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!

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.

Welcome to our first update of the year! I am Mrs Daisley and I teach on a Monday to Wednesday, with Mr Hamill taking over on a Thursday and Friday. We are working together to ensure that all of the children have the best start to their year.

Routines

We are working hard on daily routines to support good learning in our class. The more independent the children are in following routines, the more time we have to ensure good learning for all our pupils. We have created a Class Charter with this in mind-

• 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.

We have PE on a Thursday and Friday. PE kit consists of a yellow t-shirt, blue shorts and gym shoes/ trainers. Let us know if you are having problems with these items. We would encourage jewellery to be left at home for safety reasons. We are beginning with ball skills.

Literacy

We have begun a class novel, called I Was There which is a novel about children on the Titanic, which is our topic. We are learning new Reading Strategies through this novel. We are also beginning non-fiction reading and reading scheme work. In Spelling, we are doing a lot of revision before we move onto our new work. We have begun narrative writing and hope to have some Star Writers soon. In Listening and Talking, we are working on expressing our opinions on our novel and taking turns in class discussions.

Numeracy and Mathematics

We have begun with Place Value, looking at numbers up to Thousands, before moving on to tens of thousands. We are also looking a 2-D Shape.

RE

We have begun work on The Church, here we are learning about our local Church and the people who make up the Church, past and present. We have started a lovely wall display to support our learning.

Topic

We are learning more about the Titanic, as we were so interested to hear what was happening with it in primary 3. We are going to make models of boats and cabins, so would appreciate any shoe boxes you could spare.

Health and Wellbeing

As well as our Class Charter, we have been discussing our emotions.

To support our work in class, you could think about

• Helping your child to tie their own laces.
• Read with them or encourage them to read for fun. This will make a huge difference in their confidence in Literacy.
• Speak to them when they have arguments with friends and help them to think of solutions to deal with it themselves. This is a great life skill which will see them through primary and beyond.

Here are some pictures of our class. We are starting to make it homely with the children’s work displayed.

We are enjoying getting to know your children and build strong relationships with them. We look forward to getting to know them better throughout this session.

May has been a very special month in primary 4 as we had our First Communion for many of our pupils. After months of learning all about the Sacrament and weeks in church preparing, we made our whole school community extremely proud. It was lovely for us in Holy Family school to share in this special day and we hope that you can all now share this with your church community.

In Literacy , we have been continuing with our  spelling work as usual. We will keep doing spelling homework for a few more weeks, but look out for it in our diaries, rather than on the website. Mrs Gilfedder has been very pleased with the Friday tests, which show how hard we have been learning for the rest of the week. We have been  writing instructions, for example. reporting on our Mummification experiment. We have been doing some reading comprehension work altogether, as we have had a lot of disruptions due to school show and testing. We will finish our novels in June.

We have had an exciting month so are now getting back into good routines of listening well in class and answering out without shouting out.  We have been revising many aspects of grammar, such as punctuation, adjectives and adverbs.

Numeracy

After successful work on Division, we have returned to Subtraction. This has been the most tricky out of Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division so extra practise will help us all before we move on to primary 5 work.  A few strategies that have worked well for us are

• Using a number line to count back or forward
• Taking away 10’s first, then units
• Laying the sum out as a chimney sum.

We have been working on Money with Mrs Gilfedder. We have been working on recognising coins and notes up to £20. We have also been working how how much things cost and giving proper change.

Health and Well being

We are coming to the end of Roots of Empathy. We have a better understanding of how babies communicate and this has helped us to think about how we communicate with each other. We have also discussed safety for babies and children aged 8 and 9.

We have been continuing with Athletics, so that we are ready for Sports Day.

Spanish

We are delighted to be doing Spanish with Mrs Gilfedder and we have shown real enthusiasm for it. We are working on creating a learning wall to support our work.

The Egyptians

We are continuing to learn about the Egyptians. Some of us have begun making canopic jars  which were found in the tombs. We have been doing art of death masks and  Egyptian jewellery. We enjoyed our Mummification experiment using fruit!

And finally, many of us have been sharing our talents in the school show! What an amazing experience for a primary 4 pupil. We wish them all luck on the night!

We have been very busy at the start of this new term.

We have begun a new reward system where we have to get to the top of our chart 3 times to get a reward. Here are some rewards

• Getting an I-pad
• Working with a friend in the cloakroom
• Getting a certificate
• Sitting at the teacher’s table .

To move up our chart, we need to show

• Good listening
• That we are working hard
• Kindness to other people.

Literacy

We continue to work hard on our spelling programmes. There’s always spelling homework on our homework tab. Even practising our words out loud can help. We are using Educandy more in class and hopefully at home too. It helps us with our common words.

We have been working on changing our Cosy Corner into a relaxing place to read. We have been to the library to borrow books on the Egyptians, we have recommendations for boys and girls, an author of the month ( Francesca Simon) and even comics. Two groups are working on novels and another on Rapid Readers. We are also looking at a non-fiction book which has some craft ideas for the Egyptians.

Reading our books at home means that we have more time in class to talk about the strategies, characters and plot.

Mrs Gilfedder is working on Instructions and spending time at the end to edit our own, and a partners, work. We can check that everything makes sense, has good spelling and punctuation.

Numeracy

We are finishing up on Division and going to revisit Subtraction as it was the most tricky. With a bit more revision, we should all become more confident. Division is also tricky but we are doing a great job, especially with word problems. Mrs Daisley is delighted!

Mrs Gilfedder has started Money. There is no better way to practise than to use actual money when out shopping.

We will move onto Time soon. We will revise the analogue  clock and 24 hour times. Practising at home will help. This is a great life school for everyone. Try checking when your favourite programmes are on, when you have to leave for school and going to bed.

Health and Wellbeing

We are doing athletics this term. This will hopefully be outside and get us ready for Sports Day. Good listening is very important as it can be very noisy outside.

We are continuing with Roots Of Empathy, where we have learned a lot about looking after small children and how to understand emotions.

Peter Pan

Many of us have signed up for the school show. The practises are going well and we can see some budding stars of the future! What a wonderful chance to shine!

The Egyptians

We read a non fiction book on Tutankhamen, which was so popular that we are going to do a full topic. We will be making lots of things, so we might need help from home. Any books you have at home, we would be delighted to borrow.

RE

We have our retreat this week and hope it will be a fun day for everyone. Then May will be a very busy month, preparing for First Communion.

ICT

We are working on editing with Mrs Le Blond and are getting some more sessions with Mr Quinn for coding.

I hope you have all had a brilliant holiday and you are all ready for a new term.

Spelling

Red/Blue- Spelling Rule

hop-hopped/hopping

shop- shopping/shopped

get-getting

tan- tanned/ tanning

http://educandy.com

Activity codes- 574de/ 574e7

Can you explain this Spelling Rule in your jotter?

Yellow-wa

was, walk, wall, wash, wander, watch, warm, swan, wasp, water

http://educandy.com

Activity codes- 35f23/ 35f2b

Can you choose an activity ?

• Write sentences for 5 words
• Find out what 5 words mean
• Do Pyramid Writing for all of the words
• Do Rainbow Writing of all of your words.

Reading

We will have our new reading books by Wednesday. Until then, read for pleasure at home.

Numeracy

We are continuing with Division this week. Try this game.

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button

Choose a Division game. Also practise the 4 and 8 Times Tables.

First Communion

If you have home pages to finish, you can do them now as we only have the Last Supper page to do on our retreat. We are arranging the retreat this week and will let you know the date.

Although this has been a short month, we have been very busy.

Literacy

We have been working on non-fiction reading. The Red/Blue groups have been working on Life In Space, followed by The Search For Tutankhamen. We worked very hard to produce a fact file on each where we have been concentrating on the Main Ideas and Summaries. Mrs Daisley was amazed at how hard we worked , using our books and videos to write notes to help us. The Yellow group have been continuing using Rapid Readers, which have fiction and non fiction texts for us to enjoy. We always enjoy the joke at the end!

We continue to follow our spelling programmes. We have been putting our weekly lists in our diaries so that it is easier to do at home.

Writing

We have just finished exploring narrative writing. We used imaginative themes and we also explored children’s mental health week during that focus week. Many children are demonstrating writing very imaginative and personal pieces. The themes engaged their imagination and ,for other children, allowed them to invent characters to describe some of their worries. Writing is a genre that allows children to allow their imagination the freedom to explore a range of ideas but also use imaginative characters to describe their concerns.

Numeracy

We’ve been doing lots of work on Multiplication. In Number Talks, we have been looking at different strategies which will help us as the  work gets harder. We have used arrays to support our work and have been working on word problems, which can be tricky.

Beyond Number

We have been working on Symmetry with Mrs Smith and she was delighted to display some of our work within the class.

R.E.

We prepare for our First Friday Mass and our teachers were delighted with our preparation. Father Brown gave us a tour of the church, which involved a trip up to the choir loft. We also had a good look at all of the statues around the church. This has been very helpful as we need to be church detectives in our First Communion work.

Music/Dance

We have been preparing a song for Mrs Celino’s last assembly. It has been tricky to keep it a big secret!

ICT

We got our first session with Mr Quinn on Coding and we hope to do more in March.

Art

We have been learning about Charles Rennie Mackintosh. We know that he was an architect and furniture designer. He was best known for his rose artwork, so we have been working on this. We hope to display our work on our class clothesline.

Health and Wellbeing

We have been continuing to get to know our little baby teacher! We have been learning about transitional objects, which was a discussion that we could all share in from our own experiences.

Topic

We have managed some work on Magnets but we hope to do more science in the lead up to Science Week! We learned words such as attract and repel and could use them to talk about magnets.

P.E.

We have been continuing with badminton but will move on from this as the weather gets nicer to work outside.

We have been working on getting back into good routines after a long and exciting holiday. Important routines are

• Bringing our diaries to school so we can add our spelling list
• Bringing our homework jotter back when it is finished
• Remembering our reading book every day
• Remembering our P.E. kit on a Tuesday and a Friday.

In Numeracy, we have been finishing Subtraction, using different strategies. Most children like to use Chimney Sums but we will still practice other strategies like using number lines or counting on/back.

We have moved onto Multiplication. We have been using arrays to help us to visualise. We know that the 4Times Table is double the 2 Times Table and the 8 Times Table is double the 4 Times Table. Since we are good at doubles, this is handy to know. We are being very successful at Stations on a Wednesday where we go round the class doing different activities. We need to take care of our resources , like dice or counters, so that we can use them again.

Literacy

We have been working on non-fiction texts and developing our note taking skills. We all worked really hard at note taking about Neil Armstrong from a video. Everyone managed to take down some facts. We will be using our notes to build up interesting factfiles on Space for Mrs Celino to judge. There will be prizes for the 3 winners!

We were really working on Talking and Listening before Christmas with lots of activities where we followed instructions to complete artwork. This was very challenging but fun.

We continue to follow our spelling programmes, with weekly homework to support our learning in class. We do a variety of different activities such as dictation or filling out phoneme charts. Practising regularly helps us to be better spellers.

We are working on planning narrative pieces of writing. We are taking care to include good punctuation, interesting vocabulary, paragraphs and good spelling in our work.

R.E.

A majority of the children have begun their First Communion preparation. We have started early to allow for any weeks where we get side tracked by other activities. We are going to go on a retreat to Holy Family church, where we will act out the Last Supper. This will be a lovely day with lots of art and drama activities. The other children have been learning about Islam and looking at Mosques from around the world.

Topic

We are doing a science based topic this term. We started with magnets and will move on to electricity and forces. It has been fun to look at magnets and see what they can do.

P.E.

We are learning about badminton and how to make sure that we properly warm up so that we don’t do damage to our bodies.

Health and Wellbeing

We need to continue to work on friendships and how to be a good friend to others. This is ongoing in primary 4 as we are getting a bit more grown up so we will work on sorting little disagreements out on our own. We should always ask ourselves-

Do I need help from a grown up or can I sort this myself.

ICT

We have been working with Mrs Le Blond and we will soon move on to coding with a specialist.

We have had a busy month. At the very end of October , we made cookies for Halloween! We also learned about The Day of the Dead in Mexico and did some lovely artwork for it. We met Primary 4 from Mossend at the park and had a lovely play together. At the end of the month, we went to Motherwell to see Cinderella! Oh yes we did! At the end of the month, we started to get visits from one of Santa’s main elves, Ralph. He gives us good advice on how to stay on the Good List , as well as giving us a pat on the back for all our talents.

Literacy

The Red and Blue groups finished one novel and moved onto another. The Red group are now reading a Jacqueline Wilson novel and the Blue group are reading The Boy Who Had Nearly Everything. They have been working on reading aloud with greater fluency and the reading strategies.  We like to use a dictionary to help us with Metalinguistics.  The Yellow group have moved on to Rapid Readers which have a fiction and non fiction element in each book.

We are continuing to work within our spelling groups to improve our spelling. The Red /Blue group are getting much more confident filling in phoneme charts and using the spelling strategies to support our work. The Yellow group are working on phonemes and writing sentences with our words in them. We have been working together on using magnetic letters to help build our phoneme words, amongst other things.

We have moved on to Persuasive writing with Mrs Smith.

Numeracy

We have started doing Maths  stations on a Wednesday and we are getting good at organising our resources properly to help us. We often have games  which require us to sort out counters, dice and other resources. This gives Mrs Daisley a chance to work with each group on Number Talks and everyone gets a chance to share a strategy.

We have moved on to Subtraction. Starting a new topic can be nerve wracking for some children but practise helps us all to improve.

We have been working on Pattern with Mrs Smith.

Health and Wellbeing

We are all enjoying seeing a little baby boy grow in Roots of Empathy. In three weeks, we always see a big change in his skills. Mrs Le Blond is encouraging us to always be gentle with him and watch our voices so that we don’t frighten him.

The Victorians

We have learned about famous Victorians such as Florence Nightingale and William Morris. We have also been learning about famous inventors of the time.

RE

November is an important time to reflect on our loved ones who have passed before moving on to Advent, where we prepare ourselves for the birth of the baby Jesus. We have tried to reflect on  what we can do that doesn’t involve present buying, like attending Mass regularly, praying and treating people around us kindly.

Dance

We are learning traditional Scottish dances for our party. We have finished with Gymnastics for now and will choose a new topic in the New Year. We will get to choose between 3 options.