In p2/3, we have had some children working on independent learning at home. Well done to those children!

The pupils in P3/2 learned about the symbols of Advent and made their own tissue paper wreaths. The wreaths turned out really well and the children learned that the candles symbolise hope, peace, joy (the pink one) and love.

We have been very busy in P3/2 with our Nativity practise and all of our learning.

Literacy

We have been continuing with our programmes for reading, writing and spelling. The homework is available online through the school website. You will find a range of activities, such as jotter work and online activities. Please encourage your child to bring their reading books to school to support their learning in class. We have had the support of a Literacy expert to help us in developing routines to support our learning. We are enjoying a new range of activities and learning to be more independent learners. We are working hard on Daily Writing and Taught Writing. We love to get Star Writer and see our work displayed on our wall. We love to hear why our work has been chosen and we are very proud of our successes. Through our reading, we are working on developing our fluency and comprehension.

We are working more with our partners and taking responsibility for our written work by checking our core targets. We are learning through characters called Learning Lion and Successful Spider, who help us to understand our Learning Intentions and Success Criteria.

Numeracy and Mathematics

Mrs Cooney recently put a post on showing our work on Measure, which was play based. We are continuing with Addition and moving on to Subtraction. We enjoy a range of class activities such as online games, board games, Number Talks and textbook work. We have to explain our strategies, which will help us as we do much trickier work. We really enjoy using the online 100 square which can be found on Topmarks.

Health and Wellbeing.

We have been doing Gymnastics, using mats to develop our skills. We have recently done some Scottish Dancing to prepare for our party in December.

Through cooking, we have been learning about food hygiene, safety and making good food choices. We have had many successes, such as flatbreads and potato scones.

We have also been working on how to take care of our teeth. We hope to start working on brushing in class very soon.

We are working on how to be a good friend as this is very important in school and at home.

RE

As well as our Nativity, we have been preparing for Advent, like through competitions such as  Keeping Christ in Christmas, We prepared for November by talking about All Saints and All Souls Day. We have also recently begun preparing for Reconciliation by attending an Enrolment Mass. We enjoy our visits from Father Krysztof. He tells us about his life in Poland. As well as our daily prayers, we regularly reflect on the weekly Gospel and it’s meaning to us in our daily lives.

We have had a visit from a parrot  from Rainforest and we will continue to work on making habitats for him.

We enjoy a range of art activities as well as independent play in the playroom.

We have been using Lucky Ducks to encourage good behaviour and we’ll soon have a surprise visitor coming to help us to get ready for Christmas.

Primary 1 have been so busy this month and have achieved lots of their learning targets.

In Literacy we have continued to learn lots of new initial alphabet sounds and common words. We have been learning the strategies that we can use to help us to learn tricky words such as using our phonetic knowledge or spotting words hiding inside our words (e.g. his has is hiding inside). We have now learned 14 new sounds and are beginning to use our knowledge of these sounds to build words independently on our magnetic boards. Please test us on some words that contain our sounds each week whilst we do our homework. This will help us to read and write!

We have also been trying very hard to begin to write simple sentences all by ourselves on our whiteboards. Mrs Cook came into our class to visit us and she saw how well we wrote a sentence all about the cheeky pancake from our reading book. Charlie Checker helps us to remember our core writing targets such as finger spaces, big Captain Capital letters, and full stops at the end of our sentences. We have also been learning about instructions within our writing in primary 1. We made our own jam sandwiches then put instructions into the correct order so we could help others to make them too.

In Maths we have been working on numbers to 10. We have been ordering the numbers, finding missing numbers and learning the names of the numbers to 10. We have also been learning about shape. We know lots of 2d shapes and can discuss their properties. Also, we have learned the names of lots of 3d objects such as cube, cuboid, cone, cylinder and sphere.

We have been developing our emotional literacy this month by investigating a range of emotions that we feel each day. We made our own Mood Monsters for our class. We like to have regular check-ins each day to say how we feel and why.

This has been a busy month within R.M.E. We have been learning that November is a very special month for remembering all the people who have died. We prayed for the people we know who have gone to Heaven. We also remembered the soldiers who died in war during Remembrance Day.

As our Nativity is quicky approaching we spent time learning about the story of the very first Christmas. We love the story so much and have enjoyed passing our Travelling Nativity Story around each of our houses. This represents the long journey that Mary and Joseph made as they travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

This month we celebrated St.Andrew’s Day in school. Primary 1 learned the song ‘Three Craws’ and performed it in front of an audience at our school assembly. We did so well. We loved watching the older children perform too! This was great practice for our upcoming Nativity show.

This month we are looking forward to so many things. We have a class Elf called Snowball who we can’t wait to find each morning. We have our Nativity show next week and we are so excited to show off our amazing acting, singing and dancing. Please remember to buy your tickets while they are still available. In December we also have our Christmas party and our Christmas lunch. Remember to check X for lots of photos of our important events.

Primary 4/5 November Update

This month has been a very busy time for Primary 4/5, with lots of great learning taking place. As a class we are successfully co-creating learning intentions and success criteria with Mrs Stevenson. We know that these are important to help us to understand what we are learning and why, as well as helping us to focus on how we can be successful and achieve our personal goals. This term we are lucky to be working with Mrs Meechan, who has been leading some of our learning in literacy. Miss Cairney, our teaching student has been with us on a Monday and is set to return in January for a block placement.

Cross Curricular Links

Our class, alongside P5, worked extremely hard to plan an exciting Remembrance Day fundraising event with all proceeds going to Poppy Scotland. They are a charitable organisation who provide support for current and former members of the Armed Forces, as well as their families.

During these preparations we learned about the work of Poppy Scotland and designed posters to advertise our event. We planned different stations for the whole school to enjoy, including an ICT station, face painting, cookie decorating, poppy sale and colouring-in. We raised a fantastic amount of money from this event and the total will be calculated soon.

This event encouraged us to look at timetabling, as we had to allocate time slots to each class in the school. We also had to think about the resources we had to buy and budget for the expenses. Each day, in the week prior to the event, we sold poppies and raffle tickets, taking turns to do this around the school. This event encouraged our class to be very responsible and recognise the difference we can make in our community.

In addition to this we had lots of fun learning about seasonal topics, including Guy Fawkes and Hallowe’en. As a class we created fun artwork and used these themes to enhance our learning in literacy and numeracy.

Literacy

We have worked very hard this month to improve our skills in listening & talking, reading, and writing.

Our reading programme continues to present us with excellent opportunities to improve in all areas of literacy. The majority of the class have really enjoyed reading ‘The Hundred-Mile-An-Hour dog’ by Jeremy Strong, with some children saying it was very funny and silly. This novel has allowed us to build confidence in using comprehension strategies, including visualisation, prior knowledge, main ideas, summarising, and comprehension. We also have regular fluency experiences with our peers and teacher.

Our Green group have been reading chapter books and have also been exploring some of the comprehension strategies. This is helping us to deepen our understanding of our texts and challenge ourselves to read a wide range of texts.

During Book Week Scotland we had the wonderful opportunity to select books to read to our friends in Primary 3/2. We loved choosing fun books we thought our friends would enjoy. As part of our reading programme we brought in our favourite books from home and talked to our class about the reasons why we enjoyed it. We have been making regular visits to the school library and have been excited to read the books we have selected for enjoyment. In the mornings we love to have uninterrupted silent reading time.

We continue to develop our skills in spelling by following our programmes. Our Green group are using magnetic boards/letters with the 5 finger approach; say the word, make/break the word, read the word and write the word. They are continuing to learn common words weekly and are using what they learn in their daily writing. Fantastic work, Green Group!

Our Red/Blue groups continue to follow the 4-week spelling programme and are learning all about the phoneme families. We have been learning to spell common words, using spelling strategies to help us to really look closely at words. We continue to try to use all this fantastic knowledge to improve our writing.

This month we have been using our novels/reading books, Newsround and class/whole school events and current topics to enhance our daily writing experiences. We have had opportunities to write creatively, including narratives and recounts, as well as a focus on the genre features of report writing. During all of these experiences we are keeping our core writing targets at the forefront of our minds and are trying really hard to include these in our writing.

Maths

This month we have continued to focus on measurement and have extended our learning to include measuring the area of a 2D shape. We learned all about cm/half cm squares, estimated, measured, and created different shapes. We are now able to convert measurements including cm/m.

We continue to improve our mental agility through regular problem solving and are building our confidence in selecting strategies to solve number problems. Each day we work on our daily 10, which is a range of 10 questions to help us solve challenges quickly.

Addition and subtraction have been our main focus this month, looking closely at ways to solve equations and learning about comparing numbers using symbols. We loved the alligator method, showing us how to compare greater than, less than and equal to.

In the coming months we will continue our number focus and increase our confidence in applying multiplication facts from 2/4/8, 3/6 times tables. Linking what we know to help us to solve division equations.

RME

Our Primary 4 children, who are receiving the sacrament of the Eucharist in May, were invited to attend an Enrolment mass. At this mass Father asked the children to attend with their families and present enrolment certificates. We all really enjoyed being part of this celebration of mass and are looking forward  to officially beginning our preparations for the Sacrament in the New Year.

To begin our first celebrations of the season of Advent, P4/5 have been preparing to lead our school and parish community in first Friday mass.  We have been preparing our responses during the mass, to ensure we are confident and able to take an active part with confidence. Some children have been preparing introductions to the mass, reading’s and bidding prayers, as well as our offertory procession.

HWB

As a whole class we have continued to improve our skills in team games and physical fitness by taking part in fitness challenges, we will continue these in the New Year. In the month of December, we will focus on our skills in dancing and learn traditional ceilidh dances including Gay Gordons and Dashing White Sergeants.

Primary 4

Primary 4 continue to learn about our emotions and how to build empathy, from our baby Esme during our Roots of Empathy programme with Mrs Le blond. Esme continues to be the best teacher, showing us how a baby develops in real time and encouraging us to consider the needs of a baby.

Primary 5

The swim/dry side programme was an enormous success for Primary 5 and all of the children achieved some level of success during the programme. Overall, the children have commented that their confidence levels in the pool have increased and it has been a brilliant achievement for them.

Our Primary 5 girls represented the school in the NL Cross-Country competition and really enjoyed this opportunity. Well done, girls!

Well,  what a busy time we have had over the last few weeks in Primary 7. We have had our first transition visit to Cardinal Newman High School, where we got to work with teachers from the English department which we loved. We are due to visit again on the 15 December so can’t wait to get another visit.

In other areas some of our Primary 6 and 7 boys and girls represented our school at a football festival where both teams did very well and gave the children a fantastic opportunity to compete against other local schools. Recently many children represented our class in the Cross Country trials and I am pleased to say many will be selected again to run in the final. Well done to all involved and for all the parents who came along to support on these occasions.

Literacy

We are well underway with our Active Literacy Spelling Programme and some of the words being taught to the children are very tricky. We discuss the meaning and the root of these as well as how to spell them accurately. I will not always set specific spelling tasks for homework each week as the children can chose which way they would like to learn these words – I will spelling suggestions to the files section on our class team.

Reading – we have just completed a block of Non – Fiction Reading in which the children developed their reading, writing, listening and talking skills through the exploration of non-fiction sources. This was linked to Climate Change, Sustainable and Renewable Energy and the children worked co operatively over the course of the week to read, watch and listen to a variety of sources such as texts, AI generated pieces, documentaries, podcasts and online sources linked to the themes above. They had debates and discussions and shared their learning with each other over the week. They had the opportunity to plan and research and then produced an extended piece of writing each week, showcasing their knowledge within their writing skills. The children really enjoyed this method of learning. In addition to this the children had to read a personal reader at home and prepare a detailed book review which they will present to the class. This gives us the opportunity to developing our listening and talking skills and we are engaging in Peer evaluation so that we all have a shared understanding of what is expected of us in this area. So far, the presentations have been excellent, and I have a list of books that I now really want to read. We will get through the rest of these this week hopefully.

Over the next few weeks we will be embarking on a Christmas Media Study where we will explore and develop our reading comprehension skills via this media. We also hope to look at poetry and perhaps Song.

Maths and Numeracy

We have working hard on developing our Number and Number Processes. We have been looking at multiplication and division, decimal fractions, negative numbers, multiples factors and primes and BODMAS which the children really enjoyed. I am seeing the confidence increase in many of them as they are experiencing success. I would continue to encourage them to always read and consider each problem carefully. Quite often errors occur due to a lack of concentration, mis counting or wrong multiplication facts. It is important at this stage that the children are focused in class. I would also encourage children to continue to take pride in their jotter presentation. This week children are undertaking the Standardised assessments for P7 which will enable us to identify areas for development and focus for next term.

HWB/PE

We have been working with the Cardinal Newman High School sports leaders in PE. They have been teaching us a range of different games and skills and are helping us to work together as a team. We are going to learn how we can be leaders in our own school by being Junior Sports Leaders for the younger children in our school.

We are also about to embark on our favourite time of the year in the school calendar – Social Dancing. This is in preparation for our class party and to teach us lifelong skills as we never know when we might need to dance the night away at a Ceilidh.

We also recently learned and performed a modern Scottish Song in honour of St Andrew’s day. We really enjoyed singing ‘Home’ by Nathan Evans and our performance is on our school Twitter if you would like to listen to our wonderful singing.

Uniform

Please can the children remember to bring PE uniform to change on Tuesdays and Thursdays, if there is any item needed, please access our Uniform Swap and Shop where you may find what you need. Can I also remind the children to wear their school tie each day as again this sets a good example from Primary 7 to the rest of the children.

Finally thank you to you all for your ongoing support with the children.

Mrs Preston and Primary 7.

We are delighted that one of our P4 pupils’ designs was chosen by North Lanarkshire Council’s Provost as his official Christmas card design for 2024. Here is the winning entry. Well done!

winning entry christmas card comp