consequently, the Rights Respecting discussion has featured heavily in the past few weeks. We have been exploring the idea of Pupil Voice. The children can now express what that looks like for them and, we are beginning to articulate how we can all be heard within our school community.

I hope you all enjoyed the beautiful weather during the holiday weekend. Thank you once again for all your support in these challenging times – however, we have so much to look forward to in these last couple of weeks and if we all continue to work together the children will be more than ready to move on to the adventures of Primary 5, where I know they will flourish.

Finally, sending love and prayers to all our wonderful families.

Thank you

Welcome to our March/April 2021 Blog.

As always in Scotland we had all the seasons during the last month. That said we are just delighted to be back together as our P4A family, and I have so enjoyed the chat from the children about their remote learning experiences! You will be reassured to know that all children have settled back into our routines and have been making the most of the outdoor spaces. When the weather permits, we have been outside enjoying the resources provided by your fund raising and donations.

Following the return to the classroom before the break, I have been working to support the children and identify any areas for reinforcement across the core curricular areas. We have the Scottish National Standardised Assessments (SNSA)(P1/4/7) during May. The data from these assessments will be implemented to inform planning, learning, teaching, and further assessment during the remainder of the term. Also, the pupils will still have the support used to access the daily curriculum for the assessments.

In numeracy we have explored shape, symmetry, and number processes in our Numeracy lessons. Consequently, we identified how to assimilate maths within our world and culminated in the children creating symmetrical Easter Bunny cards, which I am sure you all loved. This week we have begun to look at factors and primes alongside data handling and place value.

We concluded our study of the novel Kensuke’s Kingdom when the children delivered individual presentations to the class on the topic of Japan. Whilst allowing them to hone their talking and listening skills, this also provided a wonderful confidence building opportunity. All of the children delivered fabulous presentations showcasing their artistic and technology skills and sharing their knowledge confidently with their peers. Thank you for all your support in helping the children to prepare their work at home. Not surprisingly the children were very interested to hear about the current legal challenge between Marks & Spencer and Aldi and their respective chocolate caterpillar cakes! After examining how this has developed on social media, the children used their persuasive letter writing skills to convey their opinion on the matter, and who they believed was right and wrong. The results are fabulous, and I am sure you have enjoyed reading them on twitter. Apologies for the messy faces, but how could we not take part in a little bit of personal research to celebrate the holiday weekend!

Acknowledging that this has been a tumultuous year for us all, each child has begun to create a personal Time Capsule, charting the events of the past year and most importantly their emotions. As well as being a cathartic and enjoyable process for the children I am hoping that this will be a lovely snapshot of this quite unbelievable time which the children will reflect on in the future.

It was wonderful to get to ‘meet’ you all during our remote parents’ evenings. We introduced the School Cloud video calling system for our second parents’ evenings. This was as a result of parental feedback and we hope this gave you a chance to, at least virtually, meet me and hear about progress to date. I must say, overall, this seems to have been a resounding success with just a few parents missing their appointments. There were minimal technical difficulties and the process itself was efficient and worked to schedule. You will of course be provided with a comprehensive report before the end of term. In the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions.

The return to school enabled us to continue our Lenten Journey with the celebration of the Feast Days of St Patrick and St Joseph. We participated in the online Mass at St Cadoc’s Church and learned all about the lives of these two great Saints. We also enjoyed some shamrock cakes to round off our day! We had a very special day when P4 made their Sacrament of Reconciliation and were delighted to have completed this step on the journey to the next Sacrament of First Holy Communion. During Holy Week, the significance of the Last Supper was highlighted for the children when we enjoyed a traditional Jewish Seder Meal together while learning the story of the Exodus and sampling matzo, grape juice, and bitter herbs, just as Jesus and his disciples did. Our preparation continues with your ongoing support and it really is a very exciting time for the children as they continue their faith journey!

On Thursday 22nd of April we joined with the whole school to acknowledge Earth Day 2021. As a Rights Respecting and Laudate Si school we were able to recognise the part that we all must play in healing our common home for our, and future generations, benefit. We are working towards achieving our gold award and Rights Respecting discussion will feature heavily in the coming weeks.

Finally, I hope you all enjoy the holiday weekend and thank you for all your support in these challenging times – however, we have so much to look forward to in the coming weeks and if we all continue to work together the children will continue to flourish – and finally, sending love and prayers to all our wonderful families.

Thank you

The tree is glittering, the Advent wreath has three candles, the Jesse Tree has seventeen ornaments, our wonderful assembly has been filmed….. It really is beginning to look a lot like Christmas in P4a and with only 8 sleeps to go we are very, very excited….

The wonderful season of Advent has been at the centre of our month as we get ready for the birth of the baby Jesus. To help us prepare and to countdown to the big day we have created a class Jesse Tree. This tradition dates back to the middle ages and involves listening to an Old Testament reading each day and learning about the characters which complete the family tree of the baby Jesus. To illustrate our learning, we then added an ornament showing a related image to our tree. We have really enjoyed this activity and decided to share it with our fellow pupils on the Advent wall.

One of the highlights of our month was preparing, practising and filming our virtual Advent assembly to share with our families. We worked so hard to deliver a very professional production and on the filming day itself we pulled out all the stops in our festive clothes with sparkle and tinsel aplenty. The key to our success was supporting each other and to illustrate this we created a class Advent wreath for our altar using cut outs of all of our helpful hands. We really hope you enjoyed watching our assembly!

We have still been very lucky to have plenty of helpers allowing us to visit Cadoc Wood every week. After enrolling as a Laudate Si School, we decided to decorate our class Christmas tree in a sustainable way using natural materials. At the forest each week we have created beautiful Christmas art and decorations, including stars and glittery pinecones. We followed in the footsteps of the Three Wise Men dramatising their journey, identifying challenges they may have encountered on their travels, and inventing our very own gold, frankincense and myrrh from nature to present to the baby in his manger. Thankfully, we still had time for some fun in the water, thank goodness for the spare socks in our trays!

It would not be Christmas without a panto and even in this year where nothing is the same, we were delighted to experience a private showing of a virtual Jack in the Beanstalk production in our own classroom. This came in the same week as the delicious Christmas lunch prepared by our lovely catering team and our Christmas jumper day. We really have been spoiled! A special thank you to our wonderful PSA who arranged for us all to party with our classes, with snacks and gifts for everyone.

As well as counting down the days to Christmas, we have learned to represent fractions as division and to calculate area in two ways during our numeracy lessons. In literacy we continued with our Pugs of the Frozen North novel developing character descriptions. To help us with descriptive words and setting we explored strategies used in film, including lighting and music, which was fascinating. Additionally, we learned the skill of letter writing by creating a letter to Santa and can you believe he wrote back to all of us! The class elf has definitely been keeping a very close eye on us and reporting back…

At this time of year, we know it is very important to remember people who are not as fortunate as us. We have collected our pound coins for Missio and we have made beautiful cards to send to our neighbours at the local nursing home to let them know that they are in our thoughts and prayers.

We would like to thank our primary 7 Rights Respecting School Ambassadors and Miss Mackay who have visited each week to share their knowledge of this very important area with us. They have been wonderful role models for us speaking confidently and demonstrating our school values of Love, Achieve, Respect and Kindness. We cannot wait to learn more in January….

All that remains for us to do is to echo the message of our assembly and thank all of our loved ones for taking care of us.

We wish you a Peaceful & Holy Christmas x

It has been a very rainy month but there has still been plenty to smile about in P4a….

We started November with a change to our outdoor learning day, now Wednesday, and to our class seats. We are loving getting to know our new neighbours while working and playing together to earn group jewels each week. This month we also revisited our class charter and created a friendship chain where we all committed to good behaviours in the playground and treating each other as we would like to be treated.

This month there have been many ‘celebrations’ in addition to our normal work, a welcome diversion from division you might say!

On International Children’s Day we wore blue and created posters illustrating the impact of climate change on polar animals. These were displayed in the school hall exhibition and enjoyed by all pupils and staff.

In this month of the Holy Souls we have learned about the Saints who are now in Heaven, including St Martin of Tours, St Elizabeth of Hungary, St Margaret of Scotland and, with a touch of tartan, St Andrew. Even more importantly we have prayed every day for our own loved ones who have died. Although losing them is sad for us we know that they are always with us and that our prayers are with them and for them. We created a Remembrance Tree where every leaf bore their names and made this the focus of our daily prayer including the Eternal Rest prayer which we have learned for this special month. We have continued to meet at lunchtime on a Friday to pray together as we prepare for our Sacraments in this very special year. As a school community we participated in a two minute silence at the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month remembering those who have died in conflict. We made poppies to ensure we never forget those who have given their lives to save ours.

During interfaith week we enjoyed learning about other world religions including Judaism and Buddhism.  We were particularly impressed when members of our class prepared presentations to improve our knowledge of their religions. As well as the Muslim faith we learned about Hinduism and enjoyed creating lanterns to celebrate the festival of Diwali.            

From the Feast of St Margaret of Scotland to the Feast of St Andrew we celebrated Catholic Education Fortnight. The theme for this year is ‘Jesus is the way, the truth and the life’. We discussed how we can follow the example of Jesus everyday in how we treat others and strive to be the best version of ourselves. We were delighted when Canon Eddie celebrated Holy Mass for us in our classroom. During this mass we led the liturgy and the enrolment of our school as a Laudato Si School. We will learn much more about this in the coming months but in short Laudato Si challenges us all to live the wish of Pope Francis and that we should do all we can to take care of the beautiful world God has given us. While we are missing singing together, we are still enjoying listening and appreciating music together. In particular, we loved the song ‘The way, the truth and the life’ and added our own personal touch to it. You will find it on twitter and we hope that it makes you smile.

During the month we have read our new class novel ‘The Pugs of the Frozen North’. The book has brought lots of fun and laughter as we have followed the adventures of Sika, Shen and their 66 pugs on their journey to the top of the world. Amongst many activities we have learned to draw pugs, create comic stories and focused on how we can make informed decisions and do the right thing. To illustrate this, and mark Scottish Book Week, we created our very own book covers and discussed how we as authors and illustrators could make them eye catching and attractive. We also successfully read in silence for 30 minutes as part of the Readathon raising money for school funds.

With the Feast of the Christ the King concluding the church year we are now beginning to get ready for the season of Advent. After reading the Laudato Si letter from Pope Francis we have decided to decorate our class Christmas tree with nature. During our trip to the forest we made beautiful stars using branches from the trees and we have collected lots of leaves and acorns too.

We are also preparing a special treat for our families which we will be sharing very soon……..

October has been such a busy month in Primary 4a. We have celebrated lots of class birthdays and following on from the excitement of the Tour de France, we were also delighted when the Giro d’Italia was won by Tao Geoghegan Hart, whose Granny lives in Edinburgh.

We started the month with a collaborative art task creating a beautiful squirrel using the colours of autumn, identified on our trip to the outdoor classroom. When we completed our own ‘piece’ we didn’t know what the finished outcome would be – it was so exciting to see all our hard work come together!

In this month of the Holy Rosary we have enjoyed getting together at lunch time on a Friday to pray the Rosary and remember everyone who needs our prayers. It was also very special for our class to celebrate the Feast Day of St Jude – with our very own Jude!

During our Tuesday trips to the forest we have had so much fun using our five senses to explore how the season of autumn changes our surroundings. We collected leaves of red, orange and brown and then used them to create squirrel and hedgehog art – we all agreed that they looked amazing. As well as visiting the forest we were also able to use our time out of the classroom to gather ‘Beat the Street’ points for St Cadocs while walking up to 5k. While exploring Newton Mearns we were sure to be the best versions of ourselves and outstanding ambassadors for our school. Some of us even got to walk past our own homes and were able to give our mum a wave. Thank you so much to the Mum’s and Dad’s, who have helped on our outdoor learning days – we would not be able to do it without you!

In the classroom we have used the Chromebooks to build on our literacy and numeracy learning. During Maths Week Scotland we learned about famous mathematicians Ada Lovelace and Katherine Johnson. Through our investigations we were able to discover some of the many ways maths influences our daily lives. While she is not able to visit the school, we are still able to take part in our music lessons with Mrs Duggie in true 2020 remote style.

During these uncertain days we are taking lots of time to take care of each other and ourselves. Everyday someone in the class is our VIP and we all love giving compliments to that person to make sure that they know how very special they are. We have been reading the book ‘The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse’ by Charlie Mackesy. We have learned that love and kindness are the greatest gifts to give and receive, and that asking for help, when you need it, is the bravest thing to do. This beautiful story has provided inspiration for pastel and ink drawings, while also developing our prediction, character description and questioning skills. We rounded off our learning by writing book reviews and all agreed we would highly recommend the book, while the mole was our favourite character, due to his love of cake.

Our teachers really enjoyed talking to our parents over the telephone. Everyone agreed we were very happy to be back at school and were all working really hard.

Finally, the month came to a Spooktacular end when we celebrated Halloween together. Our costumes were fabulous, with Wolverine Matthew picking up a special prize! We played games, listened to scary and funny stories (Ghost Boy was definitely our favourite – we watched it twice!), took part in the Halloween Parade and even danced sooo much!! We only had one or two treats though…..

We have loved coming back to school and especially being able to play with all of our friends again!

As we have moved into Primary 4 we have created our Class Charter and committed to being the very ‘Best Version of Ourselves’.

To help us to do this we are remembering our School Values and thinking of the beautiful song of the Lark as we set out to Love, Achieve, Respect and Kindness at St Cadoc’s Primary School.

We are all praying for a very successful year, with lots of fun too! 

Tour de France 2020

This term Primary 4A has loved learning all about the Tour de France and following the excitement during the three weeks of racing! We are able to explain that the Maillot Jaune (Yellow Jersey) is awarded to the race leader, the Maillot Vert (Green Jersey) is awarded to the best sprinter, the Maillot Blanc (White Jersey) is awarded to the best young rider and the Maillot a pois (Polka dot Jersey) is awarded to the best climber- otherwise known as the King of the Mountains! We followed the route from the Grand Depart in Nice all the way to the finale on the Champs-Elysee in Paris.

Every night we looked online to find out the current holder of all the jerseys and enjoyed sharing the information with the class and creating our wonderful ‘Working Wall’.

Our topic allowed us to learn across the curriculum from culture, literacy, advertising, drama and art (we created race jerseys!) to science and maths when we looked at how bikes work and the challenges a cyclist’s body faces during the three week challenge. In the outdoor classroom we pretended to be journalists interviewing the pro cycling stars. We were very excited using our drama skills. We also had fun with the tour during our MUGA time when we pretended to cycle in teams named after each jersey! 

When the race ended on Sunday, 20^th of September we were so delighted to see Slovenian Pogacar win the Yellow, White and Polka Dot jerseys! All this happened after a thrilling time trial on the Saturday when our leader Roglic suddenly ‘did not have the legs’!  

 Even more exciting was the fact that Irish rider Bennett took the green jersey and the stage win in Paris. We were so proud to see an Irishman in this amazing position for the first time since 1983!   

To round off our Topic we had a class party when we all made hats to wear and enjoyed watching the excitement of the final stage, while eating pain au chocolat!  

All in all, it was a great topic and we are looking forward to following the Giro D’Italia and the Vuelta Espana in the next couple of months.

Outdoor Learning

This term we have loved getting dressed up and heading to the forest! We have completed a treasure hunt, but, not surprisingly, we really loved splashing in the water! We used a special formula which allowed us to measure the circumference of a tree to work out how old it is. By using a compass, we were able to draw a bird’s eye plan of Cadoc Wood. We had great fun with the trundle wheels as we began to celebrate Maths Week Scotland and refreshed our memories about centimetres and metres.

Thank you so much to the Mum’s and Dad’s, who have helped on our outdoor learning days – we would not be able to do it without you!

Hello!

P3a have thoroughly enjoyed STEM week! A very special thank you to our parent Software Engineer who presented to us about her fascinating job. We loved watching the raisins dance when put into the lemonade, showing the effect of the carbon dioxide bubbles on the movement of the raisins. We watched them swell up with liquid as time went on. Building an igloo using only marshmallows and cocktail sticks was challenging and a race against time, but we put our minds to it and succeeded! We also used play-dough to create an elephant, using pushing, pulling, twisting and squishing movements.

As part of our Egyptian topic, we drew and shaded some kind camel faces! We did a fantastic job! To do this, we had to be patient and pay close attention to detail, using pencil to sketch lightly then shade using browns. They are all so different and unique, but capture the features of a camel perfectly. Very cute!

We built shadufs – ancient Egyptian water collecting tools – using a few materials. We tested them to see how many cubes they could pick up! To investigate mummification, we covered a piece of apple and a piece of tomato with natron – a special mix of salt and baking soda – to preserve the fruit and we looked at the difference after a few days!

In Maths, we have been focusing hard to identify the key mathematical words in word problems to be able to solve calculations. Our ability to talk confidently about numbers and explain our thinking to our peers is growing through number talks!

We are looking forward to our trip to the Kelvingrove Museum on Tuesday morning, where we will take part in an Ancient Egypt workshop!

The projects that have been brought into class are looking fantastic! We can’t wait to present them next week.

See you soon!

P3a 🙂

Hello everyone!

We have been working very, very hard on lots of different things! We began learning about other world religions, including Islam. In Maths, we have been exploring time and are becoming more able to identify the time on an analogue clock, using o’clock, half past, quarter past, quarter to and counting in 5 minute intervals. To be able to use a wider range of punctuation, we have been doing the kung fu punctuation dance, using all of the different actions, to practise commas, exclamation marks, question marks and colons. Our challenge this week in writing was to try to include direct speech, by using speech marks. It was tricky, but we gave it our best shot! We will work more on this in the coming weeks as we explore newspaper articles.

To explore Ancient Egypt, we learnt about the fancy sarcophagus coffins that important pharaohs were placed in. We used pattern to collaboratively design these for our Egyptian display! Then, we had a closer look at some hieroglyphics and began to understand how these symbols are used to represent the alphabet. We used the symbols to display our own names.

Today, we became mini pharaohs as we designed a multi-media image, using paper plates, photographs, colour and jewels. Have a look at Twitter!

We challenged ourselves to use all of our energy to complete the Daily Mile; P3a is a class full of very determined individuals!

On Tuesday, we have a lady coming in from RBS to work with us to complete a Money Sense workshop and learn all about how people use money in their lives.

Well done for working working hard on your Egypt projects at home; these are due in by Friday 13th March, but can be brought in before then. Miss Mackay is super excited to see them all! A little reminder – our Egyptian learning afternoon will be on Friday 3rd April at 1.40pm.

Speak to you soon!

P3a 🙂

Hello everyone! 🙂

This week, we worked very hard in Maths and Literacy. We re-drafted our letters to supermarkets that we had written, paying special attention to spelling, grammar and punctuation. We wanted to present it very clearly for people to be able to read them!

We investigated which materials are magnetic, using a range of items like tin foil, metal coins, spaghetti and other things around the classroom! We know what a magnet attracts and what it repels.

As part of our Scotland topic, we read when Maisie went to enjoy tea and cake at the Willow Tea Rooms (we were excited to find out that this is a real place!). We learnt a bit about Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his influence on the design of this building, looking specifically at the famous Mackintosh rose. Using a rubbing technique, we made our own roses – take a look at Twitter to see these!

To try to become better at understanding what ‘feedback’ is and how it can be helpful as we learn, we were challenged to draw 3 pictures of ourselves and make improvements each time, using the feedback from our peers! The challenge was giving specific and useful feedback and acting on this. Hopefully, this will help us in understanding how to improve our Writing and other aspects of our school work.

See you very soon! Have a wonderful February break. Please don’t forget your PE kit; we have PE on a Monday and Tuesday. If you don’t have a PE kit, please bring in a pair of older trainers and joggers to wear, particularly given the cold and muddy weather.

Remember to log in to Education City when you can to practise time, money, times tables and division! The level will be First * or First **.

Homework is not due until Friday 14th February, given the break. Reading books should be read at home, as well as some personal reading.

P3a 🙂

Hello!

This week, we began reading our new book ‘Maisie Goes to Glasgow’. Maisie lives in Edinburgh but wants to be an explorer like her Daddy so decides to travel to Glasgow. Maisie is going to take us on an adventure around Glasgow’s famous landmarks and we have decided to explore some of the city’s features like the Willow Tea Rooms, the Glasgow Rose, the Coat of Arms and the Clockwork Orange. With Burns Night on Saturday, we listened to Scots language recitals and had a look at the life of Burns, as well as some of his most famous poems. Some of us even had a go at reciting them to the class! It was fantastic!

We created a beautiful mosaic together by designing each part, using darker and lighter tones. To see it, have a look at Twitter!

On Monday, we ventured outdoors to explore Maths in a different environment. We used natural objects to create symmetrical patterns and pictures, and we also displayed the 3, 4 and 6 times tables.

We started to learn about Forces in Science, identifying pushes and pulls. We investigated the effect of friction on the motion of a toy car, moving across different materials. This was linked with our Maths as we used metre sticks to record our measurements in m and cm.

We wrote superb letters to supermarkets and restaurants to try to encourage them to stop using plastic packaging, by using persuasive and emotive language. To do this, we recalled some of the facts that we had previously learnt about plastic pollution!

Remember to log in to Education City when you can to practise the areas of symmetry, time, money, and of course your times tables! The level will be First * or First **.

Thanks for reading! See you very soon!

P3a 🙂