We had a very busy month in Primary 2. We finished October by learning about Halloween. We enjoyed reading Halloween stories such as ‘Room on the Broom’ and ‘Funny Bones’. We also had Halloween purposeful play where we completed lots of spooky challenges such as building a Lego haunted house.

In Literacy, we have continued to learn new common words and sounds. We have been practising our reading and have learned how to complete lots of associated tasks. Mrs Simpson loves when we practise our reading books every night as this help us to develop our fluency and accuracy. In November we read the story ‘Sneezy the Snowman’. We wrote our own stories about Sneezy, designed some new clothes for him, then made our own Sneezy the Snowman biscuits.

In Maths, we finished working on numbers to 100 and began to focus on addition within 20. It helps us to explore new strategies using a variety of resources such as ten frames, cubes and pegs on hangers.

In R.E. we have been learning about the story of the very first Christmas. We enjoyed showing what we have learned as narrators in our infant Nativity show ‘A Wriggly Nativity’. We hope that you enjoyed our performance as much as we did. We have also learned about Advent and how special this time is. We made Advent promises and learned about the Advent wreath.

During P.E this month we have spent time learning dance with a focus on social dancing. We enjoyed learning the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ and ‘The Hokey Cokey’ among other dances, and can’t wait to show off our new skills at our Christmas party.

This month we learned about St. Andrew, our patron saint. We made beautiful stained glass window pictures to celebrate his special day.

We loved ‘Book Week Scotland’ in Holy Family. It was fun bringing our teddies and books to school and we enjoyed the variety of activities we participated in. We particularly enjoyed visiting the library and our friends in P5/6 so they could read to us. Thank you Mrs Cook and P5/6!

In December our highlights so far have been our Christmas lunch and our trip to Motherwell Civic Centre to see Cinderella. Please see Twitter for all our photos.

We have had a very busy month in primary 2! Here is a summary of some of our fantastic learning and achievements in October.

In Maths we have worked very hard on numbers to 100. This has been a big challenge, but we have tried so hard and achieved great learning. We have been working on numbers before, numbers after, numbers in between. We have used partitioning and learned about odd and even numbers with the help of Mr Odd and Mrs Even. During Maths Week we participated in the NLC Sumdog competition. Mrs Simpson was so proud of how hard we worked. We also learned about symmetry and made some symmetrical pictures using materials we found outdoors. During Maths Week we enjoyed learning new number games. Our favourite game of the week was Hopscotch! We will soon move on to addition and subtraction.

Within Literacy we have been consolidating previously taught sounds and common words, as well as learning lots of new ones. We have enjoyed using our magnetic boards to build words which contain our sounds. Within reading we have been working on a variety of Read to Write tasks which allow us to work on important reading comprehension skills. We should try hard to read our reading books every night with an adult as this will develop our fluency and accuracy. In writing we have used our topic as a stimulus to create imaginative stories. We love our brainstorming sessions where we create our own who, when, where, what and why. Our favourite story was based on our class book ‘Aliens Love Underpants’. We wrote hilarious stories which made our teacher giggle.

October is the month of the Holy Rosary and we spent time learning about the rosary and how to say this beautiful prayer. We were excited to learn about when Our Lady appeared to St. Bernadette in Lourdes. We also finished our mini topic on ‘Jesus’ Family and Ours’. We enjoyed thinking about our own families, and learning about the holy family.

We are just about to finish our topic on Space. We have enjoyed learning about the solar system and impressed our teachers with lots of super knowledge. We also learned lots about Neil Armstrong. We have created our own rockets using 2D shapes and made some fantastic spacemen for our class display.

Without a doubt, our favourite time of October is Halloween! We had a ball at our disco and enjoyed seeing our friends dress up. In class, we explored lots of different Halloween stories and we enjoyed our purposeful play sessions where we made haunted houses, made Halloween posters, repaired jumbled skeletons and completed some playdough challenges.

Mrs Simpson gives us homework on a Monday and we should submit it on a Thursday. We should also read our reading books every night. This will help us to develop essential reading skills. We should try hard to bring our reading book to school every day so we can use it in class.

We are looking forward to November and all the super learning we will do. We will be shortly beginning our Nativity rehearsals and preparing for Christmas. Please check Twitter for regular updates and photos.

Primary 2 have had a very exciting month. We have been working very hard and celebrated lots and lots of successes in May.

In maths we have been learning about multiplication and division. We began by making sets of items. We then learned about the multiplication sign and what it means. We are able to solve lots of multiplication problems now. We have also been sharing things equally when learning about division. Here are some of the fun activities that we have been doing to help us to be great learners.

In literacy, we are still working hard on all our sounds and common words. We have been doing lots of work with Mrs Simpson on writing sentences independently. We are getting so good at this. We have been reading lots more reading books and completing lots of activities based on our books. We must remember to read our books every night at home as this will help us lots in school. Some of primary 2 boys and girls have been very lucky and have a Reading Buddy from primary 5/6 who reads our books with us. We really appreciate the help that those kind children give to us.

In May we have been celebrating the Month of Mary. We learned about the Holy Rosary and said lots of prayers to Mary our mother. Primary 2 also lead the First Friday Mass at the beginning of May. We were such a great example to the other boys and girls in the school, and we made Father Brown and all the teachers very proud. Here are some of the children who read aloud and who participated in the offertory during our Mass.

We have been working hard on our Fairyland topic this month. We received a very important letter from Cinderella who had a very important task for us to do. She had lost one of her glass slippers and she asked us to design a new one for her. We all made beautiful creations.

Cinderella was so pleased that she sent some fun tasks for us to complete.

We also helped the sad troll from the Three Billy Goats Gruff story by writing a letter to the king to tell him that the billy goats had tricked him and that he is actually very kind. We made fantastic troll pictures to decorate our class.

Through the story of Little Red Riding Hood we have been learning about Stranger Danger within Health and Wellbeing. During this topic, we identified safer strangers and what we should do if a stranger approached us. We loved playing safer stranger bingo with Miss Goldie.

We have also been learning about our teeth and how to keep them healthy. Our favourite active learning this month has been our karate lesson during Health/Eco week. We learned lots of new skills whilst having lots of fun.

Primary 2 have also been learning about the Platinum Jubilee. We read a lovely book about the queen called There Once Is A Queen and discussed the upcoming celebrations. We researched lots of information about Queen Elizabeth II and we made our own bunting and silhouette collage pictures. Our class looks fit for a royal visit with all our new artwork.

Our favourite part of the month was the cinematic experience organised by Mrs Anderson and primary 7. We had a ball watching our favourite movies and eating lots of snacks. We want to say a huge thank you to primary 7 for our fun afternoon.

We are looking forward to our last month in primary 2 and the adventures we will experience in June. We can’t wait for lots more fun and learning. Please keep an eye on Twitter for regular updates from our class.

March was a very busy month for Primary 2. We finished off term 2 with lots of great work and fun activities.

Maths

In Maths we continued to work on Addition. We used lots of concrete materials to help us to understand lots of different strategies for solving addition problems.

We also worked very hard on our topic about Fractions. We learned all about halves and quarters of shapes or amounts, and how to half/quarter numbers. Here are some of our superstars investigating which shapes can be quartered and which ones can’t.

When we studied Data Handling, we had lots of fun learning about bar graphs. We found out what everyone was having for lunch one day then made a huge bar graph on our class smartboard. At first we found Carroll diagrams difficult, but we quickly began to learn that they were easy!

Literacy

In Literacy we have been working through our programme of sounds and common words. We know that we should practise these lots at home to help us to get even better at reading and writing.  Here are some pictures of us practising our common words on a sunny March day.

We have been working hard on our independent writing again this month. Mrs Simpson can’t believe how neat our handwriting is! We have also been trying really hard to give things a go when we write our stories and recounts. If we are stuck on how to spell a word, we don’t let the word beat us – we try to think of all our strategies for spelling words that we have already learned. Here are some of our March Star Writers.

R.E.

March was a very special time in Holy Family Primary. At the beginning of the month we had Ash Wednesday which led us into Lent. During Lent we tried very hard to stick to the Lenten promises which we made. We also participated in lots of fun activities in order to raise money for Lenten charities. Here are some photos of all the fun things we did during Lent.

We also spent lots of time thinking about the Easter story. We felt very sad for Jesus that he had to face lots of pain and suffering. We thought of ways that we could be kind at Easter too.

This month we had Science Week. The focus for Science Week 2022 was Growth. We did lots of exciting activities based on growth during our week. Some of our favourite activities were going on a scavenger hunt, growing rainbows, growing cress and learning about the life cycle of a frog. Here are some pictures of our Science Week activities.

At the beginning of March we celebrated World Book Day. We came to school dressed as our favourite book characters or wearing dress down or pyjamas.  That day we did lots of book related tasks. We even went on a trip to visit our school library. Our favourite part of the day was when we had our Booknic in the afternoon with our friends from P1, P2, P3 and P4.

We had so much fun in our last month of Term 2. We can’t wait to start Term 3 and do more exciting learning! Please keep checking Twitter for regular updates from Primary 2.

Primary 2 have had a very busy but fun February.

In Maths we have been working very hard on addition to 20. We have been learning lots of strategies to help us with this, such as doubles, near doubles and bridging. The boys and girls have been playing lots of fun games and doing lots of work with partners and in groups to help them with this.

We have also been working hard on Shape and Money. We have been learning about 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p and 50p, and have been working hard to decide which coins we should use to pay for things. Mrs Simpson says everyone should try very hard to use money in shops in order to practise their coin recognition skills. Here are some of our maths superstars in action.

In Literacy we have continued to work on more sounds and common words. We are getting very good at following Charlie Checker’s targets and have been trying hard to do our neatest work this month. This includes forming all our letters properly, fingers spaces and writing on the lines. Each of our reading groups have been working very hard on partner and group reading and our reading skills are constantly improving. Within Writing, we have been using our topic as a stimulus for our narrative and recount work. We have also had a little go at writing instructions this month. We wrote fantastic instructions for making a McCoo picture, and a super recipe for Empire Biscuits.

In February we finished off our R.E. topic ‘New Life’. Within this topic, we thought about the baby Jesus, and we also welcomed a pretend baby into our class. We then thought about Baptism and learned about what happens when someone is baptised.

We also began to learn about other world religions this month. We learned that many people have different beliefs, but that we are all special. We enjoyed learning about Islam, the qur’an and the Mosque.

We are now beginning to learn about Lent in preparation for Easter. We will do lots more work on this in March so keep your eyes peeled for updates!

In HWB we learned about being safe online through our story of Buddy the Dog. We learned a song which helps to keep us safe and we thought of ways to keep ourselves safe when we are playing with mobile phones, tablets etc.

In P.E. we have enjoyed creating our own games with a partner using a variety of P.E. equipment. Here are some of our groups showing off the games that they created.

We are really enjoying our topic about Scotland. We have been so busy learning lots about our beautiful country. We learned about Charles Rennie MacIntosh and created our own MacIntosh roses.

We also learned about the artist Stephen Brown. We loved looking at pictures of his McCoo pictures and we decided to try our own using wool. Here are some of ours. Do you like them?

We are beginning to focus on Scottish landmarks and this month we investigated Edinburgh Castle. We loved learning about it’s history. We even learned it used to be a prison and some prisoners escaped through a secret tunnel. We enjoyed having an afternoon of Purposeful Play based on Edinburgh Castle. During our play, we completed a range of castle themed challenges. Our favourite was when we created a new castle for the queen to stay in during her holidays in Scotland.

We really loved learning about Scottish food and drink in February. We picked some tasty Scottish dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We then made our own Empire Biscuits using Scottish ingredients.

One highlight of our month was our trip to the school library. Thanks to Mrs Cooney and Primary 4, our library is looking amazing so we decided to go and have a little explore. We enjoyed spending time relaxing with a good book.

We also enjoyed having fun in the snow with our friends. We were so excited to build snowmen, have snowball fights and make snow angels. We even threw snowballs at our teacher!

We are looking forward to the better weather in March and beginning our Easter preparations. World Book Day is on 3^rd March and we can dress up as a favourite book character or come to school in comfy clothes. Keep an eye on Twitter for lots more adventures in primary 2.

January has certainly been a fun filled month in Primary 2.

We were so happy to be back to school after the Christmas holidays, and we enjoyed spending time catching up with our friends.

In Literacy, we spent some time revising our previously taught common words and sounds before we began working on new learning.

This month we have been working very hard on handwriting and making our jotter work as neat as possible. We have spent lots of time learning to be more independent with our writing and to remember Charlie Checker’s core writing targets:

Writing on the lines

Capital letters

Full stops

Finger spaces

As our new class topic is Scotland, we had a great time writing about the Loch Ness Monster. Here are some of our super stories.

In Maths, we have been working on addition within 20. We started this topic with lots of revision of our number bonds to 10. We enjoyed using a variety of objects/resources to help us with this. Here are some of our hard workers working out number stories for 6,7,8 and 9.

We have also been working on Shape. We found out lots about 3D shapes and we made our own creations using spheres, cubes, cuboids, cylinders and cones. We also learned about the properties of a range of 2D shapes.

We used our prior knowledge of the birth of the Lord Jesus when we began our new topic within the R.E. syllabus ‘New Birth’. Within the topic we learned about Mary’s visit to see Elizabeth. We learned about the words that Elizabeth said to Mary and we linked those words to the ‘Hail Mary’ prayer we often say in class. These children wrote the prayer in their jotters beautifully.

We then researched new babies and welcomed a new baby into our class.

This is baby Rosie. We all helped to choose a lovely name for her. Our next steps are to think about Rosie’s baptism. We would love to hear about our Baptism and see photographs from our special day if our grown-ups can find any at home.

We absolutely love our new class topic; Scotland. We have covered lots so far. We were very lucky to have access to lots of Scottish artefacts brought in by Mrs Stevenson. We saw lots of interesting things such as a Quaich, a bodhran and some very old Scottish money. Thank you to Mrs Stevenson for letting us have a look!

We have enjoyed learning about Nessie and even made our own Nessie pictures. Here are a few of our artists hard at work.

We loved learning the Scottish version of Wee Willy Winkie and we designed our own character puppets.

On Burns day we learned about Robert Burns, learned to dance the Highland Fling and we even tasted a yummy Scottish treat; a Tunnoch’s Teacake.

When we came back to school in 2022 we learned about New Years Resolutions and we created our own. Lots of us decided that we wanted to become healthier this year, so we have been learning about healthy eating. We learned some facts about the different food groups and then we worked in pairs to decide what foods we should eat lots of, and what foods we should only eat a little bit of. We made some very sensible choices.

In February we will continue to work very hard on handwriting and our core writing targets. We are also looking forward to learning about other world religions. Keep an eye on Twitter for regular updates from Primary 2.

November has been a very busy time for us in Primary 2. We have been learning lots and having so much fun.

Within Literacy, we have continued to work on new sounds and common words using a variety of tasks. We enjoy listening to stories which contain words with our phoneme, then trying to work out which words contain the sound. We also love using our magnetic boards and building our own words. Mrs Simpson tells us that we are super spellers!

In Writing, we are learning to be very independent. We plan our own stories (making sure they contain the important parts like who, what, where, when and why). We then try to use our ideas, plus the common words we have learned, to help us build our stories. Here are some of our Star Writers in November. Mrs Simpson is so proud of them all!

In Maths we have all been working together on Measure. We enjoyed learning about length and had great fun comparing the lengths of different flowers then putting them into the correct order from shortest to longest. Our Cubes group have worked so well on numbers to 20 and have revised addition to 10. The Counters group have been busy working on numbers to 100. Our next job is to start adding to 20. We are very excited!

This is a very special month when we remember all the people who have died. It is called the Month of the Holy Souls. In class we have been learning the ‘Eternal Rest’ prayer and saying it for all our loved ones. We have been praying that they are with God in heaven. On Remembrance Day we also paid tribute to the brave men and women who lost their lives during war. We made amazing pictures of poppy fields to mark the day. Mrs Simpson said we are little artists!

We have also started working on our school Nativity show alongside p1 and p3. We have learned our lines very well and we are amazing at singing our Nativity songs. We have been practising in the hall almost every day. We must remember to keep practising at home too, and hand in our outfits if we haven’t already done so.

This month we celebrated Bonfire Night. We learned how to keep safe when using fireworks. We also went on a bonfire word hunt in the classroom. Our favourite part of the day was making Rocket Fruit Kebabs. They were healthy and delicious.

This month we also celebrated Book Week Scotland. During the week, we had fantastic helpers from p7 come and read some stories with us. We also all received a special gift; a bag full of exciting books to read at home. We are so lucky!

On the last day of November we learned all about St. Andrew. We made stained glass window pictures in class. Later in the day we had a Scottish celebration with shortbread, Singing Kettle and stories about the Loch Ness Monster. We wore tartan too. We all looked so fancy!

We are looking forward to the fun month ahead in Primary 2. Don’t forget to check Twitter to keep up with what’s happening in our class.

We have had a very busy month in Primary 2. The children have been working so hard and have learned so much.

Within Maths we have been focusing on number. Our Cubes group have worked so hard within numbers to 20. We have looked at numbers before and after, larger and smaller and we have been ordering. Our Counters group have challenged themselves within numbers to 100 by learning about Place Value through working with tens and units. The children enjoy using concrete materials to help them with their learning. Here are some of our superstars learning through play.

Within Literacy, we have continued to work hard on our new sounds and common words. We enjoy building words using the sounds we learn and our great progress can be seen in our reading and writing. Here are some activities that we have enjoyed during our phonics lessons.

In Taught Writing we have been using a selection of spooky stories to help us to create exciting stories. We especially loved learning about the story ‘Room on the Broom’ and after writing, we made fabulous witches using a variety of materials including autumn leaves. Mrs Simpson loves to pick Star Writers each week. Here are a few of them showing their super work! This month we have been thinking about adjectives. We enjoyed creating adjectives for a range of different pictures and we used lots of these super descriptive words in our stories.

We enjoyed learning about the Month of the Holy Rosary in October, and we enjoyed paying visits to the gardens of the church where we participated in a decade of the holy rosary. We have begun to understand that the rosary prayer tells us about  the life of Jesus and his mother, Mary. It was a great time to learn about this, as we have been studying the topic Jesus’ Family and Yours within our R.E. lessons. Within this topic, we particularly enjoyed hearing about the story of the boy Jesus in the Temple. Pope Francis has called for us all to unite together and care for our planet. We have been learning about COP26 in Primary 2 and we discussed ways we could look after the environment. We made bunting to celebrate the conference. Here are some of our pupils showing off their promises.

Health and Wellbeing is extremely important to us and is a core part of our curriculum. This month we finished up our topic on People who Help Us. We carried out wonderful solo talks about someone we know who has a job helping people. Mrs Simpson was delighted with us. She said we had prepared so well and we demonstrated lots of confidence. We made sure we were a super audience when others had a chance to speak, and asked lots of super questions when they were finished. More recently, we have been learning about the importance of sleep. We read the story of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, thought about how we feel when we don’t get enough sleep and we designed cosy onesies for bedtime.

Our recent class topics have been Traditional Tales and Halloween. We especially enjoy purposeful play and the challenges we solve in carousel activities. We studied stories such as ‘Goldilocks’, ‘The Gingerbread Man’ and ‘The Three Little Pigs’. We loved making the pigs from the story, then creating houses made of Lego for the pigs to live in. Here are some of our favourite activities from Purposeful Play afternoons.

We understand the need for fresh air and exercise in Primary 2. We love to learn in an active way in the great outdoors. We have been great team players this month and worked so hard to earn lots of Beat the Street points for Holy Family Primary School. We also enjoyed the lovely Autumn weather and went on an Autumn walk to discover what we could hear, see, smell and touch.

Mrs Simpson is so proud of us for all our hard work. She said we should give ourselves a tap on the back as we have been successful learners this month. We can’t wait to start our new learning in November!

We have had a very busy month in Primary 1/2.

In maths we have been working on time, addition, subtraction and data handling. Our counters group have been adding to 20 and have been using a variety of concrete materials to help them to explore subtraction. They enjoyed this simple game which they could play at home too.

We have also been learning about tally marks and horizontal/vertical bar charts. The children enjoyed finding out what flavour of ice cream their friends like best then creating their own bar chart. Here is one of our Cubes group members completing a bar chart.

Within literacy, the children have been making good progress through the Active Literacy programme and have spent time revising previously taught phonemes as well as learning some new ones. The children enjoy partner spelling and the games we play to help us learn. Here is one successful learner who was able to match sounds to words which contain the sounds.

The children have also been working on instructions in Taught Writing. They wrote their own recipe for an Ice Cream Sundae as part of their Seaside topic. They also made their own Rainbow Fish and wrote instructions for Primary 1 to use when they made theirs.  Here is one of our budding artists showing off his Rainbow Fish.

One of our favourite times of the week is when we choose Star Writers each week. Here are a couple of our superstars in May.

We are really enjoying our topic in primary 1/2 and have participated in a wide range of lessons about the Seaside. We enjoyed our Seaside purposeful play when we were asked to design a new lighthouse for the lighthouse keeper. They children designed lighthouses using playdough and lego. They also created a pattern for their lighthouse and measured pictures of lighthouses. We had a ball being designers for the day.

We also showed off our creativity when we made octopus for our Seaside display in class.  Our topic wall looks awesome!

In Science, the children have been learning about living and non-living things. We also explored the habitats of living things. Here are some pupils matching a variety of habitats to the animals that live there.

We are ending May with our Health/Eco Week. The children have been busy sprucing up their playground. They did some weeding and will plant new seeds in our planters. This will ensure the playground looks beautiful in the next few weeks.

What a month we have had in Primary 1 / 2. We have had so much fun preparing for Christmas and learning all about the Nativity story.

We have had a special visitor in our class for the past few weeks – Snowball the Elf. Snowball has been a little bit cheeky sometimes. We laughed when he spilled the paper out of our paper recycling bin. We also enjoyed when he brought us a lovely story to read and asked us to write a letter to Santa. Our letters were amazing so fingers crossed they have reached the North Pole. Here are some pictures of us posting our letters to Santa.

We have also created lots of fabulous Christmas artwork in December. We have made penguins, Christmas puddings and Christmas cards to name a few. Mrs Simpson is delighted that our work is getting so neat.

Our target this month was to learn lots about the Nativity story. We have achieved this target by reading stories, story sequencing and doing artwork. We made lovely Advent promises and learned about the Advent wreath.

One of the highlights for our month was our Christmas Jumper Day. Look at how smart we all looked.

We loved our Christmas party. At the party we played ‘Pin the Carrot on the Snowman’ and the paper plate game. We did lots of party dancing and enjoyed a lovely snack. Our favourite bit was when Santa wrote us a letter and delivered some lovely treats to our class when we were out.

Looking back over the past few months we are so proud of everything we have achieved. This has been a very unusual year in our school but we have tried hard to follow the rules and still managed to work extremely hard. Mrs Simpson says we deserve a lovely rest with our families now it’s almost holiday time.

Looking ahead to 2021, we have so much to look forward to. We will continue to make lots of progress within literacy and numeracy as well as having lots of fun learning in other curricular areas.

Mrs Simpson and Primary 1 / 2 wish our families, friends, parish and school community a very happy and holy Christmas. We look forward to the year ahead and all the new things we will accomplish.