Welcome to our update for August! Primary six pupils are settling in nicely to their new classroom. They have been taking on responsibilities in the classroom and setting a terrific example for our younger pupils. Going into a new class can be exciting and a little scary. We are all just getting to know each other, which can take time. In Primary 6 we have been creating our classroom charter, discussing our rights and responsibilities and creating a display with all of these to refer to throughout the school year.

We have been learning place value in class and putting a lot of effort into memorising and practising our times tables through our mental agility games and activities.

We have just started reading our class novel Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo and we will be learning all about the Reading Strategies covered in Primary 6 through this novel. We have currently been carrying out prior knowledge and creating some predictions about what we think will happen within the book and will come back to these later at the end of our novel.

The class is really delighted about our new topic, The Titanic, and they are ready to learn more about what happened and why The Titanic is so significant.

Homework will be handed out weekly on a Monday and should be brought back in on a Friday. Reminder of PE days, both Wednesday and Thursday afternoon. Children should come to school in full uniform and get changed for PE.

Have a great week everyone!

Firstly, welcome back to Holy Family Primary School. We hope you have all had a relaxing break and it is lovely to see all your faces once again. Primary 7/6 have had a great time settling back into school routines and seeing all their friends.  Despite being a short month, it has been an exciting time for Primary 7/6!

We have met our Primary One buddies and have engaged in buddy plays which has helped develop relationships as well as settle the Primary Ones into school. Primary Six have also been a great help with the Primary One buddies and will make fantastic buddies next year.

We have started our classroom economy which involves getting paid to do weekly jobs. We can purchase items with the money that we make, such as buying engaging activities in the classroom. These jobs that we are performing each week are giving us responsibility and independence within the classroom and around school.

Furthermore, we have been preparing for our First Friday Mass that we are hosting on Friday, 1^st of September.

We have also settled into our literacy tasks such as applying our spelling strategies and being introduced to our new novel, The Night Bus Hero by Onjali Q. Rauf. We are excited to explore our reading strategies to help develop our understanding of this novel.

We have also started place value in numeracy and are excited for trying our best in maths this year.

Finally, we have decided on our first topic which will be The Titanic. We are looking forward to exploring this inter-disciplinary topic and the interesting lessons we will be covering such as exploring buoyancy, engineering, and others.

Please note it is an important year for Primary 7/6 in their academic journey. It is imperative that reading homework, especially, gets completed each week so pupils can perform their read to write tasks in class. Thank you 🙂

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!

HF Diary Week Beginning 19th June 23

Click on the link below for what’s on at Holy Family this week.

HF Diary 19062023

Apologies for the confusion earlier with this weeks diary. The link below contains the correct information.

Mrs Harley

HF Diary 12062023

This month has been very busy for primary 7 as we have taken part in a wide range of activities.

During numeracy we have been exploring chance and uncertainty as well as some algebra and revising our time skills. The children have worked hard to consolidate their basic number knowledge and strategies in preparation for high school in August. Consistent practice of these skills, especially telling the time at home, will continue to assist them in progressing their learning and help them to feel more confident using these life skills everyday.

During literacy we have created some amazing imaginative stories during our writing lessons. The pupils have such wonderful ideas and imaginations which is clear through their writing. We have been taking time to use our ICT skills to create power points and word documents in relation to our Venice topic and linking to our novel ‘The Thief Lord’. I was very impressed with the efforts all pupils gave during their Venice projects and solo talks.

During health and wellbeing, we have enjoyed continued sessions from the Scottish rugby and focused on our team building skills during PE. We have also completed activities and discussions surrounding personal hygiene, friendships, influences and a growth mindset which all pupils have participated in well.

We were very lucky to spend four days at Strathclyde Park at the end of May, taking part in a variety of activities and sports which was a huge success. The pupils attended every day and absolutely loved each and every new sport and skill they learned. I am so proud of their excellent display of behaviour and teamwork across our trip.

During RE lessons this month we have focused on Mary our Mother and learned all about her life, her names and her values. The children have also learned the Angelus prayer and we have made an effort to practice this as often as we can at 12pm each day. Pupils have also taken care dressing our May altar with flowers this month too!

As we enter our final month of primary school, the pupils are making the most of their time left at Holy Family. Their hard work is paying off and I am looking forward to making these next few weeks special for them with lots of exciting activities. Well done Primary 7B!

May has been a very special month in primary 4 as we had our First Communion for many of our pupils. After months of learning all about the Sacrament and weeks in church preparing, we made our whole school community extremely proud. It was lovely for us in Holy Family school to share in this special day and we hope that you can all now share this with your church community.

In Literacy , we have been continuing with our  spelling work as usual. We will keep doing spelling homework for a few more weeks, but look out for it in our diaries, rather than on the website. Mrs Gilfedder has been very pleased with the Friday tests, which show how hard we have been learning for the rest of the week. We have been  writing instructions, for example. reporting on our Mummification experiment. We have been doing some reading comprehension work altogether, as we have had a lot of disruptions due to school show and testing. We will finish our novels in June.

We have had an exciting month so are now getting back into good routines of listening well in class and answering out without shouting out.  We have been revising many aspects of grammar, such as punctuation, adjectives and adverbs.

Numeracy

After successful work on Division, we have returned to Subtraction. This has been the most tricky out of Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division so extra practise will help us all before we move on to primary 5 work.  A few strategies that have worked well for us are

• Using a number line to count back or forward
• Taking away 10’s first, then units
• Laying the sum out as a chimney sum.

We have been working on Money with Mrs Gilfedder. We have been working on recognising coins and notes up to £20. We have also been working how how much things cost and giving proper change.

Health and Well being

We are coming to the end of Roots of Empathy. We have a better understanding of how babies communicate and this has helped us to think about how we communicate with each other. We have also discussed safety for babies and children aged 8 and 9.

We have been continuing with Athletics, so that we are ready for Sports Day.

Spanish

We are delighted to be doing Spanish with Mrs Gilfedder and we have shown real enthusiasm for it. We are working on creating a learning wall to support our work.

The Egyptians

We are continuing to learn about the Egyptians. Some of us have begun making canopic jars  which were found in the tombs. We have been doing art of death masks and  Egyptian jewellery. We enjoyed our Mummification experiment using fruit!

And finally, many of us have been sharing our talents in the school show! What an amazing experience for a primary 4 pupil. We wish them all luck on the night!

In numeracy, we have explored identifying and measuring angles during active maths lessons. We then moved onto exploring coordinates and directions. We participated in a fun task where we had to provide coordinates around the school in a partner activity. As we completed our angles and coordinates work, we have moved onto data handling where last week we created our own surveys and gathered in information using tally marks. As we continue our data handling topic, we are looking forward to exploring the different ways to display this information gathered such as creating our own bar graphs. As always, we are continuously mastering our times tables as this will put us in good stead when exploring multiplication and division in Primary 6.

In literacy, we are working our way through our novels, The Santa Maria by Kenneth Stevenson and The Last Wolf by Michael Morpurgo. We are continuing with applying our reading comprehension strategies to better understand our novels. It is imperative that the pupils read any assigned chapters or pages for homework to be able to complete the read to write tasks in class. Furthermore, we are confident at applying our spelling strategies independently.

We have been exploring Oceans and Continents in our topic time. In May we have explored the continent of Australasia. Here, we investigated traditional Australian music and created our very own didgeridoos. We also prepared our own quiz and tested our Australasian general knowledge on our classmates. We have now moved onto Asia and we are excited to investigate what this wonderful continent has got to offer.

We have been extremely lucky to have a series of lessons with the Scottish Rugby Union who sent a coach to teach us how to play rugby.  We learned how to throw a rugby ball by spinning it to our team mates and also learned how to score a try. Grant left us treats and a quiz to complete now that the session is over.  Some pupils were extremely competent at this sport and thus Grant provided information on how to join local rugby teams in the area.

We are almost at the end of our block of swimming and dry sports at the Sir Matt Busby Centre. This time has been a fantastic opportunity for the pupils to learn basic swimming skills as well as others developing their already existing skills. It has also been a great opportunity for the pupils to gain independence and maturity by walking to and from the centre sensibly as well as following important instructions set out by the swimming coaches.

We are also almost at the end of our preparation for our school show, Peter Pan. The pupils who have been involved have attended every practise with a determination to succeed and should all be extremely proud of their effort. We are excited to show off our performance this week at St. Gerard’s Primary School!

Literacy – The children have continued to work through our reading programme which challenges them with longer, trickier texts that demand more focus and application of reading and comprehension strategies. Please ensure that your child is given the opportunity to read their book aloud each night as this really helps with their fluency and discussing what happened will help them to develop greater understanding.

In class, in addition to reading our book we have been working on a media study using the film ‘Zootopia’ which was inspired by the pupils. We had been learning the song ‘Try everything’ as part of our Health and Wellbeing focus where we had discussed being resilient, and not giving up when we found something tricky or hard. We learned that we all make mistakes and how we can use these experiences to help us as we learn. We then watched the film and discussed the characters, the settings, the plot, the themes, and key messages from the film. The children were really engaged and enjoyed learning through exploring, discussing, answering questions and drawing inferences from the film.

At home children can use these skills to discuss what they are watching, reading, is it fiction or nonfiction, why do they find it enjoyable, what is the purpose, aim, or message in story/film/clip/cartoon? This all helps the children to become more engaged in their activities and start to use critical thinking skills.

Numeracy and Maths – We have been busy learning all about Fractions and Time this month. The children have been learning about the numerator and denominator and can use the correct notation. They have a good understanding that a fraction is an equal part of a whole and really enjoyed participating in lots of games whilst learning. We are currently learning about time and can tell o’clock, half past, quarter past and some can even tell quarter to. Our recent work on Fractions really helps us with this. We loved getting to do our math’s outdoors, working in groups or pairs, playing lots of time related games.

IDL – Oceans and Continents – We have really enjoyed this topic so far as it has allowed for lots of independent learning and individual choice. Having learned a little bit about each Continent we have chosen a few that we want to learn more about. We have been investigating the different cultures such as music, food, and animals. We have used our ICT skills to research the Continents and have all created a PowerPoint on Glow which we will share with the class over the next few weeks. When exploring Africa, we used musical instruments to make different sounds and rhythms which would match our dance that we had learned, we also drew some African animals and used oil pastels to create an African safari themed backdrop. These look amazing and are proudly displayed in the class for everyone to see. This week we have been learning all about Australasia, and looked at Australia and all the islands that make up the continent. We can name some – why don’t you ask us? We also made Didgeridoo’s and are going to create our own sounds using these. We can’t wait to find out which Continent we are going to look at each week and are going to end our topic with a food tasting session, trying a variety of foods from all the Continents.

RE – Our focus for May is ‘The Month of Mary’ and we have decorated our altar in class to reflect this, one pupil brought in a lovely bunch of flowers and others have contributed flowers and beautiful drawings and prayers for Mary. We also did a great job learning a new hymn to sing to Mary ‘Bring Flowers of the Rarest’.  With Mrs Gilfedder we are learning about Islam and love learning about other religions.

Homework – As we approach the end of the term there will be no homework given out in diaries to be returned each week. I will give the children their diaries this week to be kept at home so that the children can access their GLOW logins. The children will be given another personal project to work on for the next 3 weeks, details will be discussed and decided with children this week. Most of the children have now completed their spelling programme and the next few weeks will be targeted revision and consolidation of phonemes and common words. Children should continue to practise these and to read the book that they are given home each night. They should continue to practise counting forwards and backwards in 2s, 3s, 5s and 10s, and learning the 2,3,5,10 x tables.

Children could use this time to develop other skills such as learning to tie their shoelaces, school tie, shirt buttons. This will all help them to become more independent in preparation for next session.   Thank you.