Primary 4/5 November Update

This month has been a very busy time for Primary 4/5, with lots of great learning taking place. As a class we are successfully co-creating learning intentions and success criteria with Mrs Stevenson. We know that these are important to help us to understand what we are learning and why, as well as helping us to focus on how we can be successful and achieve our personal goals. This term we are lucky to be working with Mrs Meechan, who has been leading some of our learning in literacy. Miss Cairney, our teaching student has been with us on a Monday and is set to return in January for a block placement.

Cross Curricular Links

Our class, alongside P5, worked extremely hard to plan an exciting Remembrance Day fundraising event with all proceeds going to Poppy Scotland. They are a charitable organisation who provide support for current and former members of the Armed Forces, as well as their families.

During these preparations we learned about the work of Poppy Scotland and designed posters to advertise our event. We planned different stations for the whole school to enjoy, including an ICT station, face painting, cookie decorating, poppy sale and colouring-in. We raised a fantastic amount of money from this event and the total will be calculated soon.

This event encouraged us to look at timetabling, as we had to allocate time slots to each class in the school. We also had to think about the resources we had to buy and budget for the expenses. Each day, in the week prior to the event, we sold poppies and raffle tickets, taking turns to do this around the school. This event encouraged our class to be very responsible and recognise the difference we can make in our community.

In addition to this we had lots of fun learning about seasonal topics, including Guy Fawkes and Hallowe’en. As a class we created fun artwork and used these themes to enhance our learning in literacy and numeracy.

Literacy

We have worked very hard this month to improve our skills in listening & talking, reading, and writing.

Our reading programme continues to present us with excellent opportunities to improve in all areas of literacy. The majority of the class have really enjoyed reading ‘The Hundred-Mile-An-Hour dog’ by Jeremy Strong, with some children saying it was very funny and silly. This novel has allowed us to build confidence in using comprehension strategies, including visualisation, prior knowledge, main ideas, summarising, and comprehension. We also have regular fluency experiences with our peers and teacher.

Our Green group have been reading chapter books and have also been exploring some of the comprehension strategies. This is helping us to deepen our understanding of our texts and challenge ourselves to read a wide range of texts.

During Book Week Scotland we had the wonderful opportunity to select books to read to our friends in Primary 3/2. We loved choosing fun books we thought our friends would enjoy. As part of our reading programme we brought in our favourite books from home and talked to our class about the reasons why we enjoyed it. We have been making regular visits to the school library and have been excited to read the books we have selected for enjoyment. In the mornings we love to have uninterrupted silent reading time.

We continue to develop our skills in spelling by following our programmes. Our Green group are using magnetic boards/letters with the 5 finger approach; say the word, make/break the word, read the word and write the word. They are continuing to learn common words weekly and are using what they learn in their daily writing. Fantastic work, Green Group!

Our Red/Blue groups continue to follow the 4-week spelling programme and are learning all about the phoneme families. We have been learning to spell common words, using spelling strategies to help us to really look closely at words. We continue to try to use all this fantastic knowledge to improve our writing.

This month we have been using our novels/reading books, Newsround and class/whole school events and current topics to enhance our daily writing experiences. We have had opportunities to write creatively, including narratives and recounts, as well as a focus on the genre features of report writing. During all of these experiences we are keeping our core writing targets at the forefront of our minds and are trying really hard to include these in our writing.

Maths

This month we have continued to focus on measurement and have extended our learning to include measuring the area of a 2D shape. We learned all about cm/half cm squares, estimated, measured, and created different shapes. We are now able to convert measurements including cm/m.

We continue to improve our mental agility through regular problem solving and are building our confidence in selecting strategies to solve number problems. Each day we work on our daily 10, which is a range of 10 questions to help us solve challenges quickly.

Addition and subtraction have been our main focus this month, looking closely at ways to solve equations and learning about comparing numbers using symbols. We loved the alligator method, showing us how to compare greater than, less than and equal to.

In the coming months we will continue our number focus and increase our confidence in applying multiplication facts from 2/4/8, 3/6 times tables. Linking what we know to help us to solve division equations.

RME

Our Primary 4 children, who are receiving the sacrament of the Eucharist in May, were invited to attend an Enrolment mass. At this mass Father asked the children to attend with their families and present enrolment certificates. We all really enjoyed being part of this celebration of mass and are looking forward  to officially beginning our preparations for the Sacrament in the New Year.

To begin our first celebrations of the season of Advent, P4/5 have been preparing to lead our school and parish community in first Friday mass.  We have been preparing our responses during the mass, to ensure we are confident and able to take an active part with confidence. Some children have been preparing introductions to the mass, reading’s and bidding prayers, as well as our offertory procession.

HWB

As a whole class we have continued to improve our skills in team games and physical fitness by taking part in fitness challenges, we will continue these in the New Year. In the month of December, we will focus on our skills in dancing and learn traditional ceilidh dances including Gay Gordons and Dashing White Sergeants.

Primary 4

Primary 4 continue to learn about our emotions and how to build empathy, from our baby Esme during our Roots of Empathy programme with Mrs Le blond. Esme continues to be the best teacher, showing us how a baby develops in real time and encouraging us to consider the needs of a baby.

Primary 5

The swim/dry side programme was an enormous success for Primary 5 and all of the children achieved some level of success during the programme. Overall, the children have commented that their confidence levels in the pool have increased and it has been a brilliant achievement for them.

Our Primary 5 girls represented the school in the NL Cross-Country competition and really enjoyed this opportunity. Well done, girls!