Primary 4/5 September Update

Hello and welcome to our first update for Primary 4/5. We have settled really well into our new classroom and are all very excited to have a brand-new Smart board to help us with our learning. It has been really fun getting to know each other again and Mrs Stevenson feels very lucky to have the opportunity to work with us again further up the school, we have all grown very tall!

We were so excited to welcome our families to our new classroom for our Meet the Teacher event and to share our timetable, class activities and expectations. The boys and girls hope you liked the surprise that they made for you!

Our first month of school has been spent learning about one of our favourite things – CHOCOLATE! The class novel has been Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl and we have really enjoyed exploring the chapters and getting to know more about the reading strategies. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we came into school one Monday morning and some Oompa Loompa’s had transformed our classroom door into a Wonka Bar! This topic has allowed us to use our imaginations and to create art work, learn about how chocolate is made and lots of fantastic writing linked to the novel.

The majority of the class have started our Stage4/5 spelling programme and are following a 4-week rotation, which looks like this:

Week 1/2 – Phoneme family sounds

Week 3 –  Common words (spelling strategies)

Week 4 – Common words (spelling rule)

P4/5 are enjoying the variety of activities to improve our spelling and are working hard to use our knowledge in our reading and writing tasks. We know it is really important to practise our spelling and reading every week for homework. This can be accessed on our class tab on the Holy Family website.

Maths

Our new Smart board has allowed us to explore lots of digital resources to help to develop our knowledge of place value and numbers to 10,000 and beyond. We are developing confidence in talking about the strategies we use to add and subtract larger numbers and can sequence large numbers, double numbers and round to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000.  We love to be challenged with number talks and daily ten/hit the button, as well as learning videos and ppts to explore number concepts and challenges.

This term we enjoyed learning more about measure and had opportunities to measure in the classroom and outdoors. We can make sensible estimations and measure accurately using different measuring tools. When baby Lily came to visit us we could even estimate and measure how tall she was!

We know it is important to practise our number skills  at home for homework and will use a mix of online games and written tasks to help us with this. Keep practising times tables as these are really valuable.

 RME

We have attended first Friday mass together and have enjoyed celebrating as a school community. Father Krzysztof visits our class regularly and teaches us wonderful things about our faith. This week he asked us to take part in a Rosary challenge for the Month of October and taught us about the importance of praying the Rosary to Mary Our Mother.

HWB

Primary 4

Primary 4 have begun our Roots of Empathy programme with Mrs Le blond. We had a visit from baby Esme and asked her mum, Natalie lots of fantastic questions about her developmental stage and her needs/likes. It was so interesting for us and we look forward to this time every Wednesday afternoon. We are really excited about Esme visiting again, as well as other important visitors in the coming weeks.

Primary 5

Primary 5 have been taking part in weekly Kodaly music workshops and are learning about rhythm and beat, through games and fun activities. We have really enjoyed being together as a whole year group for this and will have lots of opportunities for the classes to get together in the coming months.

We are well underway with our Swimming/dry side programme and are already showing excellent progress and increasing confidence in the pool! We swim for the first part of the session, then have time in the sports hall to improve our skills and fitness.

Primary 1 February Update

Welcome to our February update. We have been very lucky to have Miss Morrisey working with our class this month. She has planned lots of exciting learning opportunities for us and we have enjoyed getting to know her. We also enjoyed a lovely long weekend and were able to recharge and rest, ready for our next challenges at school. Here are some of our learning highlights:

Literacy

It has been very exciting for our boys and girls this month as we have been learning all about phoneme sounds (sh,ch,th). This is when 2 letters join to make a different sound. We have become text detectives and can find our phoneme sounds in stories. Now that we know all of our alphabet sounds we are able to read words containing vowels and consonants, we call these our CVC words. We sound out each letter sound then blend them together. Our reading skills are improving every day! Well done Primary 1! We should continue to work on learning our common words at home and in the classroom to help us to use these words in our sentences and stories.

This month we have created our own stories about the Loch Ness Monster and Harry the Highland Coo. We have been learning about when, who, what and how in our stories and are gaining confidence in creating wonderful imaginative stories independently. We like to use our word mats/word walls to help support us with spelling and we love to have a go at tricky words we are not sure about. In our daily writing we are sharing our news with our teachers and friends. We can create sentences about what we are doing at home in the evenings and can try to use a capital letter, finger spaces and a full stop.

Numeracy

In Primary 1 we are continuing to learn more about numbers to 20. This month our focus has been on learning how to read, write, count, build 11-20. We have been using active learning and stations to help improve our understanding of number and we like to work in this fun way in Primary 1. Our favourite station has been using the large dominos to make numbers and using 10 frames to add and subtract. We have been learning more about subtraction and have been taking away from 10/20. It has been fun learning about + and – and challenging ourselves during our number work.

We have really enjoyed learning how to tell the time and can read o’clock and half past time on an analogue clock. Ask us to read time at home and we will become even more confident in telling the time.

In the coming weeks we will be learning more about coins and how to count money. If you have a piggy bank at home this will help to become familiar with the British coins that we will be learning about.

Interdisciplinary Learning

We have continued to learn more about Scotland this month and have learned so many new things. We really enjoyed learning about the Scottish Inventors; Alexander Graham Bell and John Logie Baird. It was interesting to find out about the telephones and TVs of the past. We even got to make our own telephones from paper cups and string. Next, we made our own TV’s and designed our own favourite programmes/films to watch. We also learned about Charles Rennie Mackintosh and created excellent works of art.

This month was the start of Lent. We have set up a Lenten altar in the classroom and have made our Lenten promises. Some of our boys and girls have been attending morning mass with Father Brown in Holy Family Parish.

We are looking forward to learning all about Spring in the month of March and continuing on our journey to Easter.

Welcome back!

We have all settled back into our school routines and are working hard to reach our learning goals during our school day. To begin our journey through 2024 we set some personal targets and talked about the ways that we can achieve these during our school day. We enjoyed wishing each other a Happy New Year and had a pretend Hogmanay celebration, complete with a countdown, fireworks, cannons, and singing/dancing. We made some New Year promises and talked about what a resolution is and whey we make these. Primary 1 and Mrs Stevenson are really looking forward to the months ahead and are raring to go!

Literacy

We have been working so hard to learn all our alphabet sounds in Primary 1. This week we covered our final letters and are now consolidating our learning. Our teacher would like to check that we know all of our alphabet sounds, what they sound like in words and what their names are. We are going to be working at home too to practise our sounds.

Our next step will be to learn some phoneme sounds, which we are also very excited about.  We will hopefully be able to find our sounds in stories and recognise them when reading our books. When we are writing our wonderful sentences, we are trying hard to include capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. We have been learning about exclamation marks and question marks and have been spotting them in our reading too. Our next step will be trying to use these in our sentences too.

Our common word wall is becoming very full in the classroom and we are working hard every day to practise reading and writing our words. We can build sentences using them and spot them in books and when we use the internet in the classroom for our learning. At home we should continue to learn our common words, practise our sounds and reading to help us to keep up this great learning.

Mrs Stevenson has been delighted with the excellent listening and concentrating we have been doing during our literacy tasks. We really have gained some fantastic skills since joining the school. Well done Primary 1!

Numeracy

In Primary 1 we continue to extend our knowledge of numbers and we are now comfortable in reading, writing, counting and ordering numbers to 10. We are now extending our learning to 11-20.  Some of our class can even use the 100 square and count with 3-digit numbers, fantastic! We have been practising adding and subtracting with numbers up to 10 and enjoy our daily challenges, like daily 10 and number of the day to help us to learn more. We like to talk about our mental strategies with our classmates and this can help us to share our great ideas and learn more about number.

This week we have been learning more about days of the week and calendars. We have learned how to tell o’clock times on analogue clocks and are looking forward to learning more about time during our maths activities. If we have a watch at home, we can wear it to school to help us to become more confident when reading clocks.

Interdisciplinary Learning

We have been learning all about Scotland this month. We looked at Scotland on a world map and discussed the different countries we could see. We couldn’t believe how much water surrounded our island. That brought us to our next investigation – Scottish lochs and trying to find out if Nessie is real or if it is a made-up story. We loved watching clips about Nessie, reading the story ‘There is no such thing as Nessie’, making our Wanted posters and writing Nessie stories. We made some 3D Nessie artwork that is displayed in our classroom.

We have explored Scottish artefacts and even held a real sporran, glengarry hat and a quaich. We learned about Scottish clans and tartan. Primary 1 thought this was great fun and asked lots of excellent questions. We hope that Mrs Stevenson’s dad gives her more artefacts to share soon.

To celebrate Robert Burns’ Day on the 25^th of January we held a Burns celebration in the classroom. We learned all about the Scottish Poet’s life and heard some of his songs/poems. Our favourite was ‘Auld Lang Syne’ which we danced to after our shortbread.

We have had a very successful September, with the boys and girls becoming more independent during their school day and learning lots of new skills. We are learning more about the school and class routines and rules and are trying hard to follow these.

In literacy we have been continuing our active literacy programme and already know how to read and write s  a  t  p  I  and n. We have been listening to jolly phonics songs to help us to learn our sounds. You can access these on YouTube by searching for ‘jolly phonics songs in order’. Boys and girls, you can sing your songs for your families and teach them the actions! We have now learned 10 common words and we are continuing to practise these words every day in school and at home.

Our listening and concentration skills are improving every day. We are giving Oscar 5 when we come together as a class – eyes watching, mouth quiet, hands still, legs crossed/mountain/mermaid and ears listening. Keep up the great effort Primary 1!

We have introduced Star Writers to our classroom and we are working hard to meet our targets when we are over writing, under writing and writing on our own to get our work onto the classroom wall! We know that our letters have special places on the line and can tell if our letters are grass, ground or sky letters.

During our numeracy learning experiences we are continuing to learn how to read, write and count the numbers up to 5 and beyond. We are practicing our number formations every day and should do this at home too. We are learning more about numbers before/after and in between by using our number line. In the coming weeks we are going to learn even more about number stories and adding our numbers together to make a bigger number. To help us we will use lots of counting resources and have lots of fun!

Our class topic has been People Who Help Us and we have enjoyed talking about the people who help us in school, at home and in our community. We love learning about the emergency services and in particular the Police and Fire services. We even made our own Police vehicles. In class we have been talking about the importance of being safe when we are in the community, and how to be safe when crossing the road.

We are looking forward to another exciting month in Primary 1. We are so excited to be entering into October because we know this is an Autumn month and ends with Hallowe’en. Lots of fun to be had!

Welcome to our first update from Primary 1! At the end of each month, we will share some of the exciting things we have been learning in Primary 1.

The children have settled very well into school life and have been having lots of fun with new friends and buddies! We are beginning to remember our friend’s names and are playing so well together in the classroom and playground.

The boys and girls are learning to follow new routines and are working hard to take care of their own belongings when at school. The children are being supported in unpacking and packing their own bags, taking home their own reading book and making choices for lunch.

We have had our first PE learning experiences and our buddies helped us to get dressed into our PE kits. We will keep practising this and will get even faster at getting ready all by ourselves.

In literacy we have been working with our class puppet Oscar and he has been showing us how to sit well and concentrate when we are together at the front of the classroom during teaching time. This is helping us to develop our important listening skills. We have been exploring our reading books every week and using our reading fingers to read from left to right and jump underneath our words. We love reading books from our class library and sharing stories with our friends. We have met Percy the Park keeper and will be exploring lots of his stories over the coming months to help us to develop our skills in literacy.

We have been working hard on learning our numbers to 5 since starting school. The number puppy stories are helping us to learn the numbers 0-5 and we have been so busy learning how to read, write and count these numbers. We use lots of resources and play to help us to learn more about numeracy and mathematics in Primary 1. Ask us to tell you our number rhymes and songs at home.

On Friday we are attending our first whole school mass and we can’t wait to become part of the Holy Family Parish Community. We are going to listen Father Brown celebrate mass and talk about what we see and hear when we come back to school. We are so excited!

The month of May has been a busy one in Primary 1, with some lovely days off to recharge and then come back to school ready for our challenges. We have particularly enjoyed spending time with the nursery children who will join Holy Family in August and are looking forward to showing them what it looks like to be a big school boy/girl. We have been excellent role models so far and have had lots of fun playing with the children at the park and in the classroom.

Literacy

We are working so hard to learn all our phoneme sounds in Primary 1. So far we have learned sh, ch, th, ng, oo, ee, wh, ph, oy, ai and oa. We have been able to find our sounds in stories and recognised them when reading our books. When we are writing our wonderful sentences we are trying hard to include capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. We have learned about joining words and can add and, so, but and because to our great work too. What an achievement! At home we should continue to learn our common words, practise our sounds and reading to help us to keep up this great learning.

Mrs Stevenson has been delighted with the excellent listening and concentrating we have been doing during our literacy tasks. We really have gained some fantastic skills since joining the school. Well done Primary 1!

Numeracy

In Primary 1 we continue to extend our knowledge of numbers and are trying really hard to learn more about numbers beyond 20. Some of our class can even use the 100 square and count with 3-digit numbers. We have been practising adding and subtracting with numbers up to 20/30 and enjoy our daily challenges, like daily 10 and number of the day to help us to learn more. We like to talk about our mental strategies with our classmates and this can help us to share our great ideas and learn more about number.

We have been learning about sharing numbers equally and dividing amounts. Ask us to tell you what half looks, we know it looks like this ½ and can colour half of a shape.

We loved learning about time and are able to read o’clock on digital and analogue clocks. It has been fun learning about time in our daily lives and talking about time during our school day. Some boys and girls can read half past. At home we should keep practising this and if we have one, we could start to wear a watch to help us to learn more about time.

Interdisciplinary Learning

This term our class have been learning all about minibeasts. We have been hunting for minibeasts in the school grounds and have learned song, listened to stories and made mini beast crafts.

We have been visiting the ICT suite on a Thursday and have been learning how to log on to a laptop, navigate websites and use games to help our learning. Primary 1 have some excellent IT skills already and they will be very useful to us as move through the school.

In PE we have been enjoying the wonderful sunshine by getting outdoors and using all our equipment. We know how to use the different balls, racquets, hoops, bean bags safely and like to learn new skills every week.  We have been increasing our fitness to help us during our Sports Day. We enjoyed attending the Nursery Sports Day to cheer on our friends and can’t wait for our turn in a few weeks.

We have been learning how to be safe in the sunshine and all about being safe in and around the water as the summer months approach.

We have been practising all of our prayers in class and our hymn singing has been wonderful. All the children have been really trying to sing out loud during our celebrations of mass. Keep up the great work boys and girls!

As we begin our last month of Primary 1, we are beginning to think about own personal targets for moving forward into Primary 2. We are so excited to be moving to our new class after the big Summer break.

On returning to school after our Easter break, we have been delighted to have Miss Walker working with us in Primary 1. She will be with our class for most of the month of May. We are really enjoying working with Miss Walker and all the fun and exciting learning experiences she has planned for us.

Literacy

In Literacy we have begun to learn our phoneme sounds and have looked at phoneme stories and become text detectives to find our phoneme words. We continue to use our skills in reading and writing to explore our phoneme sounds and words. So far, we have learned ch, th, sh, ng, oo and ee. Ask us to spell some words with these sounds or find them in books at home.

We are continuing to build our classroom word wall with the common words that we have learned so far in Primary 1. In class we read, write, make our words every day from magnetic letters and other materials. At home we should continue to learn our words and practise them every night.

We are learning how to write short, independent sentences. When we write independently, we are being encouraged to use capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. Some of our class can write independent sentences using joining words like and, so, but and because. Great job!

In class we enjoy listening to and reading stories and talking about what we have read with our friends. This month we have been able to ask questions about the texts we share and like to share our opinions on the texts that we read. When we read at home ask us to sound out each sound and blend the sounds together (eg c – a – t , cat). This will help us to improve our reading fluency.

Numeracy

In Primary 1 we continue to extend our knowledge of numbers and are becoming confident when discussing numbers beyond 20. We have been practising adding and subtracting with numbers up to 20 and enjoy our daily challenges, like daily 10 and number of the day to help us to learn more. We like to talk about our mental strategies with our classmates and this can help us to share our great ideas and learn more about number. Some of our friends are counting up to 100 and can talk about numbers before, after and in between. Fantastic job Primary 1!

We have begun our Time block and are learning how to tell the time. So far, we have talked about analogue o’clock time and we will continue to learning more about this in the coming weeks. We will be playing time games, making our own clocks, and having fun! At home we could look at clocks and talk about time with our families.

Interdisciplinary Learning

This term our class have been learning all about the Seasons and in particular Spring. Ask us to sing our ‘Spring is Here’ song for you at home. We have enjoyed looking for signs of spring in our environment and have begun to learn more about Minibeasts. We have been on our Minibeast hunt and found lots of different creatures outdoors. We have learned about the life cycles of the caterpillar/butterfly and enjoyed listening to the story of the Very Hungry Caterpillar. We are looking forward to learning more about minibeasts and working on our classroom display.

In Primary 1 we are showing a keen interest in learning more about the human body. We will be learning more about our body parts and organs in the coming weeks. In PE w will be preparing our bodies and updating our skills for our Sports Day activities.

Our Muslim friends have been celebrating Eid Mubarak this month and we have really enjoyed learning all about Ramadan and Eid celebrations. Thank you to our friends for sharing their knowledge of their faith with us so well. You are all stars! In the coming weeks we will be learning more about Mary, as May is the month dedicated to Our Lady. We will continue to practise the Hail Mary prayer and learn more about the mother of Jesus. We will attend first Friday mass this week and look forward to celebrating with our whole school community.

Primary 1 January Update

Happy New Year from Primary 1! We have settled back into our school routine and have been thinking about our new year targets and resolutions. With our friends we are continuing to learn to co-operate with others, listen carefully and take turns,

Literacy

In Literacy we have continued to learn our alphabet sounds. We have almost learned the whole alphabet and our next step will be phoneme letter sounds (eg ng, sh, ch) to help us to read and write with even more confidence. We work so hard during our school day to learn our sounds and take part in games and daily challenges, sometimes even beat the teacher!

We are continuing to build our classroom word wall with the common words that we have learned so far in Primary 1. In class we read, write, make our words every day from magnetic letters and other materials. At home we should continue to learn our words and practise them every night.

We are learning how to write short, independent sentences. When we write independently, we are being encouraged to use capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. Some of our class can write a sentence and include a joining word (and, so, but). Fantastic work Primary 1!

In class we enjoy listening to and reading stories and talking about what we have read with our friends. This term our target it to ask some questions about the stories we hear and to learn more about sharing our thoughts and opinions with our classmates and teachers.

Numeracy

Primary 1 love learning about numbers, and we have been extending our number knowledge by learning all about teen numbers. We are learning how to read, write and count numbers to 20. Some of us are confident in reading number names and this is something we are continuing to work on. We are becoming very quick at reciting our number stories up to 10 and can add numbers in our heads from 0-10. This term we are going to be learning more about subtraction and will be able to subtract from 5 and then 10.

In addition to our number work we are going to be learning all about Money and this is something that we can practise at home with our families. We want to learn how to recognise coins up to 20p and be able to add small amounts of coins to buy from our class shop.

Interdisciplinary Learning

Our class learned all about Robert Burns this month. We liked hearing the funny Scots language and we thought it was very funny that Mr Creilly uses lots of these words at school! We had so much fun learning our Scottish Song ‘Oh you cannae shove your granny off the bus’ and we performed this at our Burns Assembly. The whole school performed for each other, we clapped and sang along. It was brilliant!

Our topic for this term is Under the Sea. We began our topic by talking about the things that we already know about under the sea, then we made a plan together about the things we would like to do or find out about. The children really wanted to learn about sharks. We were looking forward to showing our families our shark hats that we made this week! Over the coming weeks we are going to learn lots of interesting facts about sea creatures and life under the sea.

August ’22 Update – Primary 1

Hello and welcome to our first update from Primary 1! At the end of each month, we will share some of the exciting things that we have learned in Primary 1 and some photographs so that our families can see us having fun at school. The children have settled very well into school life and have been having lots of fun with new friends!

The boys and girls are learning to follow new routines and are working hard to take care of their own belongings when at school. The children are being supported in unpacking and packing their own bags, taking home their own reading books, and making choices for lunch. We are learning to change into our PE clothes and back into our uniforms, this is something we must keep practising at home with our families. Here we are enjoying PE with our P6 friends.

In Literacy we are learning to use good listening skills. Percy the Park Keeper has come to our class to help us to do good sitting and concentrating. We take turns to listen to our friends and share our thoughts and stories. We listened to Percy’s book ‘The Rescue Party’ and talked about the story with Percy. He asked us to make a book with our name and things we like. We loved becoming authors! Percy will be coming to visit us with different books in Primary 1.

Our Smart pal helps us to practise our letter and number formations. We use these in the morning to help us to focus and concentrate. Every day we practise writing our names too, even in the playground with chalk.

We have been learning how to form our numbers in Primary 1. We read the number puppy stories and talk about what our numbers look like and how to write them. We can count together in 1’s, forwards and backwards. So far, we can read, write, and count 0,1,2 and 3.

The month of March has been a very busy one for Primary 1. We have been working very hard but also having lots of opportunities for fun!

We started the month with World Book Day. On this day we dressed up as our favourite book characters or in our pyjamas. We brought our favourite books in to share with our friends and talked about why we liked them. We made bookmarks and read books with our buddies. The highlight of our day was the ‘booknic’ that we had in the hall. We took our blankets and relaxed with our friends from other classes, read books and heard a story being read aloud. What a fantastic day we had!

We have been learning more about how to write our own stories. We are able to use a plan to choose a When, Where, Who and What for our own imaginative stories and are creating fantastic characters! We are working very hard to include our core targets when we are writing independently. We must remember to include capital letters, finger spaces, full stops and write all of our words on the jotter lines. Keep working so hard Primary 1!

In spelling we have been learning our phoneme sounds and we can read and write words that have sh, ch, th and ng in them. Great job! We must continue to learn all of our common words at home so that we can read, write and spell them when we are making our sentences. Our teachers are so pleased with our hard work and can see that some children are reading books at home and doing lots of extra homework. Fantastic!

Primary 1 are really enjoying our number work this month because we are completing chilli challenges using adding and subtracting. We are becoming so confident when asked to complete our challenges and we do not give up if we find something tricky. We are learning to count in 2’s, 5’s and 10’s. We now know odd and even numbers and are able to sequence numbers from highest to lowest/lowest to highest. Ask us to try to count to 100 – some of us can even do that! We like to count to 100 together, during circle time, so that we can listen for the big numbers before and after.

We have enjoyed learning about volume and shape this month. After our holiday we are going to be focusing on Time and this is something that we are excited and to learn more about. If you have a watch at home maybe you could even wear it to school to help you learn more about time.

In RME we have been learning about Lent and have taken part in lots of different Lenten activities. We know that during lent we focus on almsgiving, prayer and fasting. We made Lenten promises and have tried really hard to stick to them. With the rest of the school we have raised important funds for charity and had fun while we are doing so. We came to school with crazy hair/ mad scientist, a p7 funday and cake and candy. We can talk about the Easter Story and have been learning about why Easter is so important to us. We are looking forward to our Easter Eggs on Easter Sunday!

It really has been a very fun month for us. Here are some photographs of the highlights. We really enjoyed Science and Eco Week, making empire biscuits and pancakes with our buddies.

We are looking forward to our Easter holiday and spending time with our families. See you in April!