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.
