Welcome to Primary 7’s first update of their final year at primary school. It has been lovely to welcome the children back into class after the summer holiday and great to see them smiling, enthusiastic and excited for all that is planned in the year ahead.

One of the first responsibilities the children had was to ensure that they helped their Primary 1 buddy to adjust to their very first days in school. This involved meeting them at the gate, helping them in the lunch hall and of course playing and looking after them in the school yard. I am very proud of how they all showed their nurturing and caring side when embarking on this role.

In order to ensure that we start the year as we mean to go on, we have spent lots of time settling back in to school and reflecting on our Schools Vision and Values and class rules. We are very aware that as Primary 7 we are role models to the younger children and want to set a good example of how we demonstrate, happiness, kindness, faith, mutual respect, and growth in learning. We know that with all the additional responsibilities we have and the busy, dynamic pace of primary 7 we need to work hard and focus on our learning in class.

Literacy

We have been reading the novel ‘Wonder’ by RJ Palacio, which tells the story of Auggie Pullman, a ten-year-old boy with a severe facial difference that makes him stand out. The children have really enjoyed this novel and we have explored themes of kindness, acceptance, bullying, and the challenges of living with a disability. The novel strongly emphasizes the power of kindness and the importance of empathy. The children have developed understanding through the six main reading strategies, prior knowledge, visualisation, metalinguistics, main ideas, inference and summarising. Through listening, talking and exploring the themes the children have developed a deeper understanding of the importance and impact of decisions and choices they make.

The class have also been working through the North Lanarkshire Active Literacy Spelling programme which is a 5 week programme where the children focus on the following

Week 1/2 – Building Vocabulary – focus is on Affixes and Homophones and Confusions

Week 3/4 – Common Words – Spelling Strategies and Rules for Common and Tricky Words

Week 5 – Consolidation and Assessment

 

Writing – Our focus has been on our Core Targets and Persuasive and Information Genre. The children completed applications, wrote letters, speeches and designed posters for our House Captain campaign. The children will focus on non – fiction features of writing through their IDL and Science topics.

Maths and Numeracy

The children have been working on Estimating and Rounding, Place Value up to 7 digits and 3 decimal places.

The children are learning that there is a variety of ways to problem solve and approach calculations, they are learning the relevance of rounding and estimating and when it would be useful to use this skill. They are learning to apply Maths and Numeracy to their everyday lives. Children are continuing to use Number Talks Strategies to explain and justify their answers and children are becoming more confident in this. We are continuing to work on pace and accuracy of our mental agility and should continue to learn multiplication and division facts and how to quickly multiply and divide by 10, 100 and 1000.

HWB/PE

We have been working on our fitness levels and recording our progress over a 4-week period – we are able to see how this has increased with frequency of application. We are now developing our skills in Badminton and on Thursday’s we are lucky to have sports leaders from Cardinal Newman working with us.

We have explored our rights and learned about the UNCRC and have agreed on and set up our Class Charter. We have explored how manage risks, and to keep ourselves safe when participating in sports and activities – we demonstrated our leadership skills when we taught our buddies how to play games safely in the yard.

RE

We have been learning all about the Liturgical Seasons and Colours, the Assumption, and the importance of including God in our lives throughout the year. We have had a few visits from Fr Kristoff and it has been really interesting to learn all the important things he teaches us about the Church and prayer. We celebrated our First Friday Mass to welcome everyone back to school and are now learning all about how we can be like Jesus in our own lives. We are learning about the Saints and the Holy Spirit in preparation for some of us receiving the Sacrament of Confirmation.

Homework

Unfortunately, I have been having some technical issues with the Primary 7 Homework tab. It does not always enable me access to post the homework but there does not appear to be any known cause for this, so I have therefore been posting on the Class Team when this has been unavailable. I have explained this to the children and they too have experienced some difficulty with the website and logging on to Glow and Teams. Going forward I will endeavour to post to the website and to Teams. Should you not see homework available on one, please check the other. This week passed, during ICT all children checked that they were able to access GLOW and our Class Team using their passwords. They may need to download Teams or access it via the GLOW launch pad on their own devices and they may need to re-enter their username and password. It is important that children become familiar using Teams for communication as this is often the preferred method of communication used at Secondary School.

In Other Areas

I would just like to say well done to our new Captains of Milnwood, Muirmadkin, Orbiston and Mossend. All of the children that participated in this should be very proud of themselves as they were all very worthy winners and it was certainly a tough choice for the children in the school.

Uniform

Please can the children remember to bring PE uniform to change on Tuesdays and Thursdays, if there is any item needed, please access our Uniform Swap and Shop where you may find what you need. Can I also remind the children to wear their school tie each day as again this sets a good example from Primary 7 to the rest of the children.

 

Finally thank you to you all for your ongoing support with the children and I look forward to meeting with you on Parents Evening.

Mrs Preston and Primary 7.