It was lovely to see all of our friends back in class after the Christmas holidays.  We took time to share our favourite memories with one another during talking and listening time.  There were so many stories and traditions shared during this time and it was very interesting to find out about the ways in which different nationalities and cultures spend the holiday season.

Our focus for Literacy this term will be to concentrate on writing neatly, using correct punctuation and grammar and remembering to check over all that we write so that we can correct our own mistakes more often.  Our taught writing focus is imaginative writing and we are currently writing our own fairytale to read to the children in P2.  I will post the photos on Twitter when we visit them.

We are working hard on our Novel Studies and are being encouraged to look up the meaning of unfamiliar words when we see them and not just read on past them.  This helps build our spoken and written vocabulary and improves the quality of our language work.  Please continue to get your child to read some of their book aloud to someone at home using good expression and clear voice.

In Numeracy, we began the term focussing on fractions and finding a fraction of an amount.  We are gaining confidence in this concept and are beginning to make a link between a fraction and decimals, especially tenths and hundredths.  Please continue to encourage your child to learn their tables 2-12 as this greatly helps their confidence in number and speeds up their computation.

We will begin a unit on Time towards the middle of February so it is important that your child is confident in the basics of time which has been taught in P3, 4 and 5.  If they have understanding of concepts previously taught then it is much easier to advance their knowledge and understanding of more difficult aspects of time such as adding/subtracting time and duration.

We are almost finished our topic on the 7 Ancient Wonders of the World which the children chose as their IDL subject.  They children took notes and created a factfile on each wonder and have used their ICT skills of word processing to complete an information leaflet.  We used our design skills to create a 3D pyramid and will be set a homework task of recycling household waste to recreate one of the Wonders of the Ancient World next week.

Our next topic will be the Celts and the Picts which we are all looking forward to learning about.

Our RME topics this month have included listening to the Liturgy that was read at Mass each week and exploring the idea of witness in the Old Testament. Our P6 children are all participating in the Pope Francis Faith Award which helps all of our young people to look at the skills and qualities that they have which can be used to help others.  They are also learning about the importance of taking an active part in looking after the health of our planet through the Laudato Si project.