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