After a lovely holiday, we are working hard at getting back into our good routines. We are reminding ourselves of our Class Charter as we wrote it together to help us be our best in primary 4.

• Play. Be nice to others and they’ll be nice to you. We are working on thinking about how to be a good friend to others.
• Learn. Listen to the teacher and when other children are talking. Listening to the teacher is very important for good learning, as is turn taking with other children.
• Safe. Be helpful to everyone, including teachers. We are making sure our class and school is a safe place to be in, by, for example,  following rules on how to move about the school and keeping our class tidy.

Homework

It’s never too late to start homework activities. It is always available on the school website. If your child is ever off and not too ill, you can always use the homework to keep up with the class.

First Communion

The children making their First Communion have started their workbooks which will be sent home on a Wednesday and should be brought back on a Monday. We have started early incase we have weeks where we don’t manage to do everything we need. This will give us lots of time at the end to prepare for the First Communion day in the church. The most important preparation is regular attendance at Mass.

Literacy

Reading

The Red and Blue groups are busy with novels. Please take care of these as they are a very precious resource for the school. Reading their novel at home really supports the class work and ensures that your child keeps up with their group. The Red group are reading The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark and the Blue group are reading Horrid Henry. The Yellow group have begun an exciting new series called Rapid Readers which have a fiction and non fiction part in each book.

We started with a non fiction book called How A Book Is Made. Through this book, we have been learning about Main Ideas and Summarising A Text. Summarising is a very tricky strategy because our teachers are asking us to write less, instead of more! This is confusing but we will practise until we understand it.

Spelling

We continue with our spelling programmes. This is very important work and regular practise at home will really help us with our phonemes, common words and rules.

Writing

We have been doing writing with Mrs Byrne. We wrote a Personal story about our holidays and Mrs Byrne has begun Explanation work by modelling a piece for us. We have also written a poem to celebrate Burns Day.

Numeracy and Maths

We have been working hard on our Tables, to help us with Multiplication and Division. We have been looking at strategies to support this work, like

• Repeated Subtraction and Addition
• Grouping
• Using Arrays

We have started Information handling with Mrs Byrne, including work related to Burns Day.

Topic

We are very enthusiastic in our new topic of Scottish Inventors. We have already learned about John Logie Baird and Alexander Graham Bell. Many of us have already done personal work , which will be proudly displayed in our class. All of our personal work on the Titanic have been returned to us to make way.

Art

We have just started work on Charles Rennie Mackintosh. We are learning about his life and his many talents. We are working on recreating his famous rose.

Drama

Miss Cairney has been working with us one drama work.  We have been building up our skills in expression to convey characters using body language and facial expression, then using this to make freeze frames or short improvised scenes. This is related to our Health and Well Being work in Emotionworks.

Health and Well Being

We are continuing our work on Roots of Empathy, where we have been exploring different themes, such as Taking Care Of A Baby and Crying. We love to see baby Lily every 3 weeks and see how many new skills she has acquired!

 

Welcome back!

January was a month of completing projects and novels! We said goodbye to our World War 2 topic. After we came back in January we learned all about Alan Turing, a brilliant WW2 code breaker who invented a machine to decipher the Enigma Code. We had a go of trying to decipher war messages which turned out to be harder than it looks! We also learned about the Allied Invasion of Normandy, also known as D-Day and had a go of creating our own version of this strategic plan. We finished off our topic with an interesting discursive essay looking at the relevance of learning about the Second World War.

We have then moved onto our next topic, the Circular Economy. This is an enterprising challenge where we have been put into groups and have to create a product or service that fits into the circular economy business model. This is a live challenge hosted by Young Enterprise Scotland who will be visiting our class sometime in February! At the end of the challenge, a few lucky groups may be selected to go through to the final showcase where we will need to present our enterprising business plans to a panel of judges.

For Primary 7, we completed our brilliant novel, Holes by Louis Sachar. From our evaluations, it is safe to say we absolutely loved this book and the fun activities we were able to do such as creating Sploosh! We are excited to start our new novel, Divided City which will explore themes of sectarianism and friendship. We think this links in nicely to our work we are doing with the charity, Nil by Mouth, alongside our friends at Mossend Primary.

We completed a Term 1 maths assessment and are super proud of our results! Miss Gallagher wants to ensure the retention of maths skills remains high so for homework each week, we will be given a maths worksheet with questions covering various maths operations. We will go through our answers in class each Friday morning.

We would like to welcome Miss Sloan to our class. She is a student teacher who will be with us for several weeks. We are sure she will be a valuable part of our class!

Welcome back!

We have all settled back into our school routines and are working hard to reach our learning goals during our school day. To begin our journey through 2024 we set some personal targets and talked about the ways that we can achieve these during our school day. We enjoyed wishing each other a Happy New Year and had a pretend Hogmanay celebration, complete with a countdown, fireworks, cannons, and singing/dancing. We made some New Year promises and talked about what a resolution is and whey we make these. Primary 1 and Mrs Stevenson are really looking forward to the months ahead and are raring to go!

Literacy

We have been working so hard to learn all our alphabet sounds in Primary 1. This week we covered our final letters and are now consolidating our learning. Our teacher would like to check that we know all of our alphabet sounds, what they sound like in words and what their names are. We are going to be working at home too to practise our sounds.

Our next step will be to learn some phoneme sounds, which we are also very excited about.  We will hopefully be able to find our sounds in stories and recognise them when reading our books. When we are writing our wonderful sentences, we are trying hard to include capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. We have been learning about exclamation marks and question marks and have been spotting them in our reading too. Our next step will be trying to use these in our sentences too.

Our common word wall is becoming very full in the classroom and we are working hard every day to practise reading and writing our words. We can build sentences using them and spot them in books and when we use the internet in the classroom for our learning. At home we should continue to learn our common words, practise our sounds and reading to help us to keep up this great learning.

Mrs Stevenson has been delighted with the excellent listening and concentrating we have been doing during our literacy tasks. We really have gained some fantastic skills since joining the school. Well done Primary 1!

Numeracy

In Primary 1 we continue to extend our knowledge of numbers and we are now comfortable in reading, writing, counting and ordering numbers to 10. We are now extending our learning to 11-20.  Some of our class can even use the 100 square and count with 3-digit numbers, fantastic! We have been practising adding and subtracting with numbers up to 10 and enjoy our daily challenges, like daily 10 and number of the day to help us to learn more. We like to talk about our mental strategies with our classmates and this can help us to share our great ideas and learn more about number.

This week we have been learning more about days of the week and calendars. We have learned how to tell o’clock times on analogue clocks and are looking forward to learning more about time during our maths activities. If we have a watch at home, we can wear it to school to help us to become more confident when reading clocks.

Interdisciplinary Learning

We have been learning all about Scotland this month. We looked at Scotland on a world map and discussed the different countries we could see. We couldn’t believe how much water surrounded our island. That brought us to our next investigation – Scottish lochs and trying to find out if Nessie is real or if it is a made-up story. We loved watching clips about Nessie, reading the story ‘There is no such thing as Nessie’, making our Wanted posters and writing Nessie stories. We made some 3D Nessie artwork that is displayed in our classroom.

We have explored Scottish artefacts and even held a real sporran, glengarry hat and a quaich. We learned about Scottish clans and tartan. Primary 1 thought this was great fun and asked lots of excellent questions. We hope that Mrs Stevenson’s dad gives her more artefacts to share soon.

To celebrate Robert Burns’ Day on the 25^th of January we held a Burns celebration in the classroom. We learned all about the Scottish Poet’s life and heard some of his songs/poems. Our favourite was ‘Auld Lang Syne’ which we danced to after our shortbread.

Click on the link below to view our diary for the week ahead.

HF Diary 15012024