A group of P6/7 children attended the football festival at St. Ambrose HS. They played very well and we are all so  proud of them. Well done!

Tesco Bellshill invited us along to take part in ‘The Big Scottish Breakfast’ with Kellogg’s. We had cereal, pancakes and delicious fruit before meeting Coco the Monkey! A competition was held to design the most creative new cereal for Kellogg’s. We had to think about the name of our cereal and the packaging.

Thank you to Kellogg’s and Tesco for inviting us along, and we look forward to more partnership working.

All classes had the opportunity to visit the Church today to see the statue of St Michael the Archangel. Father Krzysztof told us all about the important work of St Michael, who was brave and courageous.

This week is Maths Week Scotland (22nd-28th September 2025). The theme is WILD MATHS – bringing nature and numbers together. Wild Maths will explore plants and wildlife, weather and natural forces, astronomy, and outdoor learning.

Primary 4 took their learning outside to take on the sticks and angles challenge. Each group had to collect a range of sticks of different lengths. They had to work co-operatively to make a picture of a house using the sticks that included:
• a right angle
• an acute angle
• a straight angle
• an obtuse angle
• a reflex angle

This P4 boy has shown excellent patience, focus and determination to work on this build. We are so pleased to have this Encanto house to display in our classroom. Fantastic work!

We were delighted to have a visit from Leonard the Lion and author Debbie Quinn.  Her book ‘Leonard’s Lunch’ has a health & wellbeing focus, encouraging children to make healthy food and lifestyle choices.

The children really enjoyed learning a dance with Leonard and the older children took part in a Q&A session with Debbie, asking excellent questions about the writing/publishing process and what she is going to write next. We can’t wait for Leonard’s next adventures!

Primary 4/5 November Update

This month has been a very busy time for Primary 4/5, with lots of great learning taking place. As a class we are successfully co-creating learning intentions and success criteria with Mrs Stevenson. We know that these are important to help us to understand what we are learning and why, as well as helping us to focus on how we can be successful and achieve our personal goals. This term we are lucky to be working with Mrs Meechan, who has been leading some of our learning in literacy. Miss Cairney, our teaching student has been with us on a Monday and is set to return in January for a block placement.

Cross Curricular Links

Our class, alongside P5, worked extremely hard to plan an exciting Remembrance Day fundraising event with all proceeds going to Poppy Scotland. They are a charitable organisation who provide support for current and former members of the Armed Forces, as well as their families.

During these preparations we learned about the work of Poppy Scotland and designed posters to advertise our event. We planned different stations for the whole school to enjoy, including an ICT station, face painting, cookie decorating, poppy sale and colouring-in. We raised a fantastic amount of money from this event and the total will be calculated soon.

This event encouraged us to look at timetabling, as we had to allocate time slots to each class in the school. We also had to think about the resources we had to buy and budget for the expenses. Each day, in the week prior to the event, we sold poppies and raffle tickets, taking turns to do this around the school. This event encouraged our class to be very responsible and recognise the difference we can make in our community.

In addition to this we had lots of fun learning about seasonal topics, including Guy Fawkes and Hallowe’en. As a class we created fun artwork and used these themes to enhance our learning in literacy and numeracy.

Literacy

We have worked very hard this month to improve our skills in listening & talking, reading, and writing.

Our reading programme continues to present us with excellent opportunities to improve in all areas of literacy. The majority of the class have really enjoyed reading ‘The Hundred-Mile-An-Hour dog’ by Jeremy Strong, with some children saying it was very funny and silly. This novel has allowed us to build confidence in using comprehension strategies, including visualisation, prior knowledge, main ideas, summarising, and comprehension. We also have regular fluency experiences with our peers and teacher.

Our Green group have been reading chapter books and have also been exploring some of the comprehension strategies. This is helping us to deepen our understanding of our texts and challenge ourselves to read a wide range of texts.

During Book Week Scotland we had the wonderful opportunity to select books to read to our friends in Primary 3/2. We loved choosing fun books we thought our friends would enjoy. As part of our reading programme we brought in our favourite books from home and talked to our class about the reasons why we enjoyed it. We have been making regular visits to the school library and have been excited to read the books we have selected for enjoyment. In the mornings we love to have uninterrupted silent reading time.

We continue to develop our skills in spelling by following our programmes. Our Green group are using magnetic boards/letters with the 5 finger approach; say the word, make/break the word, read the word and write the word. They are continuing to learn common words weekly and are using what they learn in their daily writing. Fantastic work, Green Group!

Our Red/Blue groups continue to follow the 4-week spelling programme and are learning all about the phoneme families. We have been learning to spell common words, using spelling strategies to help us to really look closely at words. We continue to try to use all this fantastic knowledge to improve our writing.

This month we have been using our novels/reading books, Newsround and class/whole school events and current topics to enhance our daily writing experiences. We have had opportunities to write creatively, including narratives and recounts, as well as a focus on the genre features of report writing. During all of these experiences we are keeping our core writing targets at the forefront of our minds and are trying really hard to include these in our writing.

Maths

This month we have continued to focus on measurement and have extended our learning to include measuring the area of a 2D shape. We learned all about cm/half cm squares, estimated, measured, and created different shapes. We are now able to convert measurements including cm/m.

We continue to improve our mental agility through regular problem solving and are building our confidence in selecting strategies to solve number problems. Each day we work on our daily 10, which is a range of 10 questions to help us solve challenges quickly.

Addition and subtraction have been our main focus this month, looking closely at ways to solve equations and learning about comparing numbers using symbols. We loved the alligator method, showing us how to compare greater than, less than and equal to.

In the coming months we will continue our number focus and increase our confidence in applying multiplication facts from 2/4/8, 3/6 times tables. Linking what we know to help us to solve division equations.

RME

Our Primary 4 children, who are receiving the sacrament of the Eucharist in May, were invited to attend an Enrolment mass. At this mass Father asked the children to attend with their families and present enrolment certificates. We all really enjoyed being part of this celebration of mass and are looking forward  to officially beginning our preparations for the Sacrament in the New Year.

To begin our first celebrations of the season of Advent, P4/5 have been preparing to lead our school and parish community in first Friday mass.  We have been preparing our responses during the mass, to ensure we are confident and able to take an active part with confidence. Some children have been preparing introductions to the mass, reading’s and bidding prayers, as well as our offertory procession.

HWB

As a whole class we have continued to improve our skills in team games and physical fitness by taking part in fitness challenges, we will continue these in the New Year. In the month of December, we will focus on our skills in dancing and learn traditional ceilidh dances including Gay Gordons and Dashing White Sergeants.

Primary 4

Primary 4 continue to learn about our emotions and how to build empathy, from our baby Esme during our Roots of Empathy programme with Mrs Le blond. Esme continues to be the best teacher, showing us how a baby develops in real time and encouraging us to consider the needs of a baby.

Primary 5

The swim/dry side programme was an enormous success for Primary 5 and all of the children achieved some level of success during the programme. Overall, the children have commented that their confidence levels in the pool have increased and it has been a brilliant achievement for them.

Our Primary 5 girls represented the school in the NL Cross-Country competition and really enjoyed this opportunity. Well done, girls!

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.