P5/6 March Update

March was another busy and productive month for Primary 5/6.

Numeracy

We have been working extremely hard learning all about decimal numbers. We have been learning to add, subtract, multiply and divide decimal numbers. We have used our prior knowledge of our addition, subtraction, multiplication and division skills to do so. We have then moved onto measurement, and we were introduced to converting units of measurements. We will continue with measurement after the Easter holidays.

Literacy

We have continued to apply our spelling strategies to help us learn our spelling words each week. We took advantage of the great weather one day and created our spelling words on the ground using chalk. We have continued with our novels, applying our reading strategies to gain a greater understanding of the plot, characters, and setting. Once we completed our literacy novels, we explored various non-fiction texts. We have been working extremely hard in our writing lessons, focusing on narrative, information reports and recounts. We have been able to link our topic and science lessons into our writing such as writing excellent recounts from science investigations.

Topic

In topic, we explored lots more interesting things about the Romans. We learned the  different ways the Romans travelled throughout the Empire such as boats and ships. Once we investigated the various forms of travel and transport, we used this information to write an information report. We have also looked at other ways that the Romans were skilled engineers such as exploring Roman aqueducts. We even worked in groups to build our very own aqueduct. This task required teamwork, collaboration and problem solving.

Science

We have had lots of fun during science exploring our space topic of the solar system. We explored Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and re-created this storm in a jar. We also enjoyed exploring the different star constellations by creating homemade telescopes to look at the constellations. Our final aspect of our science topic looked at the windiest planet in the solar system, Neptune. We investigated wind by predicting if objects would blow by the force of wind.

RE

We have been exploring the Easter story during March. We have explored the story of The Last Supper and Stations of the Cross.

Keep up to date with the school’s twitter page to see even more photos of all our fantastic learning.

As we are over half way through P4, we are developing many skills and working on our talents. A lot of what we are learning will support our work in P5 and beyond, so this is a very important year for us.

Literacy

Spelling and Reading

The more we read for pleasure, the more we realise that it can support our spelling. Recent Common Words Assessments have shown that reading for pleasure and working on our school resources, makes a real difference in our confidence in spelling Common Words.

We continue to work through our Spelling programmes, which concentrate on building our Phoneme Knowledge and Common Words/Spelling Rules. Our teachers encourage us to focus on Phonemes during our homework tasks as this can make a huge difference for us. Our teachers are very proud of the people who work hard at their homework as they are making good improvements.

We have been doing some more Non-Fiction reading, which has been very popular in class. One group were reading The Search For Tutanknamen, which ignited so much interest in the Egyptians that we took a few weeks to do some research. As Covid rules are relaxing, we have had great fun sharing resources to learn more about the boy king. Mrs Daisley was delighted at the partner work that we did. This will help us in P5 and beyond.

Some of us have done personal presentations to share with our class mates. We have shown good respect in listening and responding to these presentations.

As Mrs Cooney was off, Mrs Daisley decided to do some Writing. She was very impressed to see that we can plan our Writing and many of us are also working on editing our finished work. She really struggled to pick Star Writers as we were really working hard!

Numeracy

Although we spent a long time on Subtraction, it was  time well spent as we will build on our knowledge in P5 and beyond.

We then moved on to Money. Some of us were working on Money up to £2 and the others were working on Money up to £20. It was obvious to our teachers that some of us have real life experience using coins and notes in shops. Hopefully everyone else can get more experience now that Covid rules are relaxing. Pocket money is a great way for children our age to learn  more.

We are moving on to Multiplication, which should be supported by the regular work that we have been doing throughout the year.

Health and Wellness Being

As the year goes on, our teachers are proud at how we have been sorting issues relating to football. This is the first year that we have been able to take part in the yard and it was a bit tricky at the start. It’s ok if we still have issues but we should remember to discuss them calmly with a friend or grown up.

We will continue to work on our friendships so that they grow stronger. Some friendships change and new ones can develop as our hobbies and interests change. We keep working on having empathy for other people so that we can see things through their eyes. This is tricky at our age so we will keep working on it throughout primary school.

We continue to work on good manners. Our teachers love to hear good manners and so do other members of staff. We bet that our families do too.

We have enjoyed using the gymnastic equipment to improve our skills. We are learning how our body works and how we can control our movements, like travelling on a gymnastic horse. We have been learning what parts of our bodies we use on the ropes and when hanging from the bars. We also work together as a team to sort out the equipment, as it was a lot of setting up.

RE

We had a visitor during Lent. It was the Easter Bunny and he visited each of us with a treat and a little card with our special talents on it. We were very excited each day to find out where he was.

The First Communion children went on a retreat and had a lovely day out of school. We got a chance to do some Meditation and art activities. We also managed to do a modern day Last Supper.

\We learnt a lot about Lent and made a Lenten tree where we put Easter decoration with friendly advice on them. Each day we would pick one with a message like

• Share with your friends
• Use kind words
• Don’t leave people out of games.

Topic

We did some more Space work with Miss McCullock, who will return nest term. She started work on Natural Disasters and will continue with that after the holiday.

We have lots of photos over on Twitter showing what we have been up to.

The month of March has been a very busy one for Primary 1. We have been working very hard but also having lots of opportunities for fun!

We started the month with World Book Day. On this day we dressed up as our favourite book characters or in our pyjamas. We brought our favourite books in to share with our friends and talked about why we liked them. We made bookmarks and read books with our buddies. The highlight of our day was the ‘booknic’ that we had in the hall. We took our blankets and relaxed with our friends from other classes, read books and heard a story being read aloud. What a fantastic day we had!

We have been learning more about how to write our own stories. We are able to use a plan to choose a When, Where, Who and What for our own imaginative stories and are creating fantastic characters! We are working very hard to include our core targets when we are writing independently. We must remember to include capital letters, finger spaces, full stops and write all of our words on the jotter lines. Keep working so hard Primary 1!

In spelling we have been learning our phoneme sounds and we can read and write words that have sh, ch, th and ng in them. Great job! We must continue to learn all of our common words at home so that we can read, write and spell them when we are making our sentences. Our teachers are so pleased with our hard work and can see that some children are reading books at home and doing lots of extra homework. Fantastic!

Primary 1 are really enjoying our number work this month because we are completing chilli challenges using adding and subtracting. We are becoming so confident when asked to complete our challenges and we do not give up if we find something tricky. We are learning to count in 2’s, 5’s and 10’s. We now know odd and even numbers and are able to sequence numbers from highest to lowest/lowest to highest. Ask us to try to count to 100 – some of us can even do that! We like to count to 100 together, during circle time, so that we can listen for the big numbers before and after.

We have enjoyed learning about volume and shape this month. After our holiday we are going to be focusing on Time and this is something that we are excited and to learn more about. If you have a watch at home maybe you could even wear it to school to help you learn more about time.

In RME we have been learning about Lent and have taken part in lots of different Lenten activities. We know that during lent we focus on almsgiving, prayer and fasting. We made Lenten promises and have tried really hard to stick to them. With the rest of the school we have raised important funds for charity and had fun while we are doing so. We came to school with crazy hair/ mad scientist, a p7 funday and cake and candy. We can talk about the Easter Story and have been learning about why Easter is so important to us. We are looking forward to our Easter Eggs on Easter Sunday!

It really has been a very fun month for us. Here are some photographs of the highlights. We really enjoyed Science and Eco Week, making empire biscuits and pancakes with our buddies.

We are looking forward to our Easter holiday and spending time with our families. See you in April!

The next Parent Council meeting will take place on Tuesday 8th March at 6.30 pm. This will take place online using the Webex platform from the comfort of your own home. Please make every effort to join this meeting and help support our school. If you haven’t joined a Parent Council meeting before please feel free to join and listen and find out a little more about the role of our Parent Council.

The link for the meeting is

https://meet166.webex.com/meet166/j.php?MTID=mda6ed5b19935e93945c7635dd5a0592a

Once again, it has been a very busy month with lots of opportunities to learn along the way!  We have been joined again each Tuesday and Wednesday morning by our S6 volunteer Lucy, the children have loved seeing her again and working with her.  We are also being joined for the rest of the month of March by Mr McCrae who is our student teacher who has enjoyed meeting all the children over the past 4 Thursdays.  We know he will enjoy his time in P2/3!

We have taken lots of interest in the world around us and began the month learning all about the Winter Olympic Games.  We found out where Beijing was in relation to where we are in Mossend  by looking at a map of the world.  We also talked about all of the places that we have visited on holiday and learned about North, South, East and West.

Each group focussed on a different sport, looked at any equipment the sport used, designed a new outfit and even explored each sport through drama!

ICT

We are still working on learning our username and password for our Sumdog accounts and logging on independently so that we can make full use of all of the fun learning activities available.  We should continue to practise this at home so that we can log on quickly and can spend more time learning new skills.

February also saw us focus on Internet safety.  We took the opportunity to discuss ways that we can keep ourselves safe when working or playing games online.  We produced posters highlighting advice such as not sharing our personal details, not meeting anyone that you talk to and making sure that your mum or dad know who you are talking to online.

RME

Some of our Primary 3 children are preparing to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation on April the 26th.  We are completing our Workbook in class and doing the follow up tasks at home with our parents.  Please keep our children in your prayers during this time.

LITERACY

In reading, we have been focussing on fluency and expression which is helping us to make sure that when reading, our audience can understand the meaning of the story.  We have been making good use of our increasing knowledge and understanding of phonemes to help us de-code tricky or unfamiliar words.  We are reinforcing this knowledge through our daily writing tasks and homework tasks.

As always, we are still focussing on our handwriting and taking our time to make sure that our letters are formed properly as this improves the presentation of our tasks.

We have also begun to make better use of our spelling wordbank and common word wall to make sure that we are continuing to improve the our general spelling.

NUMERACY

In Number Talks we have been looking a partitioning numbers by learning all about hundreds, tens and units.  We have been using HTU boards, cubes and concrete number material to work out our answers.

This month we began work on fractions.  We have looked at halves and quarters and are moving on to working out fractions of an amount.  It would be helpful if this could be continued at home using buttons, pennies or beads.  You could use questions such as, “Can you count our 6 buttons and split them into 2 equal groups/can you find half of 6? Can you count out 8 pennies and put them into 4 equal groups/can you find quarter of 8?”

CELEBRATIONS

We had great fun celebrating Pancake Tuesday yesterday and we made our own batter, poured it into the frying pans and tossed our own pancakes!  We chose our toppings and enjoyed eating what we had prepared.

We have waited patiently for World Book Day! There are many fun and educational activities planned for that day and we are all looking forward to dressing up.  Photographs will be posted onto Twitter.

We have been working extremely hard learning all about fractions. We have investigated what a fraction is, simplifying fractions, finding equivalent fractions, and calculating fractions of a quantity.

We have continued to apply our spelling strategies to help us learn our spelling words each week. We have continued with our novels, applying our reading strategies to gain a greater understanding of the plot, characters and setting. We really enjoyed making a news report video based on one chapter.

In science, we are investigating all things space! Already this month, we have explored Venus by creating carbon dioxide, investigated impact craters on the moon, and now onto creating the solar system using balloons and paper mache.

We have explored lots of exciting things during topic time. We have created our very own Colosseums and learned all about Gladiator fighting. We then moved onto to learning about Roman Legionaries and the Roman Army. We created our own shields and practised military manoeuvres, just like the Romans did!

Primary 2 have had a very busy but fun February.

In Maths we have been working very hard on addition to 20. We have been learning lots of strategies to help us with this, such as doubles, near doubles and bridging. The boys and girls have been playing lots of fun games and doing lots of work with partners and in groups to help them with this.

We have also been working hard on Shape and Money. We have been learning about 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p and 50p, and have been working hard to decide which coins we should use to pay for things. Mrs Simpson says everyone should try very hard to use money in shops in order to practise their coin recognition skills. Here are some of our maths superstars in action.

In Literacy we have continued to work on more sounds and common words. We are getting very good at following Charlie Checker’s targets and have been trying hard to do our neatest work this month. This includes forming all our letters properly, fingers spaces and writing on the lines. Each of our reading groups have been working very hard on partner and group reading and our reading skills are constantly improving. Within Writing, we have been using our topic as a stimulus for our narrative and recount work. We have also had a little go at writing instructions this month. We wrote fantastic instructions for making a McCoo picture, and a super recipe for Empire Biscuits.

In February we finished off our R.E. topic ‘New Life’. Within this topic, we thought about the baby Jesus, and we also welcomed a pretend baby into our class. We then thought about Baptism and learned about what happens when someone is baptised.

We also began to learn about other world religions this month. We learned that many people have different beliefs, but that we are all special. We enjoyed learning about Islam, the qur’an and the Mosque.

We are now beginning to learn about Lent in preparation for Easter. We will do lots more work on this in March so keep your eyes peeled for updates!

In HWB we learned about being safe online through our story of Buddy the Dog. We learned a song which helps to keep us safe and we thought of ways to keep ourselves safe when we are playing with mobile phones, tablets etc.

In P.E. we have enjoyed creating our own games with a partner using a variety of P.E. equipment. Here are some of our groups showing off the games that they created.

We are really enjoying our topic about Scotland. We have been so busy learning lots about our beautiful country. We learned about Charles Rennie MacIntosh and created our own MacIntosh roses.

We also learned about the artist Stephen Brown. We loved looking at pictures of his McCoo pictures and we decided to try our own using wool. Here are some of ours. Do you like them?

We are beginning to focus on Scottish landmarks and this month we investigated Edinburgh Castle. We loved learning about it’s history. We even learned it used to be a prison and some prisoners escaped through a secret tunnel. We enjoyed having an afternoon of Purposeful Play based on Edinburgh Castle. During our play, we completed a range of castle themed challenges. Our favourite was when we created a new castle for the queen to stay in during her holidays in Scotland.

We really loved learning about Scottish food and drink in February. We picked some tasty Scottish dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We then made our own Empire Biscuits using Scottish ingredients.

One highlight of our month was our trip to the school library. Thanks to Mrs Cooney and Primary 4, our library is looking amazing so we decided to go and have a little explore. We enjoyed spending time relaxing with a good book.

We also enjoyed having fun in the snow with our friends. We were so excited to build snowmen, have snowball fights and make snow angels. We even threw snowballs at our teacher!

We are looking forward to the better weather in March and beginning our Easter preparations. World Book Day is on 3^rd March and we can dress up as a favourite book character or come to school in comfy clothes. Keep an eye on Twitter for lots more adventures in primary 2.

Primary 1 February Update

Welcome to our February update. This month we had a lovely holiday from school which allowed us to rest, recharge and spend time with our friends and family. Here are some of the things we have been working on in Primary 1 this month.

In Numeracy we have been continuing to learn more about numbers. We have been focussing on teens numbers and have been practising reading, writing and counting 11-20. It is important that we remember a teen number is made up of a ten and units. In Primary 1 we can even count up to 100 and beyond. We asked to learn more about big numbers and have been exploring a 100 square to learn even more. Your teachers are so proud of you, Primary 1!

We especially enjoyed learning a number song to help us remember all of the special things we can do with numbers. Here we are singing our number song with a little help from the teacher. Ask us to sing it for you at home.

We are continuing to learn about money and counting coins to make amounts. This is something that we could work on at home to help us to understand money even more. It can be a little bit tricky to add lots of coins together to make an amount up to 20p. Keep practising Primary 1! Our next challenge will be to learn how to tell the time. Show us clocks at home and see if we can tell you what time school starts and ends.

In Literacy we have been so excited because we have now learned every single sound of the alphabet! We can say the sounds name, what it sounds like and use our alphabet sounds in lots of different words when reading and writing. Ask us at home to recognise and write some of our letter sounds and you will be so surprised. Our next challenge will be to learn our phoneme sounds (eg sh, wh, th) but we are feeling very confident! Our teachers have asked us to remember to practise our reading books every single night at home. This will help us to become even better at reading our books and recognising our sounds and words. Here we are doing our partner read in class.

Lots of the boys and girls in our class can now write sentences independently and our teachers are asking us to ‘have a go’ when we try to spell uncommon words. We know that it doesn’t matter if we make mistakes because that is how we learn and get even better. When we are writing we have a special personal dictionary where we can write words that we would like to use in our writing. Our teachers help us to fill it with lots of great words! We know that we must keep practising our common words so that we can use them in our writing and when we are reading too. Here we are having fun and practising in class.

In Primary 1 we love to get outdoors and explore our surroundings. We have been learning all about creation and how God created everything, including the animals and birds. So, when the RSPB asked us to take part in a school big bird watch we couldn’t wait to get started! Here we are recording what we found in our environment. We were really surprised by all of the different types of birds that we could see.

We have been continuing to learn about Scotland and in particular about castles, famous Scottish Artists and Scottish food. We are planning to make our very own McCoo after learning about the Artist Steven Brown and some delicious empire biscuits.

We are very excited about the coming weeks as we have lots of things to look forward to at school. Next week is Shrove Tuesday and our P7 buddies are going to make us delicious pancakes. During lent we have special activities at school every week. World Book Day is on 3^rd March and we can dress up as a favourite book character or come to school in comfy clothes. We will really enjoy reading lots of different books and have great fun with our P7 buddies and friends.

See you in March for another update!

Maths

We started the year revising the four key operations of maths: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We then moved onto investigating time. We have investigated 12 hour and 24 hour time, time durations and intervals. It would be great to see further practise at home.

Literacy

We have started our new literacy novels: ‘Matilda’ by Roald Dahl and ‘Fuzzy Mud’ by Louis Sachar. We have been working on our reading comprehensive strategies to enhance our awareness and understanding of the novels. We have also been working extremely hard on developing our fluency skills within our reading groups and partner readings. We had so much fun acting out scenes from chapters of our novels and we look forward to doing more of this as we progress through the chapters. We have been doing great with our spelling, exploring different spelling rules, and developing our skills in applying our spelling strategies.

RE

As the new year brings new beginnings, we have been exploring the Creation story in RE. We have been trying to gain a greater understanding of the importance of all of God’s creatures and as such made bird nests as a way to take care of the birds that God made on the fifth day.

Topic

We have started a new topic; The Romans. We had a collaborative class discussion on what we would like to learn within this topic and lots of exciting areas were discussed such as the Roman Army and Empire, the Gladiators, and many others. So far, we have discovered how Rome was founded, investigated members of Roman society, and even built bridges like the Romans.

Expressive Arts

We are focussing on the Andy Warhol movement of Pop Art. So far, we have created colourful doughnuts and we are looking forward to creating even more Pop Art. Within music, we are currently focusing on the different emotions that music can bring out in us.

PE

In PE, we are enjoying practising basketball on a Wednesday and football on a Friday.