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.

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!

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.

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.