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!