We are looking forward to welcoming back all the pupils of Holy Family Primary on Wednesday the 17th of August at 9:00am.

For our P1 intake, we will welcome all our new starts at 10:00am on the Wednesday where they will be collected at the gate and taken into their new class by their teacher, Mrs Stevenson.

P1 parents, you are most welcome to come, a maximum of two parents per child, at 2:15pm to collect your children from inside the school where you can take lots of First Day photographs of your child.

Primary 5/6 had another successful month of learning in May.

Numeracy

We worked extremely hard investigating different types of angles. We even learned how to measure and draw angles. We then moved onto learning about money. We learned to add, subtract, multiply and divide money. We used our prior knowledge of our taught strategies to do so. We also practised budgeting our money and exploring profit and loss.

Literacy

As always, we worked hard at applying our spelling strategies. We are all able to do this independently which is fantastic. We have been working our way through our reading novels (Wonder by RJ Palacio and The Demon Headmaster by Gillian Cross). We have explored and applied different reading strategies to help us understand our novels to a great extent. Furthermore, we have also worked hard in our writing lessons. We have focused on narrative, persuasive and discursive. Some of us have even became Star Writers and we are so proud of ourselves!

Topic

We were introduced to our new Enterprise topic when we came back from the Easter holidays. In groups, we have been planning for our Enterprise Day, 17^th of June, where we are selling products and services to raise money for Cancer Research UK. Some examples of the products and services we are selling are stickers, face painting and beat the goalie activities.

Science

We were also introduced to our new science topic, Human Biology. We have explored bacteria growing on teeth, the sense of taste, our heart and BPM as well as memory. We are enjoying the practical experiments and investigations that science offers us.

H&W

We are exploring kindness during our health and wellbeing lessons. Kindness is one of our school’s core values and it is also a core theme within the Primary 6’s reading novel, Wonder. We have explored what it means to be kind to our self and others, ways we can be kind and the impact kindness has on the world around us.

Keep up to date with our school’s Twitter feed to see pictures of all the wonderful learning.

Well…where to begin with all the learning and fun that the children have experienced over the last month.

Prior to updating I asked the boys and girls “so what have we been doing/learning this month” they couldn’t wait to tell me and share their achievements.

Lauren – we have been learning about time.

Amber – we have been going to Mass more and saying lots of Hail Mary’s.

Laraib – we have been learning about Venn Diagrams and Carroll Diagrams.

Ava – I have really enjoyed the PE this month and making my First Holy Communion.

Dzeisonas – I just always love Maths.

Caobhin – I have really liked doing Athletics in PE.

Lacey – I loved saying the Rosary, learning all about Mary in the Month of May and making my First Holy Communion.

Connie – I have learned lots about time and Data Handling.

Holly, Grace, Olivia and Emily – We loved reading Horrid Henry

Maths and Numeracy

The children have worked extremely hard this month and have demonstrated their developing knowledge and understanding in the four operations and fractions by applying this to other areas in Maths such as Time, Data Handling and Angles. They all very enjoyed the active aspects of these areas and surveyed everyone in the school to gather data on favourite foods, colours and animals. I have also been very impressed with how quickly the children are picking up angles and compass points and they were able to identify a variety of right angles in our classroom and can give directions using North, South, East West, clockwise, anti – clockwise. Ask them to tell you their little rhyme for remembering the order of the Compass Points. Going forward we will be working on Symmetry and consolidating our number knowledge before the end of term.

Literacy

The Green Group are continuing to use the six main reading strategies of prior knowledge, metalinguistics, visualisation, inference, main ideas and summarising to help them gain a deeper understanding of what they are reading. They have been reading The Best Dog in the World and are enjoying learning all about the relationship between Denzil and Elliot. The children were given a home reading record and I have asked them to ensure they are choosing a book to read at home and to record it in their diary.

The Red Group have enjoyed reading all about the antics of Horrid Henry. They have been reading in groups, in partners and individually and are learning to read for longer periods. They have looked at some comprehension strategies such as visualisation, metalinguistic and main ideas to help them gain a fuller understanding of what they are reading. They have demonstrated this in their written work and we are going to try to read another Horrid Henry book before summer.

The Children have been exploring their senses when writing poetry this month. They have discussed the use of their senses to help them when writing.

Religious Education

Throughout the month of May the children have participated in class and whole school decades of the Rosary in devotion to Our Lady. They have been to Mass and have been learning some beautiful hymns including Bring Flowers of the Rarest. The boys and girls in Primary 4 celebrated the Sacrament of the Eucharist on the 14^th May and did themselves proud with their full participation in the mass responses and hymns. Their hard work and preparation was clear to see and we are very proud of them. As a class we celebrated

OTHER CURRICULAR AREAS

We have been busy over the last few weeks, participating in Health Week and in PE we have been developing our skills in Athletics, running, sprinting, jumping and throwing and we can’t wait to showcase our skills at Sports Day.

Our class Enterprise topic that the children decided; was that, they wanted to raise money to help the people of Ukraine affected by War. We watched news coverage and discussed the cause of and impact of the conflict in Ukraine. The children have written prayers for peace and used oil pastels to create a piece of artwork that shows the sunflower and the thistle combining the two national symbols.

We collaborated with Primary 2/3 and decided we would plant sunflower seeds to sell; the proceeds will be donated to a charity dedicated to helping support the affected Ukrainian families. The children designed persuasive posters and advertising posters to promote this throughout the school.  So far they have raised a fantastic amount, keep your eyes on Twitter for the final amount raised.

Over the next few weeks, we will be looking at Sea Animals and exploring the habitats in the World’s Oceans.

Primary 4 Update.

We have had a busy month , which has gone by very quickly.

First Communion

Our biggest event was the First Communion for many of our students. It was a beautiful day for everyone. The teachers were very proud, and we are sure the families were too. This is the start of a life long journey of faith and we are very proud to have been part of it . We hope the children continue to have a close relationship with Jesus, through the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist.

Literacy

We have been very impressed with the amount of children who have created their own presentations and shared them with their friends. We have learned so much about the natural world from these young investigators! We have many future David Attenborourghs in our class!

We have been continuing with our spelling programmes, with weekly homework to support our work in class. We have many pupils who say that doing their homework regularly has made them much more confident. As part of our class work, we have been working on making our sentences more interesting through good vocabulary and punctuation.

We have all been reading novels this month. We have enjoyed talking about different characters, examining the vocabulary used in the novels and working out what the author is really telling us. We also enjoy talking about what we already know. This relates to the reading strategies that we will use in the future. Some groups have been working on writing summaries of the chapters we have read. It really helps us in class, if we bring our novel every day as we need it to do our written tasks.

We have been working on recounts as part of our writing work and working on extending our work and editing it , by ourselves or with a partner.

Numeracy and Maths

We have worked very hard on Multiplication and Division , which then helped us as we moved on to Fractions. Our teachers were delighted at how well we grasped how these are all connected. If we can multiply, we can also divide. This helped us to understand fractions, where we worked on halves, quarters, tenths, fifths and some children managed more tricky fractions. Some really smart children even mentioned percentages and understood how these worked.

We were even able to connect this to our work on data handling. Many children knew that 11 out of 22 children who chose chocolate as their favourite snack was the same as one half.

Health and Wellbeing

Our teachers have been so impressed with our levels of fitness during athletics lessons. We have been working on building our stamina and skills, with impressive results. We have also been working on co-operating with our team members and supporting everyone in our group. Our teachers have noticed that we are getting much better at that as the year goes on.  Well done everyone! Give yourself a pat on the back!

Topic

We did some work on natural disasters . We loved to see what can happen to our world, such as tsunamis and earthquakes. We really enjoyed making our own volcanoes with Miss McCulloch.

June

By the time you read this, we will have had a chance to have a party for our First Communion. We will be joined by our class-mates who supported us over the last few months with great patience. We want to thank them for that.

We have taken many photos which are over on Twitter.

Primary 2 have had a very exciting month. We have been working very hard and celebrated lots and lots of successes in May.

In maths we have been learning about multiplication and division. We began by making sets of items. We then learned about the multiplication sign and what it means. We are able to solve lots of multiplication problems now. We have also been sharing things equally when learning about division. Here are some of the fun activities that we have been doing to help us to be great learners.

In literacy, we are still working hard on all our sounds and common words. We have been doing lots of work with Mrs Simpson on writing sentences independently. We are getting so good at this. We have been reading lots more reading books and completing lots of activities based on our books. We must remember to read our books every night at home as this will help us lots in school. Some of primary 2 boys and girls have been very lucky and have a Reading Buddy from primary 5/6 who reads our books with us. We really appreciate the help that those kind children give to us.

In May we have been celebrating the Month of Mary. We learned about the Holy Rosary and said lots of prayers to Mary our mother. Primary 2 also lead the First Friday Mass at the beginning of May. We were such a great example to the other boys and girls in the school, and we made Father Brown and all the teachers very proud. Here are some of the children who read aloud and who participated in the offertory during our Mass.

We have been working hard on our Fairyland topic this month. We received a very important letter from Cinderella who had a very important task for us to do. She had lost one of her glass slippers and she asked us to design a new one for her. We all made beautiful creations.

Cinderella was so pleased that she sent some fun tasks for us to complete.

We also helped the sad troll from the Three Billy Goats Gruff story by writing a letter to the king to tell him that the billy goats had tricked him and that he is actually very kind. We made fantastic troll pictures to decorate our class.

Through the story of Little Red Riding Hood we have been learning about Stranger Danger within Health and Wellbeing. During this topic, we identified safer strangers and what we should do if a stranger approached us. We loved playing safer stranger bingo with Miss Goldie.

We have also been learning about our teeth and how to keep them healthy. Our favourite active learning this month has been our karate lesson during Health/Eco week. We learned lots of new skills whilst having lots of fun.

Primary 2 have also been learning about the Platinum Jubilee. We read a lovely book about the queen called There Once Is A Queen and discussed the upcoming celebrations. We researched lots of information about Queen Elizabeth II and we made our own bunting and silhouette collage pictures. Our class looks fit for a royal visit with all our new artwork.

Our favourite part of the month was the cinematic experience organised by Mrs Anderson and primary 7. We had a ball watching our favourite movies and eating lots of snacks. We want to say a huge thank you to primary 7 for our fun afternoon.

We are looking forward to our last month in primary 2 and the adventures we will experience in June. We can’t wait for lots more fun and learning. Please keep an eye on Twitter for regular updates from our class.

Please click this link for the latest newsletter:

April Newsletter (Word version)

April Newsletter (PDF version)

We will also be collecting batteries to potentially win the school £4000 to spend on our outdoor area! Please start collecting batteries. You can hand them in to school or into your local supermarket. Just let us know how many you’ve collected and we can add it to our total. More info here:

https://www.bigbatteryhunt.co.uk

March was a very busy month for Primary 2. We finished off term 2 with lots of great work and fun activities.

Maths

In Maths we continued to work on Addition. We used lots of concrete materials to help us to understand lots of different strategies for solving addition problems.

We also worked very hard on our topic about Fractions. We learned all about halves and quarters of shapes or amounts, and how to half/quarter numbers. Here are some of our superstars investigating which shapes can be quartered and which ones can’t.

When we studied Data Handling, we had lots of fun learning about bar graphs. We found out what everyone was having for lunch one day then made a huge bar graph on our class smartboard. At first we found Carroll diagrams difficult, but we quickly began to learn that they were easy!

Literacy

In Literacy we have been working through our programme of sounds and common words. We know that we should practise these lots at home to help us to get even better at reading and writing.  Here are some pictures of us practising our common words on a sunny March day.

We have been working hard on our independent writing again this month. Mrs Simpson can’t believe how neat our handwriting is! We have also been trying really hard to give things a go when we write our stories and recounts. If we are stuck on how to spell a word, we don’t let the word beat us – we try to think of all our strategies for spelling words that we have already learned. Here are some of our March Star Writers.

R.E.

March was a very special time in Holy Family Primary. At the beginning of the month we had Ash Wednesday which led us into Lent. During Lent we tried very hard to stick to the Lenten promises which we made. We also participated in lots of fun activities in order to raise money for Lenten charities. Here are some photos of all the fun things we did during Lent.

We also spent lots of time thinking about the Easter story. We felt very sad for Jesus that he had to face lots of pain and suffering. We thought of ways that we could be kind at Easter too.

This month we had Science Week. The focus for Science Week 2022 was Growth. We did lots of exciting activities based on growth during our week. Some of our favourite activities were going on a scavenger hunt, growing rainbows, growing cress and learning about the life cycle of a frog. Here are some pictures of our Science Week activities.

At the beginning of March we celebrated World Book Day. We came to school dressed as our favourite book characters or wearing dress down or pyjamas.  That day we did lots of book related tasks. We even went on a trip to visit our school library. Our favourite part of the day was when we had our Booknic in the afternoon with our friends from P1, P2, P3 and P4.

We had so much fun in our last month of Term 2. We can’t wait to start Term 3 and do more exciting learning! Please keep checking Twitter for regular updates from Primary 2.

Welcome back everyone and I hope you all had a happy and restful holiday break.

Maths and Numeracy

During the month of March pupils have been learning all about Fractions. They have worked hard throughout the month and can name the numerator and denominator, can name equivalent fractions and calculate the fraction of quantity. The children participated in lots of practical activities to deepen their understanding in this area. They are then going to take this knowledge forward and apply it to Telling the Time. As always, mental maths skills are a focus throughout the year and we encourage children to access Sumdog as often as possible and continue to practise the 2,3,4,5 and 10 Times Tables.

Literacy

The Green Group have been developing their comprehension skills using the story of The Twelfth Floor Kids. Children have been applying the six main reading strategies of prior knowledge, metalinguistics, visualisation, inference, main ideas and summarising. Going forward children will continue to apply these skills to help make sense of increasingly complex themes and narratives. It is important that children spend time not only reading the texts but exploring and discussing the language and tools used by the author to enhance the reading experience.

The Red Group are making good progress and are enjoying the range of novels that they are reading. In Term 3, we are going to look at longer novels and continue to work on answering in more detail and full sentences.

Children have been working on the genre of explanation writing this month; they have been learning about extreme weather forces and have been researching and reading about a variety of extreme weather forces. Children were able to demonstrate their learning in this area by completing an independent piece of writing about a topic of their choice. Children have also prepared a presentation to deliver to the rest of the class with a focus on timing, presentation, volume, eye contact and information. We have really enjoyed listening to these.

Religious Education

The children who are making the Sacrament of Reconciliation and Communion attended and participated in a retreat in the Church Hall. This was a very special and reflective time for the children to come together to appreciate and consider the importance and relevance of this Sacrament in their lives. We have also been spending time with Mrs Celino and Mrs Le Blond during Lent learning all about the Stations of the Cross.

OTHER CURRICULAR AREAS

We have come to the end of our topic on Natural Disasters and the children have very much impressed me with their enthusiasm and ability to retain so much of the information that we have gathered.

During Science Week, we completed a number of fun experiments using a variety of materials and substances.

On World Book Day we dressed up as our favourite characters and had a wonderful ‘Booknic’ in the hall where we shared our favourite stories and books.

We sadly said goodbye to Miss Bradley who has been working with us over the last month. Miss Bradley was a great help to us and she helped us make healthy fruit smoothies, taught us all about inference and even taught us some sign language. We will miss her very much and wish her well with the rest of her studies.

Going forward we look forward to celebrating the Sacrament of Reconciliation on Tuesday 26^th April and the Sacrament of Communion on the 14^th May. We are also looking forward to deciding on our topic focus for the final Term, which will involve lots of fun, and Outdoor Learning.

It was lovely to get the chance to speak with you all on Parents Evening and I want to thank you once again for your continued support. Please do not hesitate to contact me should you need to discuss anything.

P2/3 March Learning Update

As we prepared to get ready for our Easter break after a very hard working term it was lovely to take time to reflect on all of the learning experiences that have taken place in P2/3 over the month of March.

We have worked hard to ensure that we are developing the whole child by broadening our children’s experiences within and outwith our school.  We have worked together with children at all stages through our Eco activities, taking part in our whole school Lenten Fundraisers as well as showing love for our community by litter picking in out local area.

Here are some photos of some of the fun learning times we have had in March and look forward to having lots more learning and fun in the remaining months to come.

We began the month by participating in World Book Day!  We had great fun coming to school dressed as our favourite characters, we read and heard lots of stories throughout the day and finished it all off with a fantastic picnic in the hall.

During Science Week we had the most amazing time exploring the world around us!  We undertook an experiment over time where we were tasked to chose and plant vegetables and flowers and record the growing process over 2 weeks.  We were allowed to take them home at Easter and we have been encouraged to send pictures of our plants via Twitter.  We also explored rainbows by growing them in 2 different ways.  We loved watching our paper rainbow grow but our favourite was making a Skittles rainbow as the teacher gave us the extra Skittles to eat as a treat!

As part of our commitment to looking after the health of our planet and wildlife, we were asked to take part in a big community litter pick.  We collected the equipment to do this safely then worked in teams to tidy up our environment.  We concentrated on the football pitches and park across from our school as it was covered in harmful litter.  They looked so much better when we had finished!

Some of our friends in P3 have been preparing to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation on April the 26th in Holy Family Church.  As part of our preparations, we took part in a teacher-led Reconciliation Retreat in the hall at Holy Family Church Hall where we focussed on what this special sacrament means to us.  We listened to the story of Zacchaeus and acted it out together with costumes which brought the story to life for us.  Please keep us in your prayers.

And finally, we said a very tearful farewell to our visiting student teacher, Mr McCrae!  We had so much fun getting to know him during his time in our class and look forward to him coming to visit us soon.   We wish him all the very best in his future studies.