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P4 Update

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We are working hard in primary 4. Our teachers are very proud of our attitude towards learning and our growing independence in class.

Literacy

We have been using Reading Strategies to talk about a class novel, group novels or reading books. We are getting using to talking about Prior Knowledge, Inference, Visualisation and Metalinguistics. Although these are tricky words to learn, we are showing examples of them in our written work. We have talked about Main Ideas and Summaries, which we will be moving on to.

After lots of useful revision, we have moved on to new spelling work. Some children have started the Stage 4/5 programme which is different to what we are used to. We are coping well. Mrs Daisley was very pleaded with our super phoneme charts!

Mrs Smith is continuing to support our writing in class, where we spend time planning our writing. We have worked hard on Recounts and Instructions and are now moving on to Explanation Texts. Mrs Smith is pleased at our hard work.

Numeracy

We have moved on from Place Value to Addition. We used Number Talks strategies to help us find the best strategy to help us. We are also keeping up our Times Tables practise so we don’t forget!

We have started doing Maths Stations one day a week and everyone agreed that it was good to get a chance to play different types of Maths games, online and with solid materials.

Beyond Number

We have done Information Handling, 3D Shape and are working on Patterns and Relationships.

Health and Wellbeing

We are thrilled to be taking part in Roots of Empathy and have a lovely little baby boy teaching us all about relationships. Over this year, we expect to learn a lot from him.

We have been doing Gymnastics and Dance but will now be moving on. We will take a vote in class to decide on what. Later this term, we will be doing Social Dancing in preparation for our Christmas party!

Science

We have been studying The Rainforest. We will let our pictures show you what we have been doing.

R.E.

We are continuing to learn about the Apostles as we cover saints. We learning about the Glorious Mysteries in October. We will move on to Advent by the end of this month. We continue to work on the Gospel and Mass Responses in class.

Social Studies.

We are pleased to be starting The Victorians. We have already learned that schools in Victorian times were very strict!

Homework

Some children find homework challenging. Remember to talk to us if this is an issue.

Finally. if you ever thought homework needed to be boring, look at our marvellous display from our creative children! Everything here has been done at home!

 

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Primary 4 Update

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Primary 4 Update.

We have had a busy month , which has gone by very quickly.

First Communion

Our biggest event was the First Communion for many of our students. It was a beautiful day for everyone. The teachers were very proud, and we are sure the families were too. This is the start of a life long journey of faith and we are very proud to have been part of it . We hope the children continue to have a close relationship with Jesus, through the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist.

Literacy

We have been very impressed with the amount of children who have created their own presentations and shared them with their friends. We have learned so much about the natural world from these young investigators! We have many future David Attenborourghs in our class!

We have been continuing with our spelling programmes, with weekly homework to support our work in class. We have many pupils who say that doing their homework regularly has made them much more confident. As part of our class work, we have been working on making our sentences more interesting through good vocabulary and punctuation.

We have all been reading novels this month. We have enjoyed talking about different characters, examining the vocabulary used in the novels and working out what the author is really telling us. We also enjoy talking about what we already know. This relates to the reading strategies that we will use in the future. Some groups have been working on writing summaries of the chapters we have read. It really helps us in class, if we bring our novel every day as we need it to do our written tasks.

We have been working on recounts as part of our writing work and working on extending our work and editing it , by ourselves or with a partner.

Numeracy and Maths

We have worked very hard on Multiplication and Division , which then helped us as we moved on to Fractions. Our teachers were delighted at how well we grasped how these are all connected. If we can multiply, we can also divide. This helped us to understand fractions, where we worked on halves, quarters, tenths, fifths and some children managed more tricky fractions. Some really smart children even mentioned percentages and understood how these worked.

We were even able to connect this to our work on data handling. Many children knew that 11 out of 22 children who chose chocolate as their favourite snack was the same as one half.

Health and Wellbeing

Our teachers have been so impressed with our levels of fitness during athletics lessons. We have been working on building our stamina and skills, with impressive results. We have also been working on co-operating with our team members and supporting everyone in our group. Our teachers have noticed that we are getting much better at that as the year goes on.  Well done everyone! Give yourself a pat on the back!

Topic

We did some work on natural disasters . We loved to see what can happen to our world, such as tsunamis and earthquakes. We really enjoyed making our own volcanoes with Miss McCulloch.

June

By the time you read this, we will have had a chance to have a party for our First Communion. We will be joined by our class-mates who supported us over the last few months with great patience. We want to thank them for that.

We have taken many photos which are over on Twitter.

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March in P4

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As we are over half way through P4, we are developing many skills and working on our talents. A lot of what we are learning will support our work in P5 and beyond, so this is a very important year for us.

Literacy

Spelling and Reading

The more we read for pleasure, the more we realise that it can support our spelling. Recent Common Words Assessments have shown that reading for pleasure and working on our school resources, makes a real difference in our confidence in spelling Common Words.

We continue to work through our Spelling programmes, which concentrate on building our Phoneme Knowledge and Common Words/Spelling Rules. Our teachers encourage us to focus on Phonemes during our homework tasks as this can make a huge difference for us. Our teachers are very proud of the people who work hard at their homework as they are making good improvements.

We have been doing some more Non-Fiction reading, which has been very popular in class. One group were reading The Search For Tutanknamen, which ignited so much interest in the Egyptians that we took a few weeks to do some research. As Covid rules are relaxing, we have had great fun sharing resources to learn more about the boy king. Mrs Daisley was delighted at the partner work that we did. This will help us in P5 and beyond.

Some of us have done personal presentations to share with our class mates. We have shown good respect in listening and responding to these presentations.

As Mrs Cooney was off, Mrs Daisley decided to do some Writing. She was very impressed to see that we can plan our Writing and many of us are also working on editing our finished work. She really struggled to pick Star Writers as we were really working hard!

Numeracy

Although we spent a long time on Subtraction, it was  time well spent as we will build on our knowledge in P5 and beyond.

We then moved on to Money. Some of us were working on Money up to £2 and the others were working on Money up to £20. It was obvious to our teachers that some of us have real life experience using coins and notes in shops. Hopefully everyone else can get more experience now that Covid rules are relaxing. Pocket money is a great way for children our age to learn  more.

We are moving on to Multiplication, which should be supported by the regular work that we have been doing throughout the year.

Health and Wellness Being

As the year goes on, our teachers are proud at how we have been sorting issues relating to football. This is the first year that we have been able to take part in the yard and it was a bit tricky at the start. It’s ok if we still have issues but we should remember to discuss them calmly with a friend or grown up.

We will continue to work on our friendships so that they grow stronger. Some friendships change and new ones can develop as our hobbies and interests change. We keep working on having empathy for other people so that we can see things through their eyes. This is tricky at our age so we will keep working on it throughout primary school.

We continue to work on good manners. Our teachers love to hear good manners and so do other members of staff. We bet that our families do too.

We have enjoyed using the gymnastic equipment to improve our skills. We are learning how our body works and how we can control our movements, like travelling on a gymnastic horse. We have been learning what parts of our bodies we use on the ropes and when hanging from the bars. We also work together as a team to sort out the equipment, as it was a lot of setting up.

RE

We had a visitor during Lent. It was the Easter Bunny and he visited each of us with a treat and a little card with our special talents on it. We were very excited each day to find out where he was.

The First Communion children went on a retreat and had a lovely day out of school. We got a chance to do some Meditation and art activities. We also managed to do a modern day Last Supper.

\We learnt a lot about Lent and made a Lenten tree where we put Easter decoration with friendly advice on them. Each day we would pick one with a message like

  • Share with your friends
  • Use kind words
  • Don’t leave people out of games.

Topic

We did some more Space work with Miss McCullock, who will return nest term. She started work on Natural Disasters and will continue with that after the holiday.

We have lots of photos over on Twitter showing what we have been up to.

Primary 4

P4’s February Update

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Even though it’s been a short month with a holiday, we’ve been working hard in Primary 4.

Literacy

We have been continuing with our daily spelling which is supported by our weekly homework tasks. This month we have been getting more confident using spelling strategies and Mrs Daisley was surprised at how good we were at Mnemonics. This is where we use each letter to make a little saying that helps us to remember how to spell words.

big

elephants

can

always

understand

small

elephants

This is helpful to remind us how to spell because. Mrs Daisley had to admit that the children did this better than she could manage!

In reading, we have been continuing to work on our group reading activities. We have to remember to take our reading work home and to bring it back. It’s very tricky to look up words or find clues if we don’t have our books in class. We are working on making sure that we do our best written tasks by talking about what makes our work good. Some of us a working on Summaries, for example, and we know that a good Summary shouldn’t be too long and should mention the Main Ideas from our novel. Others are working on answering question in full sentences with good punctuation.

Mrs Cooney has been reading a novel called Orion Lost to us in class.

We have had great reading materials about Space to read independently in class. We got some from our school library. We are very proud of our hard work restoring the school library with Mrs Cooney. The other classes are delighted to get a turn using it now.

In writing, we have learned the features of explanation pieces of writing, written about Chinese New Year and identified key vocabulary around our topic on space, so that we could write a report on that too. We watched Authors Live to listen how a real author plans his stories and we have started planning a very special narrative piece for someone we love.

We continue to work on talking, through class discussions and through our reading work. Listening to follow instructions is ongoing in class.

Numeracy

We have been working on Subtraction in class. Some of us are working up to 50 and others are now working with 3 digit numbers. All of our good work on Addition has helped us to progress with this, as we can use strategies like adding on for this work.

We continue to work on Times Tables. This month, we have concentrated on the 3 and 6. We know that the 6 Times Table is double the 3 Times Table.

We also continue with Time and we worked on Fractions as we could see patterns in Time.

This month, we started to work on stations-we go round different stations such as practical activities. We enjoyed this and we will do more in the future, now we can share resources more.

Health and Well-Being

We continue to work on Gymnastics and are delighted to be able to work inside using the equipment, such as the wall bars.

We are spending a lot of time discussing our friendships and ways to keep them strong. It is normal  for our age to have some difficulties in dealing with friends. With the help not our teachers and family, we can get stronger at dealing calmly with tricky situations.

Here are some issues that we face

  • feeling left out
  • feeling hurt by someone’s words or actions
  • feeling lonely in the playground
  • getting carried away with play fighting
  • not knowing how to calm ourselves down after a disagreement.

In class, we get best results when we discuss our problems once we have managed to calm down. We can then see both sides and we are getting good at finding a solution. We are also stopping to think how we would feel if we were the one left out, for example. The best way you can help at home, is to talk calmly with us and help us to find a way to deal with it ourselves.

 

Topic

We have enjoyed learning about Space. We are impressed to learn about the careers of astronauts, such as Tim Peake and Neil Armstrong. We are real scientists as we have had to do the same experiment over again to see what works best. Our rockets didn’t go straight up into the air , so we discussed what we will do next time. Real scientists don’t give up!

RE

We all learned about Jewish Passover this month and why this celebration is important.

The First Communion children are getting through their workbook and we will be finished in March. You can help by making sure that the home sections are finished by the time we finish Unit 7. We will do Unit 8 after the First Communion itself.

Primary 4

P4 , November

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We have been very busy in Primary 4. We are pleased to be back sitting in groups, where it is easier for us to work with partners. We have enjoyed taking part in upper school assemblies for the first time since Covid.

Literacy

We have 2 Spelling groups who have been working hard on Phonemes and Common Words. One group has also been working on Spelling Rules , which can be tricky. We get our new words on a Monday and then spend the week doing activities including Dictation ( with a partner or a teacher), Phoneme or Common Word Stories and whiteboard work. Ask us about Diacritical Marking- we are getting really good at it.

Sometimes , for fun, we play games  like Spelling Tennis or Beat The Teacher. We are surprised when our teacher makes mistakes! Oops!

This month, we began some work on non-fiction. We have been learning about the features of a non-fiction book , such as Contents Page, Glossary or Index. We read Incredible Insects where we were shocked about what insects live in our homes. We started working on note-taking. We used bullet points so we didn’t need to write in full sentences.

During Anti- Bullying week, we explored how to be a good friend and wrote information reports about this. We’ve been trying to fit more conjunctions into our writing pieces.

We’ve also been working on letter to tell our families about some ways that we can be more eco-conscious at home and at school. Some of these changes may be too big to try ( such as getting an electric car) but even small changes make a big difference.

We tried blackout poetry on Remembrance Day, working with In Flanders Field, whilst remembering everyone we know who has been affected by war.

Numeracy

We have been working hard on Addition. We have been doing a variety of different activities to support our learning. We do Number Talks, Daily 10 and Textbook work swell as playing games, doing board work and worksheets.

Every day in class, we talk about time. Here are some examples of the types of questions we answer.

  • How long is it till lunchtime?
  • When will it be 3 o’clock?
  • You have 10 minutes to finish, When will the be?
  • How many seconds are left in a minute, if we have gone through 30 seconds?

This will all help us to be more confident using Time. We have started talking more about minutes to, which is a bit tricky. Please help us with this at home.

We keep up with out Tables by playing games. We know that the 4x Table is double the 2x Table. Some of us have realised that this can help us with the 8xTable. We will do the same with the 3x Table and the 6x Table.

RE

We have learned a lot about Saints during this month. We were very disappointed that our display on the Apostles was ruined by a leak from upstairs. We learned about St Margaret of Scotland on her feast day.We are now concentrating on St Andrew. We had a Remembrance Tree to remember everyone that we have loved and lost.

We often watch Being Catholic where we can see Sunday’s Gospel. We watch parts of the Mass to help us with our Mass responses. This is a big year for some of our children who will be making their First Communion. We want to be ready for that special day.

 

Social Studies

As part of our RE work on Remembrance Day, We read a novel called War Game. It had a very sad ending and was based on the author’s real family. We new able to do some lovely artwork for Remembrance Day.

Health and Well -Being

We have worked hard on anti bullying lessons and we will continue to talk about how to be a good friend.

We have continued to work on ball skills. We have followed warm ups on YouTube which help us to keep our bodies safe. We are working with partners and in groups.

We have lots of pictures over on Twitter so please go over to see what we are up to!