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.

November has been so exciting in Primary 1 / 2. We have been working so hard and have learned lots.

In maths we have been working on Measure. We used a variety of different items to measure things on our desks. We also measured a huge octopus in the playground using our feet. We made estimations then compared our estimations to how long the octopus tentacles actually were.

We also weighed items from our desks using a pan balance and compared what items were lighter or heavier.

The Cubes group have also been working on ordering numbers to 10 and number names, and The Counters have worked so well on numbers to 100!

Within Literacy we have continued to work on new sounds and words. We have been learning how to do partner spelling and thought of lots of strategies to remember our common words. Within Writing, we have been working hard on narrative work and have produced some fantastic stories. We have even learned how to self-assess our work. Here are some of our Star Writers for November.

We have learned lots of new reading comprehension tasks recently and are getting so good at completing them independently. Here is one of our star pupils showing off her Beginning, Middle and End task.

During the Month of the Holy Souls we remembered those who have died and we thought about those people every day during prayers. We learned the Eternal Rest prayer and drew lovely pictures to remember them. We also learned about some Bible Stories this month; Jonah and the Whale and Noah’s Ark. We completed a variety of tasks and thought about how those stories could help us to be better people. We made our own Noah’s Ark with all the animals inside. Here are some of them on display in our classroom.

We have been working on three mini topics this month in our class; Bonfire Night/Fire Safety, Winter and Looking after the Planet. We loved hearing stories about Winter and our Winter Purposeful play sessions. where we enjoyed building ice castles for Elsa and writing our common words in the snow.

We also reflected on the story ‘The Lorax’ and thought about how we could help look after our planet too. Mrs Simpson is impressed as we are doing our bit to save the planet by always using our blue recycling paper bin in class.  The children have lots of other hints and tips to share with their grown-ups at home too!

Within Health and Wellbeing the children have been learning yoga. We have been learning to develop our strength, balance and confidence through lots of yoga poses. We understand that yoga can make us feel calmer and help us to regulate our emotions.

Some children have been finding homework tricky since we moved to our digital model. If you cannot find the homework, simply search for ‘Holy Family Primary and Nursery Class Glow Blog’ on Google. You select the first suggestion that appears which will take you directly to the correct website.

Each class has an individual tab at the top of the screen which you click on to select the current week’s homework. Please see photo as a guide.

If you have any questions or cannot find the homework, please either ask on Teams or write a note in your child’s diary. I have supplied a jotter for homework which should be handed in on Thursdays. Sumdog and Glow details were supplied again last week. They can be found inside your child’s diary. Homework is a very helpful tool for parents as this allows them to see what the children have been learning in school. It is also beneficial for pupils as it allows them to revise previously taught work.

We have been reflecting on November in class and the children have been thinking about the target they were set in their Learning Journeys. Please complete these at home with your child. Our new target for December is to reflect on the Nativity story. Please keep an eye on Twitter to see the children learning about the birth of our Lord.

Keep working hard primary 1/2. You are doing so well!

We have had a fabulous month of new learning in primary 1 / 2. We have continued to work hard on learning our new school routines and have tried so hard to show great behaviour and work. Mrs Simpson thinks we are superstars. Our Rainbow Reward chart, Class Dojo and winning lots of Golden Tokens encourage us to do our best every day.

Within literacy we have made excellent progress within the Active Literacy programme. We have learned lots more sounds and have been learning to use the sounds we learn to build new words.

Our reading is constantly improving . We have read lots of interesting reading books and have enjoyed learning a variety of Read to Write tasks. We love completing Sticky Sentences. This is where we sequence jumbled up sentences. We have created lots of interesting pieces of writing this month also. We have been learning about recounts and have enjoyed creating our own. We have written about our October holiday and a Halloween story recount. We have been trying hard to assess our own work by becoming Charlie Checkers. We have been checking our work to ensure we have included capital letters, full stops, fingers spaces and that we are writing on the line. We carried out solo talks this month in class. We shared lots of interesting information with our new friends. Mrs Simpson said that we prepared very well and listened so well to others. Here is one of us carrying our our solo talks.

Within maths, the Cubes group have made an excellent start to Addition. The Counters group have been working on Subtraction. Both groups have been using concrete materials to help them understand these concepts. We love practising our number formation on our ‘Show Me’ boards. Mrs Simpson says we are getting good at counting forwards and backwards from a range of different numbers.

Our class has continued to develop their emotional literacy through Health and Wellbeing lessons. We especially enjoyed playing the Emotions board game where we had the opportunity to discuss times in our life when we felt a range of emotions.

Our topics this month have been Autumn and Halloween. We have participated in a wide range of lessons based on both topics. As well listening to spooky stories, we have had the opportunity to create various pieces of Halloween artwork. Our favourite was making 2D shape witches. We also enjoyed going on an Autumn treasure hunt. We were able to find lots of things relating to Autumn including lots of brightly coloured leaves which we used to make Autumn hedgehogs. We praised God for creating our beautiful Autumn world by creating Autumn leaves with praise words on them.

Mrs Simpson has been teaching us lots of Spanish in class. We have learned lots this month including a range of colours, some classroom commands and we can also bless ourselves. Our favourite game so far is Spanish Eye Spy.

We have continued with new sounds and common words within Literacy, and Mrs Simpson is very proud of all of our achievements. Within Taught Writing we have been using a different fairytale each week to help us write. We have been learning how to write letters and have written exciting letters to our friendly dragon, Elsa and the king of Fairyland.

Within Maths we have worked very hard on addition, subtraction, measure and money. It’s been a very busy month indeed. We love when we do our Maths stations and enjoy learning through play.

As we are still doing Fairyland as our topic we have enjoyed reading and acting out stories. We have also successfully created a variety of artwork based on Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Our classroom is looking fantastic with all our creations! The highlight of our month was when we arrived in school to find that our beanstalk had been started by the characters of Fairyland.

Within ‘This is Our Faith’ we have spent time thinking about Lent and how we can properly prepare ourselves for Easter. We thought of Lenten promises and ways we can spread God’s love.

Fairtrade is a topic which we have explored this month. We enjoyed learning about what it actually means. We also learned about how chocolate is made, and enjoyed designing our own chocolate bars. We made bunting for our class and also did some home baking for our Fairtrade coffee morning. Our Tiffin looked and smelled delicious. We hope our visitors enjoyed it.

Primary 2 have had a fabulous start to the year. We have a new topic which we all absolutely love – Fairyland!! It all started when we received a letter from a friendly dragon asking us to rebuild Fairyland  as it was lost. We have been working hard to design a new beanstalk for Jack. It looks great so far.  We have also made some pictures of the giant which are on display in our class. We got a shock when we came in and the Fairyland characters had started work on the new beanstalk for us. We have been using fairytales to give us ideas for our Taught Writing lessons, and have been writing letters to Elsa about our magical powers. We also enjoyed purposeful play which was topic themed. This gave us the chance to learn through play.

In literacy we have been so busy with new sounds, words and reading books. We also met two new characters this month: Veronica Verb and Naomi Noun. We had fun learning about nouns and verbs and when to use them.

We visited the library this month and had fun reading some lovely stories. We had the opportunity to return our old books and borrow a new one.

In Maths we have been working on multiplication and measure. We have had a ball using the pan balance to compare weights of items. We even used pencils to measure the length of each other. We like to be active when we learn so we have enjoyed sharing and making equal sets of items to help us with multiplication and division.

We are so luck to get to work with a specialist during P.E time. We have been learning football. We enjoy learning new skills and developing resilience through sports activities.

Within R.E we have been learning about the Epiphany of the Lord. We have also been thinking about the baptism of Jesus and the children have been thinking about their own baptism.

Mrs Simpson and all the children in Primary 2 would like to wish you all a very happy and holy Christmas. We are looking forward to our Christmas holidays, but also can’t wait to come back fresh in 2020 to achieve even more.  All the best from us to you!

Primary 2 have had such a busy month. Preparation has began for our Nativity show ‘A Miracle in Town’. The children have their parts and have been working hard to learn their lines and songs.

We have continued work on addition and subtraction and have also covered a topic on shape. As always, a great deal of our work is practical using Seal Maths.

Within Literacy we have been doing more work on new sounds and common words. The children are getting so good at reciprocal teaching (teaching each other) by testing each other on what we have been learning. In writing we have had a go at writing a recount and have also been writing instructions. We especially enjoyed writing about how to make a jeely piece for Katie Morag.

The children have devoted lots of their prayers this month to their deceased loved ones as part of our work on the Month of the Holy Souls. We have learned the ‘Eternal Rest’ prayer and have been saying it daily.

As part of our Emotion Works syllabus, we have been identifying emotions and linking things that happen to us with how it makes us feel. The children made their own emotions using play foam and blank faces.

We have enjoyed some S.T.E.M time within our busy class this month. We were given the challenge of designing a new bridge for the Island of Struay as part of our topic.  We made our way around a variety of stations (e.g spaghetti and marshmallows) and tried to design a safe bridge for the people on Struay to use.

Work began on our Christmas enterprise for our Christmas Fayre. The children had a ball making reindeer food and were so proud of the results.