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