November has been a busy month for Primary 4.

We started with All Saints Day and All Souls Day. We have been very conscientious in talking about people we love who are no longer with us. We also did work on saints, including St Margaret of Scotland. We learned a bit about her life and the kind deeds that she did as queen. We finished the month by preparing for our First Friday Mass.  We also started to learn about Advent at the end of November and learned more about the Liturgical calendar. Whilst over at church, we took the chance to look around at the statues, especially of Mother Theresa and Pope John Paul, who are now both saints.

We are very proud of our new Mini Vinnies, who have already been working on plans to help the poor and help out at Mass. Some have already helped at Sunday Mass and the parish were delighted with their help.

We prepared for St Andrew’s Day by learning Ally Bally Bee, which we sang beautifully. We have also been learning a dance for the Reindeer Rave to support St Andrew’s Hospice.

For the Christmas Fayre, we enjoyed making marshmallow snowmen and decorating biscuits.

We also have a guest in our class. Ralph, the elf is offering us advice on  staying on Santa’s Good List. Here is his advice-

• Listen well to our teachers and the adults at home
• Help around the class and at home
• Be kind to our friends and siblings.

Look out for a letter from Ralph as he visits each child’s desk.

We have made some lovely Christmas artwork to decorate our school. We made Christmas trees which are now in the hall and step by step Reindeers which will go up soon.

We are continuing to have baby Lily visit us for Roots of Empathy. Mrs Le Blond and Mrs Anderson are already impressed at how gentle we are to little Lily! We have been learning about different themes, including crying and how a baby communicates with us. We had some super responses to this topic.

It’s hard to believe that we have had any time left to do Literacy and Numeracy but we continue to work hard to make good progress in these areas. We continue with Addition and Times Tables. We have been working on Number Pattern and Time In Reading, we continue to develop the confidence to use strategies such as Prior Knowledge and Inference to support our learning. We are concentrating on always answering in clear sentences. We continue to follow the NLC programme for Spelling. We have our phonemes, common words or spelling rules placed around the class so that we have plenty opportunities to see our lists. We have been working on Instructional Writing with Mr Hamill.

This a good time to remind all adults that we have weekly homework which is very easy to find on the school website. The children completing it regularly are gaining an advantage in their learning and their confidence.

Finally, we have recently introduced a job chart and we have all had a chance to choose a job to help our class stay organised. We are the biggest class in the school and we continue to work on taking care of resources that we all share. With this in mind, can the adults at home please ensure we return all resources to school, like reading books, pencils or rubbers accidentally taken home. Can you also label children’s personal things such as jumpers in order to find them more easily.

Primary 5 have been extremely busy in all areas of the curriculum this month, enhancing existing and developing some new skills.

RE

We started the month by leading the school at First Friday mass where we prayed for all the Holy Souls, during the month of November we remembered in our thoughts and prayers all our loved ones who had died.

IDL

Primary 5 this month planned and delivered a highly successful Enterprise Project which saw the budding entrepreneurs in our class plan and deliver ‘Poppy Day’. Each year in Holy Family the primary 5’s are responsible for arranging a whole day of activities to celebrate and remember everyone who has died during conflict. This year Primary 5 decided that they wanted to think about the ‘Poppy for Peace’, very poignant considering what is happening in the world around us. The children very much enjoyed learning all about the different colours of poppies and what they represent. The children worked together in teams to create a variety of fun filled activities to suit all children from Primary 1 to Primary 7, they created a timetable for the whole school – giving each class a designated slot to participate . They used their skills and talents to make bracelets, iced, cookies, hand and face painting and created a photobooth with a green screen which the classes all used to dress up. In the afternoon a panel of judges chose the best dancers from each class during our ‘Danceathon’.

The children have now come to the end of their Swim and Gym sessions in Sir Matt Busby, each child has made excellent progress and very much enjoyed learning this vital, life saving skill.

Maths and Literacy

We continue to work our way through the NLC Active Literacy programme focussing on spelling strategies and rules, our writing genre has been narrative and we have completed some excellent stories with interesting characters and settings, we will be looking at persuasive and instructional writing in the lead up to Christmas.

We have been learning to add and subtract decimals, and to multiply by 10 and 100. We are multiplying by 2 digit numbers. We continue to focus on mental maths skills and have been learning a variety of subtraction and multiplication strategies to explain our thinking.

Primary 5 have been working hard to learn their Scottish Song ‘Wellerman’ they performed this to the school on St Andrews day and did a fantastic job of learning the lyrics – well done to everyone.

We have a busy and fun filled lead up to the Christmas holidays so please continue to check school website for any updates.

Thank you

Mrs Preston and Primary 5.

Primary 2 have had a very busy month.

In Literacy we have been learning more new sounds. We love to use our new sounds to create words using our magnetic boards. We have also been working lots on sentence writing using our common words and words that contain our focus sound.

This month we learned about writing recounts. We wrote a fantastic recount of our trip to see the ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ pantomime. We have also been trying hard to write more independently and to check our writing to make sure that it makes sense.

We have been continuing with our reading, making sure that we use good expression  and fluency. We must remember to read our reading books every night at home and to practise our common words and sounds so that we can continue to develop our reading skills.

In Maths we have been continuing to focus on numbers to 100. We have been estimating numbers using a blank number line and we have been rounding to the nearest 10. We have also been learning about Area within our topic on Measure. We have begun our topic on Addition and have been revising our number bonds to 10 to prepare us for adding to 20.

As it was November, we spent time this month learning about the month of the holy souls. We thought about those who have died and we remembered them in our prayers. We also paid tribute to those who had lost their lives in war on Remembrance Day. We made beautiful poppy pictures to decorate our classroom door and we observed a minute silence to show respect. P5 also organised a fun filled day to raise money for people affected by war. We had lots of fun and lots of money was raised for a good cause. Thank you to everyone who made a kind donation. This month we also produced beautiful pictures for the ‘Keep Christ in Christmas’ art competition. Hopefully we will have a winner in our class.

This month we have been really busy with practising for our Nativity show ‘It’s a Baby’, which we will perform on Tuesday 5^th and Wednesday 6^th December. We are so excited to be the narrators. We have been working hard on learning our lines and songs. You will love the show!

We celebrated St. Andrew’s Day with a fun school assembly this week. Each class learned and performed a Scottish song. Primary 2 learned the song ‘Three Craws’. Mrs Simpson said she was so proud of us. We also learned all about St. Andrew, made a St. Andrew stained glass window picture, listened to Scottish stories and tasted some delicious shortbread.

Next month we are looking forward to lots of new learning, our Nativity show and Christmas party. Please keep checking Twitter for photos of our adventures.

Well, November proved to be an amazingly busy month full of exciting learning experiences as well as lots of fun events including Guy Fawkes Night and St Andrew’s Day!

We have had the pleasure of having a student teacher, Miss Mooney with us this month and she has enjoyed herself so much that she will be returning in March for 5 weeks. Thank you for all of your hard work in class and we look forward to welcoming you back in the new year.

We have spent most of the month rehearsing for our upcoming Nativity play which will take place next week, 4th, 5th and 6th of December.  The children are singing beautifully and have learned all of the words to their songs and hymns and we look forward to seeing you all there next week!

In literacy, we are continuing with our reading, making sure that we use good expression  and fluency. We are learning to break down words that are unfamiliar or difficult using our knowledge of phonemes and sounds taught. I would be grateful if you could try and practise their sounds an reading with them.

We have covered some new concepts  in maths including addition of TU using the mental maths strategies learned in Number Talks.  We practised adding the tens together first then adding the units together and finally adding both answers together. I will post examples of this on next week’s homework for you to try with your child.  In the meantime, could I please ask that you begin introducing telling the time to your child in preparation for learning this key life skill.  We will start this next term but it can be very tricky for some children and will require additional support from home in order that they learn to confidently tell the time.

We spent lots of time combining our learning about the Holy Souls in Heaven with our celebration of Poppy Day in early November.   Many of our families lost loved ones in the many wars and troubles fought and we remembered their sacrifice by having a day of fundraising which helps support people in need following their sacrifice for peace. Thank you to everyone who sent in their money on this day, your donation was very gratefully received especially at this time of the year when families are busy preparing for Christmas.

Click the link below to view our diary for the week ahead.

HF Diary 20112023

Click on the link below to view our diary for the week.

HF Diary 13112023

Click on the link  below to view our latest Newsletter.

Newsletter Nov Dec 2023

Click on the link below to view our diary for this week.

HF Diary 06112023

Click on the link below to view our diary for this week.

HF Diary 30102023

Outdoor Education Programme Brochure A5 PARENT DIGITAL