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Primary 3 November Update

Well, what a busy month we have had in Primary 3. We have had lots of fun learning experiences throughout the month of November.

Literacy

We have been working through our spelling programme and learning new phonemes and common words each week. We are building our vocabulary and have been learning about using adjectives to improve our writing. We are enjoying our reading tasks each week and are good at recognising our common words and phonemes in the books we are reading.

We used the Monster Mallows that we made at Halloween as a stimulus for writing Instructions and then applied this later in the month when we made Snowman biscuits. We are getting good at writing instructions. We have also explored narrative and recount and have written about Sneezy the Snowman and created our very own funny Elf stories. Going forward we are going to try and work on our presentation. We are continuing to focus on letter and number formation and using a ruler to underline our work and making sure our letters are not floating on the line.

We are still working on our listening and talking skills and are trying to listen carefully to instructions to help improve our learning. We are trying not to interrupt and to listen carefully when someone else is speaking. We know this is respectful and that everyone in our class has a voice.

Maths and Numeracy

Over the last month we have spent a great deal of time working on strategies to help us with addition and subtraction, we have been using concrete materials such as ten frames, one hundred squares, cubes, and number lines to help us add and subtract in tens and hundreds. The children have applied their prior understanding of place value to help with this. They are now going to be focussing on multiplication and division and again will explore a range of concrete, pictorial and abstract resources to help them develop a greater understanding in this area.

RE

The children have been praying for all their loved ones during the month of November and remembering the angels and holy souls. The have been learning about the Nativity in preparation for their performance of Wriggly Nativity. They worked hard to learn all their songs and sang beautifully during the performance. The children are now learning about Advent.

Social Studies/Art&Design/Other Areas

The children have finished their topic on Space, completed by a trip to Motherwell Heritage Centre where the children took part in a Rocket Workshop. This was an enjoyable and educational visit for the children, and they all participated fully in the engaging activities provided. They also showcased their learning as were able to respond to the questions asked throughout the day. The workshop co-ordinator remarked that it was lovely to have such enthusiastic and confident individuals participating in the workshop. Please log on to our class Team on Glow to see pictures of the day.

In addition to this we have spent time making crafts for the Christmas Coffee morning and creating a variety of Christmas themed artwork. The children are exploring line, shape, colour and using a variety of different media to create different effects. We hope that you have enjoyed looking at their work.

PE – we have been learning dances for our Christmas Party. The children have enjoyed this and are almost prepared to demonstrate these at their Christmas party on 20th December.

**Finally, Primary 3 have achieved their target and earned four hundred Dojo points. They have chosen to have a class pyjama and pizza party. Children may come to school in pyjamas or comfortable clothing on this day and bring in a pillow. They will have pizza, ice cream and a Christmas movie to reward their effort this Term. This will take place on Friday 16th December 2022.

Have a wonderful Christmas and New Year and please check Twitter and our class Team over the next week or so for class and picture updates.

Primary 2 November Update

We had a very busy month in Primary 2. We finished October by learning about Halloween. We enjoyed reading Halloween stories such as ‘Room on the Broom’ and ‘Funny Bones’. We also had Halloween purposeful play where we completed lots of spooky challenges such as building a Lego haunted house.

In Literacy, we have continued to learn new common words and sounds. We have been practising our reading and have learned how to complete lots of associated tasks. Mrs Simpson loves when we practise our reading books every night as this help us to develop our fluency and accuracy. In November we read the story ‘Sneezy the Snowman’. We wrote our own stories about Sneezy, designed some new clothes for him, then made our own Sneezy the Snowman biscuits.

In Maths, we finished working on numbers to 100 and began to focus on addition within 20. It helps us to explore new strategies using a variety of resources such as ten frames, cubes and pegs on hangers.

In R.E. we have been learning about the story of the very first Christmas. We enjoyed showing what we have learned as narrators in our infant Nativity show ‘A Wriggly Nativity’. We hope that you enjoyed our performance as much as we did. We have also learned about Advent and how special this time is. We made Advent promises and learned about the Advent wreath.

During P.E this month we have spent time learning dance with a focus on social dancing. We enjoyed learning the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ and ‘The Hokey Cokey’ among other dances, and can’t wait to show off our new skills at our Christmas party.

This month we learned about St. Andrew, our patron saint. We made beautiful stained glass window pictures to celebrate his special day.

We loved ‘Book Week Scotland’ in Holy Family. It was fun bringing our teddies and books to school and we enjoyed the variety of activities we participated in. We particularly enjoyed visiting the library and our friends in P5/6 so they could read to us. Thank you Mrs Cook and P5/6!

In December our highlights so far have been our Christmas lunch and our trip to Motherwell Civic Centre to see Cinderella. Please see Twitter for all our photos.

P4 in November

We have had a busy month. At the very end of October , we made cookies for Halloween! We also learned about The Day of the Dead in Mexico and did some lovely artwork for it. We met Primary 4 from Mossend at the park and had a lovely play together. At the end of the month, we went to Motherwell to see Cinderella! Oh yes we did! At the end of the month, we started to get visits from one of Santa’s main elves, Ralph. He gives us good advice on how to stay on the Good List , as well as giving us a pat on the back for all our talents.

Literacy

The Red and Blue groups finished one novel and moved onto another. The Red group are now reading a Jacqueline Wilson novel and the Blue group are reading The Boy Who Had Nearly Everything. They have been working on reading aloud with greater fluency and the reading strategies.  We like to use a dictionary to help us with Metalinguistics.  The Yellow group have moved on to Rapid Readers which have a fiction and non fiction element in each book.

We are continuing to work within our spelling groups to improve our spelling. The Red /Blue group are getting much more confident filling in phoneme charts and using the spelling strategies to support our work. The Yellow group are working on phonemes and writing sentences with our words in them. We have been working together on using magnetic letters to help build our phoneme words, amongst other things.

We have moved on to Persuasive writing with Mrs Smith.

Numeracy

We have started doing Maths  stations on a Wednesday and we are getting good at organising our resources properly to help us. We often have games  which require us to sort out counters, dice and other resources. This gives Mrs Daisley a chance to work with each group on Number Talks and everyone gets a chance to share a strategy.

We have moved on to Subtraction. Starting a new topic can be nerve wracking for some children but practise helps us all to improve.

We have been working on Pattern with Mrs Smith.

Health and Wellbeing

We are all enjoying seeing a little baby boy grow in Roots of Empathy. In three weeks, we always see a big change in his skills. Mrs Le Blond is encouraging us to always be gentle with him and watch our voices so that we don’t frighten him.

The Victorians

We have learned about famous Victorians such as Florence Nightingale and William Morris. We have also been learning about famous inventors of the time.

RE

November is an important time to reflect on our loved ones who have passed before moving on to Advent, where we prepare ourselves for the birth of the baby Jesus. We have tried to reflect on  what we can do that doesn’t involve present buying, like attending Mass regularly, praying and treating people around us kindly.

Dance

We are learning traditional Scottish dances for our party. We have finished with Gymnastics for now and will choose a new topic in the New Year. We will get to choose between 3 options.

Primary 5 November Update

Primary 5 have had another successful month during November.

We have been working extremely hard in maths developing our multiplication skills. We have been learning new strategies and problem-solving skills to solve our sums. We do a range of active maths exercises to supplement our learning. It would be great to encourage the children to practise their times tables consistently at home to aid their learning in school.

We have been showing great progress in literacy. We have been reading our literacy novels, ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’ and ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ by Roald Dahl. We have been applying our reading strategies throughout our novels, enabling us to gain a greater understanding of the texts. We have also been practising our oral skills by reading to our groups, in pairs, or to our self. We have also been enjoying watching chunks of the movie adaption, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, once we successfully complete our tasks.

Furthermore, we are enjoying learning our new spelling words each week. We work hard at learning our new phoneme of the week, spelling rule or common words.

We have been successful learners during our topic time which is the World Cup. We have been exploring the stadiums and even started to create our very own World Cup stadium through cooperative learning.

In RE, we have explored our patron Saint of Scotland, St. Andrew and created our very own saltires. We then practised extremely hard for the First Friday Mass which we led on December 2nd.

We have been confident individuals during PE. We have teamed up with Primary 6/5 and Primary 7 (a & b) to practise Scottish dancing.  We are extremely excited to show off our new dance skills at the Christmas party.

November Update – Primary 7B

During the month of November, we have been very busy in Primary 7B!

We started off the month by taking part in our first Friday Mass with pupils reading, sharing bidding prayers and taking part in the offertory.

In maths we have been focusing on multiplication and our times tables.  All pupils love to explore new ways to practise their times tables, so we have been playing some interesting active maths games including times table Jenga! Most pupils are becoming more confident using different multiplication strategies in their work and can confidently explain how they have come to an answer during our number talks sessions too.

In literacy, we have been continuing to read our Divided City novel and discuss new themes we discover whilst reading. Pupils enjoy using our cosy corner of the classroom to read privately on our comfy classroom beanbags!
We have also been learning how to write a discursive argument. Pupils used these new skills to write a discursive piece of work discussing whether or not there should be a smoking ban in Scotland. This directly links to their health and wellbeing topic of the dangers of alcohol and substance abuse and misuse.

During this month, we have also been taking part in a lot of drama games which the pupils thoroughly enjoy. We have used different skills such as improvisation and speech and movement to develop our theatrical skills within the classroom.

We have been very lucky to still receive PE sessions from Cardinal Newman sports leaders each week and we will be sad to see them return to High School in December. The pupils have loved having their input and taking part in each week’s lesson.

However, in preparation for our Christmas parties, we have started practising our Scottish dancing skills! We have joined up with primary 5 and 6 to learn various group dances including the military two step and the dashing white sergeant. We are very excited to take part in these dances during our Christmas parties!

We have also been continuing to learn about the Scottish Parliament and democracy in Scotland which is part of our mini topic this term. The pupils are now very excited as we are going to visit the Scottish Parliament next week!

November has been full of learning, fun and hard work for Primary 7B and we are very much looking forward to the Christmas fun in December!

Please make sure you follow the school’s twitter page to see photos of what we get up to during the week!

P6/5 November Update

We began the month of November  remembering the lives of the Holy Saints as well as praying for the repose of our departed family and friends.  The children completed and returned the November Lists which meant that we as a school community could remember our dearly departed together.

We completed our novel study books at the end of the month, The Queen’s nose and Dragonfire and we all agreed were terrific stories.  We will send home a copy of our Book Reviews so that everyone can read a little about why we enjoyed our books so much.

We again have focussed on improving our handwriting and presentation and are pleased with the results.   We feel very proud of our efforts and now take great pride in the work we produce. We have revised nouns, verbs and adjectives so feel free to test us at home!

As part of World Book Day, we had the opportunity to choose a book from our library to take home and enjoy and throughout the day we participated in lots of fun activities such as paired reading with P2 and making dens in class with our friends.  The teacher posted the photos on Twitter.

IDL

Our topic this month has been Scottish Inventors which was a fantastic opportunity to celebrate the ingenuity of our Scottish ancestors and appreciate the impact their inventions have had on our modern day lives.

As one of our homework tasks, we were asked to either create a new invention or make a replica of an invention that we admired.  The pupils who completed this, demonstrated their creations to P5 and took time to explain the purpose of their work.  It was very enjoyable and P5 enjoyed all of the presentations.

Please remember to follow us on Twitter and take a look at what we have been getting up to in and out of class throughout the coming month.
Here are a few of our highlights this month.

 

P6/5 October Learning Update

October saw our class cover many new topics in maths, literacy, health and well-being, social studies and RME.

In maths, we completed estimating and rounding and attained good marks in our final assessment!  We moved onto negative numbers which was fun, most of us are very confident in using the number line past  0 and we are able to speak confidently about the real life situations which require us to know and understand negative numbers.  We are now moving into looking at 2D and 3D shape with Miss Hamill and in particular, we will look at the properties of a range of shapes.

In literacy, we have continued to use the novel studies The Queen’s Nose and Dragonfire to reinforce our comprehension skills as well as those of skimming and scanning and exploring the writer’s style. We have been reminded to always check our spelling and to make sure we use a dictionary to check if we are unsure how to spell a word.  Our handwriting has shown lots of improvement and we are very proud that our hard work is paying off!

Our new topic is the Human Body and we have learned lots already including the fact that many parts of our bodies are the exact measurement if other parts.  Ask us to tell you all about it. We have been learning about the Senses and all of the amazing things our bodies can do.

We began the month of October with the celebration of 1st Friday Mass where our class led the congregation with prayers and hymns.  It was a beautiful service and we hope everyone enjoyed it as much as we did.  We got to meet family and friends in the school hall afterwards for tea and biscuits which was lovely.

We have moved on to the study of Judaism as part of our commitment to learning about other world religions as it is important that we understand the many ways in which people worship God and learn tolerance of the faith and beliefs of others.

*It was so good to see all parents at our recent Parent’s Evening, the first in-person meetings since October 2019 and hope that everyone got to ask any questions regarding your child’s time in class.  Please remember that I am available via email or at the gate at 3pm most days should you require any help.

 

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