November has been a busy month for Primary 4.

We started with All Saints Day and All Souls Day. We have been very conscientious in talking about people we love who are no longer with us. We also did work on saints, including St Margaret of Scotland. We learned a bit about her life and the kind deeds that she did as queen. We finished the month by preparing for our First Friday Mass.  We also started to learn about Advent at the end of November and learned more about the Liturgical calendar. Whilst over at church, we took the chance to look around at the statues, especially of Mother Theresa and Pope John Paul, who are now both saints.

We are very proud of our new Mini Vinnies, who have already been working on plans to help the poor and help out at Mass. Some have already helped at Sunday Mass and the parish were delighted with their help.

We prepared for St Andrew’s Day by learning Ally Bally Bee, which we sang beautifully. We have also been learning a dance for the Reindeer Rave to support St Andrew’s Hospice.

For the Christmas Fayre, we enjoyed making marshmallow snowmen and decorating biscuits.

We also have a guest in our class. Ralph, the elf is offering us advice on  staying on Santa’s Good List. Here is his advice-

• Listen well to our teachers and the adults at home
• Help around the class and at home
• Be kind to our friends and siblings.

Look out for a letter from Ralph as he visits each child’s desk.

We have made some lovely Christmas artwork to decorate our school. We made Christmas trees which are now in the hall and step by step Reindeers which will go up soon.

We are continuing to have baby Lily visit us for Roots of Empathy. Mrs Le Blond and Mrs Anderson are already impressed at how gentle we are to little Lily! We have been learning about different themes, including crying and how a baby communicates with us. We had some super responses to this topic.

It’s hard to believe that we have had any time left to do Literacy and Numeracy but we continue to work hard to make good progress in these areas. We continue with Addition and Times Tables. We have been working on Number Pattern and Time In Reading, we continue to develop the confidence to use strategies such as Prior Knowledge and Inference to support our learning. We are concentrating on always answering in clear sentences. We continue to follow the NLC programme for Spelling. We have our phonemes, common words or spelling rules placed around the class so that we have plenty opportunities to see our lists. We have been working on Instructional Writing with Mr Hamill.

This a good time to remind all adults that we have weekly homework which is very easy to find on the school website. The children completing it regularly are gaining an advantage in their learning and their confidence.

Finally, we have recently introduced a job chart and we have all had a chance to choose a job to help our class stay organised. We are the biggest class in the school and we continue to work on taking care of resources that we all share. With this in mind, can the adults at home please ensure we return all resources to school, like reading books, pencils or rubbers accidentally taken home. Can you also label children’s personal things such as jumpers in order to find them more easily.