Can we please ensure homework is getting completed each week and pupils have brought in their reading novels with them each day to help them with their read to write tasks.  Homework is uploaded each week, both on the website as well as our Primary 7/6 Teams Page. Any issues gaining access to the homework, please do let me know 🙂

Numeracy:

In numeracy, we explored all things time, looking both into converting 12 and 24 hour time as well other practical aspects such as looking at timetables, which will serve Primary 7 well as they enter secondary school. Primary 7/6 also worked on their division skills and looked at different strategies to solve division problems such as the written method, proportional reasoning and the grid method. The pupils have became more confident with their division skills and can see the relationship this operation has with multiplication.

Literacy:

Primary 7 completed their block of reading Dividing City where they explored themes of friendship and sectarianism. This booked tied in well with their partnership work with Mossend Primary School and the charity Nil by Mouth where the pupils got the opportunity to participate in workshops exploring these themes. They will now be moving onto their new novel, Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider: Stormbreaker. Similarly Primary 6 have completed their block of reading The Borrowers where they have further developed their reading comprehension strategies. They will now be moving onto The Boy at the Back of the Class by Onjali Q. Raúf where they will explore themes of friendship and adventure.

Primary 7/6 are focusing on discursive essays this term. In February, the pupils produced an excellent discursive essay linking in with their sectarianism work where we had three star writers! Following this essay, the pupils were given the opportunity to select their own topic idea. This was a great opportunity for the pupils to take more ownership over their work and produced a range of interesting and topical discursive essays. Examples of these essays were the purpose of VAR in professional football matches, the opportunities and consequences of children using technology and the possibility of alien life form.

IDL:

We have completed our Circular Economy Challenge topic where the pupils collaboratively worked in groups to generate a sustainable business idea. The groups brain stormed ideas, conducted market research and created sales pitches. One group, Refillable Ink, was shortlisted to compete against a group from Primary 6 to go through to the Dragon’s Den style showcase in March. Our group, Refillable Ink were lucky enough to have been selected to go through to represent our school this month.

RE:

In religious education, we explored prayer & decision making where we analysed prayers and their meanings behind these. The pupils also reflected on times of prayer such as when seeking God’s advice or guidance.

Other Curricular Area:

Congratulations to the netball team from Primary 7 and 6 who competed at North Lanarkshire’s Active School’s Netball Tournament last month. The team performed extremely well together!  Well done team!

Welcome back!

January was a month of completing projects and novels! We said goodbye to our World War 2 topic. After we came back in January we learned all about Alan Turing, a brilliant WW2 code breaker who invented a machine to decipher the Enigma Code. We had a go of trying to decipher war messages which turned out to be harder than it looks! We also learned about the Allied Invasion of Normandy, also known as D-Day and had a go of creating our own version of this strategic plan. We finished off our topic with an interesting discursive essay looking at the relevance of learning about the Second World War.

We have then moved onto our next topic, the Circular Economy. This is an enterprising challenge where we have been put into groups and have to create a product or service that fits into the circular economy business model. This is a live challenge hosted by Young Enterprise Scotland who will be visiting our class sometime in February! At the end of the challenge, a few lucky groups may be selected to go through to the final showcase where we will need to present our enterprising business plans to a panel of judges.

For Primary 7, we completed our brilliant novel, Holes by Louis Sachar. From our evaluations, it is safe to say we absolutely loved this book and the fun activities we were able to do such as creating Sploosh! We are excited to start our new novel, Divided City which will explore themes of sectarianism and friendship. We think this links in nicely to our work we are doing with the charity, Nil by Mouth, alongside our friends at Mossend Primary.

We completed a Term 1 maths assessment and are super proud of our results! Miss Gallagher wants to ensure the retention of maths skills remains high so for homework each week, we will be given a maths worksheet with questions covering various maths operations. We will go through our answers in class each Friday morning.

We would like to welcome Miss Sloan to our class. She is a student teacher who will be with us for several weeks. We are sure she will be a valuable part of our class!

It was wonderful to see some parents at meet the teacher and being able to discuss classroom routines, expectations, and learning. We also discussed upcoming events such as preparation of Confirmation which will begin week beginning 2^nd of October. As highlighted at meet the teacher, please don’t hesitate the school if you need to speak to me. My door is always welcome.

In maths, we have been practising our estimating and rounding skills with decimal numbers. We have then moved onto practising number processes with decimal numbers and linked this learning to money. This has tied nicely into our classroom economy and understanding the importance of budgeting money.

In literacy, we have been enjoying reading our novel, The Night Bus Hero and engaging well in our read to write tasks. We have been exploring the themes of adventure and homelessness. We have enjoyed creating a marketing plan for Social Bite and are looking forward to their visit next month.

During RE, we have enjoyed investigating the Beatitudes. We have did so through actively living out the Beatitudes which has brought our learning to life.

Just a reminder that our normal PE days are Tuesdays and Thursdays but I ask for pupils and parents to be flexible as we have visitors from Active Schools and High Schools throughout the year. As discussed at meet the teacher, I will give as much notice as possible if days change to accommodate these visits.

We have been enjoying our IDL topic, The Titanic. We have explored the design of the ship and then took our knowledge to work in groups and build a 3D replica of the RMS Titanic. We have also enjoyed some STEM experiments such as exploring water displacement as well as investigating the pressure the ship was under when it was filling with water. We have also explored the timeline of key events the night of the disaster and tested our knowledge using Booklet.com.

Firstly, welcome back to Holy Family Primary School. We hope you have all had a relaxing break and it is lovely to see all your faces once again. Primary 7/6 have had a great time settling back into school routines and seeing all their friends.  Despite being a short month, it has been an exciting time for Primary 7/6!

We have met our Primary One buddies and have engaged in buddy plays which has helped develop relationships as well as settle the Primary Ones into school. Primary Six have also been a great help with the Primary One buddies and will make fantastic buddies next year.

We have started our classroom economy which involves getting paid to do weekly jobs. We can purchase items with the money that we make, such as buying engaging activities in the classroom. These jobs that we are performing each week are giving us responsibility and independence within the classroom and around school.

Furthermore, we have been preparing for our First Friday Mass that we are hosting on Friday, 1^st of September.

We have also settled into our literacy tasks such as applying our spelling strategies and being introduced to our new novel, The Night Bus Hero by Onjali Q. Rauf. We are excited to explore our reading strategies to help develop our understanding of this novel.

We have also started place value in numeracy and are excited for trying our best in maths this year.

Finally, we have decided on our first topic which will be The Titanic. We are looking forward to exploring this inter-disciplinary topic and the interesting lessons we will be covering such as exploring buoyancy, engineering, and others.

Please note it is an important year for Primary 7/6 in their academic journey. It is imperative that reading homework, especially, gets completed each week so pupils can perform their read to write tasks in class. Thank you 🙂

In numeracy, we have explored identifying and measuring angles during active maths lessons. We then moved onto exploring coordinates and directions. We participated in a fun task where we had to provide coordinates around the school in a partner activity. As we completed our angles and coordinates work, we have moved onto data handling where last week we created our own surveys and gathered in information using tally marks. As we continue our data handling topic, we are looking forward to exploring the different ways to display this information gathered such as creating our own bar graphs. As always, we are continuously mastering our times tables as this will put us in good stead when exploring multiplication and division in Primary 6.

In literacy, we are working our way through our novels, The Santa Maria by Kenneth Stevenson and The Last Wolf by Michael Morpurgo. We are continuing with applying our reading comprehension strategies to better understand our novels. It is imperative that the pupils read any assigned chapters or pages for homework to be able to complete the read to write tasks in class. Furthermore, we are confident at applying our spelling strategies independently.

We have been exploring Oceans and Continents in our topic time. In May we have explored the continent of Australasia. Here, we investigated traditional Australian music and created our very own didgeridoos. We also prepared our own quiz and tested our Australasian general knowledge on our classmates. We have now moved onto Asia and we are excited to investigate what this wonderful continent has got to offer.

We have been extremely lucky to have a series of lessons with the Scottish Rugby Union who sent a coach to teach us how to play rugby.  We learned how to throw a rugby ball by spinning it to our team mates and also learned how to score a try. Grant left us treats and a quiz to complete now that the session is over.  Some pupils were extremely competent at this sport and thus Grant provided information on how to join local rugby teams in the area.

We are almost at the end of our block of swimming and dry sports at the Sir Matt Busby Centre. This time has been a fantastic opportunity for the pupils to learn basic swimming skills as well as others developing their already existing skills. It has also been a great opportunity for the pupils to gain independence and maturity by walking to and from the centre sensibly as well as following important instructions set out by the swimming coaches.

We are also almost at the end of our preparation for our school show, Peter Pan. The pupils who have been involved have attended every practise with a determination to succeed and should all be extremely proud of their effort. We are excited to show off our performance this week at St. Gerard’s Primary School!

We have started our literacy novels: The Santa Marie by Kenneth Steven and The Last Wolf by Michael Foreman. We will continue to apply our reading comprehension strategies as well as work on our fluency, pace and expression when reading the chapters out loud. We have continued to apply our spelling strategies each week. We no longer do a weekly spelling test and instead will complete one every four weeks to gain a more holistic approach to spelling.

We are focusing on decimal numbers in maths. We have explored the relationship between decimal numbers and fractions and have understood the link between these two concepts. We are now working our way through the operations of maths such as adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing decimal numbers.

We are enjoying our weekly swimming and dry sports trip to the Matt Busby centre, along with Primary 6/5. We are gaining more confidence in the pool each week and hopefully by the end of the block, we will all be sound swimmers. A special thanks to all the parent helpers who have accompanied us each week.

We have recently started rugby lessons with Scottish Rugby. This will continue for a few more weeks where we learn passes, formations, and conversions.

We have started our topic: Oceans and Continents. So far, we have explored the Pacific Ocean and created our very own Great Barrier Reef. which is part of our wall display in class. We are excited to explore more oceans and the different continents from around the world. We will be investigating different cultures such as music, food and animals.

Numeracy

We have been working extremely hard learning both shape and measurement interchangeably during maths time. We have learned to convert units of measurement, learned to calculate the area of 2D shapes and the volume of 3D shapes. We have also continued to work hard on grasping on our times table knowledge every morning to consistently build our multiplication and division skills.

Literacy

We have continued to apply our spelling strategies to help us learn our spelling words each week. We have continued with our novels, applying our reading strategies to gain a greater understanding of the plot, characters, and setting.

It is important that all pupils read their class novels when assigned for homework. It would also be great if pupils read other books at home to further improve their literacy skills, such as spelling and grammar.

Health & Well-being

In Health & Well-being, we explored our emotions. We investigated triggers of negative emotions and strategies to overcome these emotions to turn them into more positive ones. We also explored different colours linking to certain emotions. We have completed playing badminton in P.E and have moved onto football. Along with practising our ball skills, we have also been practising kindness during our games.

IDL Topic

We have explored lots of exciting things during topic time. We learned about Roman Legionaries and the Roman Army. We created our own shields and practised military manoeuvres, just like the Romans did! We then moved onto creating catapults that Roman soldiers used in battle and measuring how far our play-dough cannon balls travelled. We also investigated Roman engineering and created our very own aqueducts.

Maths

We have been working hard in numeracy this month. We completed our multiplication unit and did well in our end of unit assessment. We then moved onto division where we have investigated different strategies to solve our division problems and explored the inverse relationship between multiplication and division. It is important that pupils have a strong grasp on their times tables so the more practise at home, the better. This knowledge of the times tables will serve useful for their school journey. We have also began working on beyond number topics on a Friday morning, currently focusing on measurement.

Literacy

 We are continuing to practise applying our spelling strategies and some of us are strong at independently applying our strategies. We have been working extremely hard at being able to identify the reading comprehension strategies and applying them in our written tasks with the appropriate scaffolding. We have been working on newspaper reports in our writing lessons, linking these back to our Romans topic.

RE

We have explored Creation in RE. We initially explored the Creation story and recounted this story by creating our very own comic strips. We then moved onto exploring care for our planet, linking our discussions and activities to Laudato Si. We have created fat balls for birds and investigated animal habitats.

Topic

We have been exploring the Romans in our IDL topic. So far, we have discovered how Rome was founded, explored different societal roles within the ancient time as well as explored the design and function of the Colosseum. We are excited to start building a 3D replica of the Colosseum in our groups.

Health and Wellbeing

We have been practising our badminton skills during PE. We have been working on our serve as well as some of the main shots. In Health and Wellbeing, we explored the impact of physical activity on the human body.

Primary 5 have had another successful month during November.

We have been working extremely hard in maths developing our multiplication skills. We have been learning new strategies and problem-solving skills to solve our sums. We do a range of active maths exercises to supplement our learning. It would be great to encourage the children to practise their times tables consistently at home to aid their learning in school.

We have been showing great progress in literacy. We have been reading our literacy novels, ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’ and ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ by Roald Dahl. We have been applying our reading strategies throughout our novels, enabling us to gain a greater understanding of the texts. We have also been practising our oral skills by reading to our groups, in pairs, or to our self. We have also been enjoying watching chunks of the movie adaption, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, once we successfully complete our tasks.

Furthermore, we are enjoying learning our new spelling words each week. We work hard at learning our new phoneme of the week, spelling rule or common words.

We have been successful learners during our topic time which is the World Cup. We have been exploring the stadiums and even started to create our very own World Cup stadium through cooperative learning.

In RE, we have explored our patron Saint of Scotland, St. Andrew and created our very own saltires. We then practised extremely hard for the First Friday Mass which we led on December 2^nd.

We have been confident individuals during PE. We have teamed up with Primary 6/5 and Primary 7 (a & b) to practise Scottish dancing.  We are extremely excited to show off our new dance skills at the Christmas party.

Primary 5 have been working extremely hard learning and successfully applying their reading strategies as well as practising their verbal reading skills. Primary 5 completed their novel, ‘Kaspar Prince of Cats’ by Michael Morpugo. We have now moved onto their new novels, ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ and ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’. Primary 5 have also been learning and successfully applying their spelling strategies.

In Maths, we have been working very hard learning our addition strategies. We have now moved onto subtraction and will be exploring the linkage between addition and subtraction. We have also been learning a ‘times table of the week’ in conjunction with our number strategies.

During topic time, Primary 5 have been exploring the solar system and have investigated impact craters, constellations and Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. We will explore the solar system further in November.

In PE, we have been playing netball. We have learned the different passes, how to shoot and the different positions.

We have been learning about the life of Jesus during RE recently. In particular, we have looked at Jesus the Healer and Jesus the Teacher.

Primary 5 have been successful learners and Miss Gallagher is very proud.

Please look to our school’s Twitter page to see the great learning.