Welcome to our Primary 6 February update! We have had such a busy month and also enjoyed a lovely long weekend and were able to recharge and reset.

Literacy

Within Literacy, Fantastic Foxes have just finished reading Dinosaur Trouble by Dick King-Smith which we really enjoyed and wrote up book reviews about what we enjoyed about the book. We have now started our new book Why the Whales Came by Michael Morpurgo and have started looking at prior knowledge and making predictions about the book so far. Marvellous Matilda’s have been coming to an end with A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll and have enjoyed this book learning about the different themes coming through the book and looking at each reading strategy throughout the weeks. We have also produced great writing this month, one in particular, writing to persuade to vote for their Circular Economy group within their topic work. Great persuasive language was used and they shared their reasons why you should vote for their group over others within the class which they all really enjoyed.

Numeracy

In Numeracy, we have been working on Division, Measurement, Properties of 2D and 3D shapes and now moving onto our new topic of Money. The children have been continuing to work on their mental agility and have been competing in a range of mental maths games within our maths lessons, as well as using our new mental maths strategy board cards to create questions with a partner and answer the questions using a range of strategies to help solve each question. We have enjoyed learning about measure, length, mass, and calculating the area and perimeter.

Religious Education

This month our class focus has been based on Lent and looking at ways that we can get closer to God, through prayer, fasting and almsgiving. As well as attending Mass within the parish each Monday and Wednesday at 8:30am throughout the period of Lent.

Other Curricular Areas

Primary 6 have came to an end with our Circular Economy topic, which we all enjoyed being able to work in small groups with having specific job roles and creating and designing a product/service that fits into the circular economy business plan model. We have now moved onto another topic based on Crime Scene Investigation, which we have been enjoying the STEM based activities and discussions throughout each lesson.

Within Physical Education, we have moved onto our new topic of Badminton, learning racket skills, accuracy and aim, footwork, serve, rally and attack, as well as defending techniques. We have been enjoying these lessons and being able to get back outdoors after our time indoors with our last topic of Gymnastics, which was also a success.

STEM Club

Huge Congratulations to all children that participated in the Microbit Club. The children really enjoyed these sessions and engaged really well within each session. The children are now looking to get other teachers involved in Microbit and to introduce these throughout our STEM lessons within the class to allow the pupils that engaged within the after school club to help teach through pupil-led learning and to share our knowledge and understanding about coding.

Just a reminder for homework which will be handed out weekly on a Monday and should be brought back in on a Friday. Our PE days are both Wednesday and Thursday afternoons and children should come to school in full uniform and get changed for PE.

Thank you and have a great month of February everyone!

Mr Rice and Primary 6

Welcome back everyone!

January has been a very busy month and we all have been working hard on getting back into our daily routines. Primary 6 said goodbye to our Scottish Myths and Legends topic and ventured onto learning our brand-new topic of Circular Economy. Which we have all been enjoying and being able to work in small groups creating and designing a product/service that fits into the circular economy business plan model. This is a current live challenge hosted by Young Enterprise Scotland who will be visiting our class in the upcoming weeks and by the end of the challenge, one group being selected to go through to the final showcase where they will be presenting their business plan to a panel of judges.

In Literacy, we continue with our spelling programmes which is very important to keep up regular practise at home to help carry out our spelling strategies in class. We have also started new novels, Marvellous Matilda’s have been reading ‘A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll’ and Fantastic Foxes have been reading ‘Dinosaur Trouble by Dick King-Smith’. We continue to use a range of reading strategies while reading our novels which include, creating detailed visualisers of a character within the book and analysing and drawing evidence from the novel. This helps us build a character profile and we can refer to this throughout the rest of the novel.

In Maths, we completed our Term 1 maths assessments covering topics like place value, rounding, addition and subtraction. It was good to see prior knowledge coming into play when they came back from the holidays and achieving good results in this assessment. Mr Rice wants to ensure the retention of maths skills remains high so for homework each week, we will be given a worksheet covering a range of questions to consolidate prior learning throughout our new term. We have been continuing with multiplication and division through a range of strategies, looking at multiples, factors and primes as well as working with Mrs Nixon on properties of 2D and 3D shapes.

Primary 6 have also been working alongside Mossend Primary with the charity, Nil by Mouth, focusing on raising awareness of the issues surrounding sectarianism within our society. Drawing out personal attitudes, views and experiences while encouraging people to challenge sectarianism in our own lives and in wider society. We have also enjoyed participating in a NLC Resettlement workshop with Primary 6/7 which focused on raising awareness of refugees.

Within PE, we have moved on to our new topic, Gymnastics. We started learning about each other’s experiences in the topic, we have some classmates who attend a gymnastics club after school which was good to share some of our personal achievements together before we started the topic. We have been learning about different types of jumps to learning a range of different types of rolls. Performing different vaulting movements, performing a hurdle step into a cartwheel and round-off. Which has now led us onto performing a series of similar movements, linked together to form a sequence in our upcoming PE lessons.

Just a reminder for homework which will be handed out weekly on a Monday and should be brought back in on a Friday. Our PE days are both Wednesday and Thursday afternoons and children should come to school in full uniform and get changed for PE.

Thank you and have a great month of February everyone!

Mr Rice and Primary 6

Primary 6 have been busy in all areas of the curriculum this month, learning new skills and working hard within the school too.

In Literacy, we have been working in our reading groups working very hard throughout our reading comprehension strategies. Marvellous Matilda’s have been reading a book called Tribes by Catherine MacPhail and Fantastic Foxes have not long finished the book The Queen’s Nose by Dick King-Smith. We have also been continuing to work our way through the NLC Active Literacy programme focussing on spelling strategies and rules, and a range of writing genres with both Mr Rice and Mrs Nixon.

In Maths, we have been currently learning about Multiplication and adding and subtracting Decimals, multiplying large numbers, and using different strategies to work out our answers. We continue to focus on mental maths skills and have been learning a variety of strategies during Number Talks to explain our thinking.

Primary 6 have been working collaboratively with the Primary 6’s from the Primary 7/6 class on their Scottish Song ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’ by The Proclaimers, which they performed on St Andrews Day at the school assembly. Well done to all that practised their lyrics and did a fantastic job on the day!

In RE, Primary 6 have been learning about the different Saints we have and researching about the faith and inspiration of the Saints. Also, we have been carrying out God’s Loving Plan and have been making great progress in this aspect of the curriculum. From making class contracts and having great discussions in class together to understand what God’s Loving Plan is.

In IDL, we have moved onto our new topic ‘Scottish Myths and Legends’ and have been carrying out a lot of independent research as well as group research. We are currently working on home projects, creating a Scottish Myth or Legend out of recyclable materials to display at our IDL wall. The class have really enjoyed this topic and enjoy sharing what they know about different Scottish Myths and Legends they research.

In PE, we have not long finished Target Games which we have all enjoyed and, in the end, creating our own target game in small groups and presenting these games to the class to carry out as a whole class, demonstrating our skills that we have learned and consolidating our learning together. We have also moved onto Social Dancing for the lead up to our Christmas Party this year and have been working hard alongside Primary 7/6 and Primary 5 in practising different Scottish songs and dances to carry out at the Christmas Party.

Some of our Primary 6 pupils also participated in Cross Country which we were training for during parts of our PE slots and some Friday afternoons. A couple of pupils in Primary 6 had some successful high places within our Primary 6 Boy and Girl races, which we were all so happy for and congratulate them in reaching the finals for next year to participate in! Congratulations to all pupils in Holy Family that had taken part, you should all be so proud of yourselves!

Primary 6 also carried out the Christmas Fayre and Tombola stalls which was a great success, and we are all very proud of each other for how busy the day was and to have a result of each stall sold out by the end of the day was a great success for each of the classes Christmas Crafts. Well done to everyone who worked extremely hard in creating these Christmas Crafts, they were all fantastic!

We have a busy and fun filled couple of weeks leading up to Christmas so please continue to check the school website for any important updates.

Thank you and have a great month of December!

Mr Rice and Primary 6

Welcome to our September update for Primary 6!

Primary 6 have been very busy in all areas of the curriculum. We have just finished our class modelling novel Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo and it was great to look back on some predictions made at the start of the book to see what we first initially thought was going to happen, to discovering what the book was all about through various reading strategies and summarising the events together as a class. We have now moved onto working in our groups and receiving our new novels and working very hard throughout our reading comprehension strategies. Marvellous Matilda’s have received a book called Tribes by Catherine MacPhail and Fantastic Foxes have received the book The Queen’s Nose by Dick King-Smith.

Within numeracy and maths, we have been working on place value, rounding, estimating, and now we have been working with addition and subtracting. They have been focussing a lot on reading questions carefully so that they have a good understanding of what they need to do to solve the problem. We have also been applying a variety of strategies such as using a number line, recognising doubles and near doubles and looking at patterns within number, and using friendly numbers that can help them. We will continue to apply a variety of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division strategies to help us with us our computational skills. We have been continuing to use some mental agility games and activities throughout our lessons and at home in memorising and practising our times tables.

Our first topic, The Titanic, has been a great topic so far and we have all been enjoying finding out all about the people on the Titanic and what their jobs were, who travelled on the Titanic, and also the difference in social class. We are currently creating dioramas at home of what each of the rooms looked like and identifying important features to distinguish the difference between each room. Our class display is coming along greatly with class work and homework projects.

Within Health and Wellbeing, we have recently started learning about the first cog within Emotion Works, ‘Emotion Words’. This is an educational programme within Scotland and very well aligned to the Scottish Curriculum and related policies such as GIRFEC. We have been focusing on building emotion word vocabulary which helps develop and deepen emotional understanding and we look forward to learning more about each cog and becoming more emotionally literate.

We have also been busy in carrying out the Choccy Challenge with Scotland’s Enterprising Schools and Young Enterprise Scotland which they have created a fantastic resource designed to allow pupils to work collaboratively, be creative and solve problems, which we all have been busy doing within the class. We have been working in groups creating a product, giving it a name, creating a logo and slogan, as well as creating packaging and adverts for each of them.

Furthermore, Primary 6 have been preparing for our First Friday Mass that we are hosting on Friday, 6^th of October.

Have a great week everyone!

Welcome to our update for August! Primary six pupils are settling in nicely to their new classroom. They have been taking on responsibilities in the classroom and setting a terrific example for our younger pupils. Going into a new class can be exciting and a little scary. We are all just getting to know each other, which can take time. In Primary 6 we have been creating our classroom charter, discussing our rights and responsibilities and creating a display with all of these to refer to throughout the school year.

We have been learning place value in class and putting a lot of effort into memorising and practising our times tables through our mental agility games and activities.

We have just started reading our class novel Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo and we will be learning all about the Reading Strategies covered in Primary 6 through this novel. We have currently been carrying out prior knowledge and creating some predictions about what we think will happen within the book and will come back to these later at the end of our novel.

The class is really delighted about our new topic, The Titanic, and they are ready to learn more about what happened and why The Titanic is so significant.

Homework will be handed out weekly on a Monday and should be brought back in on a Friday. Reminder of PE days, both Wednesday and Thursday afternoon. Children should come to school in full uniform and get changed for PE.

Have a great week everyone!