Even though it’s been a short month with a holiday, we’ve been working hard in Primary 4.

Literacy

We have been continuing with our daily spelling which is supported by our weekly homework tasks. This month we have been getting more confident using spelling strategies and Mrs Daisley was surprised at how good we were at Mnemonics. This is where we use each letter to make a little saying that helps us to remember how to spell words.

big

elephants

can

always

understand

small

elephants

This is helpful to remind us how to spell because. Mrs Daisley had to admit that the children did this better than she could manage!

In reading, we have been continuing to work on our group reading activities. We have to remember to take our reading work home and to bring it back. It’s very tricky to look up words or find clues if we don’t have our books in class. We are working on making sure that we do our best written tasks by talking about what makes our work good. Some of us a working on Summaries, for example, and we know that a good Summary shouldn’t be too long and should mention the Main Ideas from our novel. Others are working on answering question in full sentences with good punctuation.

Mrs Cooney has been reading a novel called Orion Lost to us in class.

We have had great reading materials about Space to read independently in class. We got some from our school library. We are very proud of our hard work restoring the school library with Mrs Cooney. The other classes are delighted to get a turn using it now.

In writing, we have learned the features of explanation pieces of writing, written about Chinese New Year and identified key vocabulary around our topic on space, so that we could write a report on that too. We watched Authors Live to listen how a real author plans his stories and we have started planning a very special narrative piece for someone we love.

We continue to work on talking, through class discussions and through our reading work. Listening to follow instructions is ongoing in class.

Numeracy

We have been working on Subtraction in class. Some of us are working up to 50 and others are now working with 3 digit numbers. All of our good work on Addition has helped us to progress with this, as we can use strategies like adding on for this work.

We continue to work on Times Tables. This month, we have concentrated on the 3 and 6. We know that the 6 Times Table is double the 3 Times Table.

We also continue with Time and we worked on Fractions as we could see patterns in Time.

This month, we started to work on stations-we go round different stations such as practical activities. We enjoyed this and we will do more in the future, now we can share resources more.

Health and Well-Being

We continue to work on Gymnastics and are delighted to be able to work inside using the equipment, such as the wall bars.

We are spending a lot of time discussing our friendships and ways to keep them strong. It is normal  for our age to have some difficulties in dealing with friends. With the help not our teachers and family, we can get stronger at dealing calmly with tricky situations.

Here are some issues that we face

• feeling left out
• feeling hurt by someone’s words or actions
• feeling lonely in the playground
• getting carried away with play fighting
• not knowing how to calm ourselves down after a disagreement.

In class, we get best results when we discuss our problems once we have managed to calm down. We can then see both sides and we are getting good at finding a solution. We are also stopping to think how we would feel if we were the one left out, for example. The best way you can help at home, is to talk calmly with us and help us to find a way to deal with it ourselves.

 

Topic

We have enjoyed learning about Space. We are impressed to learn about the careers of astronauts, such as Tim Peake and Neil Armstrong. We are real scientists as we have had to do the same experiment over again to see what works best. Our rockets didn’t go straight up into the air , so we discussed what we will do next time. Real scientists don’t give up!

RE

We all learned about Jewish Passover this month and why this celebration is important.

The First Communion children are getting through their workbook and we will be finished in March. You can help by making sure that the home sections are finished by the time we finish Unit 7. We will do Unit 8 after the First Communion itself.