We’ve been back for nearly 3 weeks now after the Christmas holidays, and what a lot we’ve packed in!

It’s been full steam ahead for Literacy and Numeracy as we build on our knowledge from last term and look more closely at Subtraction, Multiplication, Time and Fractions. The children in P4 should be able to explain to their adults what links Time and Fractions. Tell your adults, P4!

We have been focusing even more on phonemes during Spelling lessons and have even been working altogether on Diacritically Marking everyone’s spelling words. This is helping the pupils of P4 to recognise that a phoneme is just a sound. Some of our pupils can explain what a digraph, trigraph and split phoneme is, too! Ask your children, adults!

The theme of a lot of our learning this term will be around Space. We have watched videos of real astronauts reading aloud books from the International Space Station; we have started listening to a novel by an author from Edinburgh, Alistair Chisholm, called Orion Lost; and we have found out some really interesting facts all about Space. Perhaps the pupils from P4 could share some of these facts – or their favourite activity linked to our Space topic – in the comments below.

P4’s budding artists:

The class has also done some excellent group work about Healthy Eating; lots of different foods had to be sorted into food groups. This created a lot of discussion and a better understanding of the importance of eating a balanced diet. Staying active is also a huge part of a healthy lifestyle and I’m delighted to report that every P4 pupil is trying their best in our new block of PE: Gymnastics!

We’re all very happy to be back in school and some of our P4s are preparing for their First Holy Communion. Keep this short prayer in mind: As we receive the body of Jesus, may we remember what He told us to do — love one another as I have loved you. We wish them all the best with their preparation for this holy sacrament.

Mrs Daisley left you all some reminders on our class’s page on the website in the first week back. I thought they were so good, I’d share them with you here again:

Reminders

• Sort out your bag so that you always have your reading book and other things that you need.
• If your parents put a note in your diary, remember to let one of us see it. Also, remember to show your parents notes that we send home.
• It will be cold so remember a jumper or cardigan.
• Bring water, not juice for drinking in class.
• Leave toys at home for now.
• Talk to your parents or teachers if you have a problem so we can sort it out.
• Remember to use kinds words when talking to other children- stop and think how you would feel if someone said those words to you.
• Do your best to listen in class and work hard on taking turns.
• Remember that you have lots of talents but they may be different from your friends which is ok. Be proud of the things that you can do!
• It’s ok to make a mistake- teachers do every day!!

Happy New Year from Primary 1! We were excited to get back to school, to see our friends and get back to our learning. To begin 2022 we talked about the things that we would like to get better at in our learning. We talked about this with our friends and teachers.

In Literacy we have been continuing to learn our alphabet sounds. We only have 4 sounds left to learn until we know all of them! We need to continue to work on our sounds at home to make sure we know them very well. Our magnetic boards help us to use our sounds to build words. Lots of our children can now read independently and Mrs Stevenson and Mrs Byrne are delighted that the children use their reading finger to jump from word to word, read from left to write and sound out their letters to blend/read their words. Fantastic work! We love reading and pick stories from our library every day. We are learning to write sentences independently and can write our own ideas in our stories. Our teachers remind us to write on the line, use finger spaces and full stops. We are continuing to learn more about capital letters and how to use them in our sentences. Here we are working hard on our literacy tasks.

In Numeracy we have been continuing to learn more about numbers. Some of us can even count all the way to 100! We are learning to count in 2’s, 5’s and 10’s. Ask us to show you how we can do this at home. Our teachers have been helping us to remember to write our numbers facing the correct way. We need to practise this every day. We have been learning all about money and can recognise coins up to £2. Over the next few weeks we are going to learn even more about adding coins, giving change and playing in our shop. Mrs Byrne has been helping us to learn more about measuring and we have had so much fun measuring in the classroom and playground.

We love to be healthy in Primary 1! We talk about how we feel every day and ‘check-in’ with our adults to talk about our emotions. Fuzzy Wuzzy our worry monster eats up all of our worries so that we can be happy and healthy at school. We have been enjoying getting fit and working as a team to play games and improve our skills. We created our own games and made rules for our friends to follow.

In RME we have been learning about how God created our world for us. We know that God created the seasons, plants and animals.  We will continue to learn about the 4 seasons that God created and thank God for his wonderful gifts. During our prayer time we are continuing to learn the Our Father, Hail Mary and praying the rosary together. We are very good at saying our Holy Family Prayer. Ask us to say our prayers at home to help us get even better at them.

We have chosen Scotland as our topic for this term and have enjoyed learning about Scottish Hogmanay. We talked about Scottish traditions and why Hogmanay is special for us. With our teachers we planned what we like to learn about during this topic. Mrs Stevenson’s dad let us borrow lots of exciting Scottish artefacts that we loved learning more about. Our favourite thing was the plaque with William Wallace on it.

We asked to learn about the Loch Ness Monster first. Here are our very own Nessie’s!

On 25^th January we had a Burns celebration with our friends. We enjoyed Tunnock teacakes and some country dancing. We learned all about the Scottish Poet Robert Burns. After listening to 2 of Burns’ famous poems we coloured in some pictures of a rose and a mouse. We thought some of the Scots language was very funny and we are going to learn more about this.

We hope you enjoyed our update this month and will look forward to sharing what we get up to in February!

January has certainly been a fun filled month in Primary 2.

We were so happy to be back to school after the Christmas holidays, and we enjoyed spending time catching up with our friends.

In Literacy, we spent some time revising our previously taught common words and sounds before we began working on new learning.

This month we have been working very hard on handwriting and making our jotter work as neat as possible. We have spent lots of time learning to be more independent with our writing and to remember Charlie Checker’s core writing targets:

Writing on the lines

Capital letters

Full stops

Finger spaces

As our new class topic is Scotland, we had a great time writing about the Loch Ness Monster. Here are some of our super stories.

In Maths, we have been working on addition within 20. We started this topic with lots of revision of our number bonds to 10. We enjoyed using a variety of objects/resources to help us with this. Here are some of our hard workers working out number stories for 6,7,8 and 9.

We have also been working on Shape. We found out lots about 3D shapes and we made our own creations using spheres, cubes, cuboids, cylinders and cones. We also learned about the properties of a range of 2D shapes.

We used our prior knowledge of the birth of the Lord Jesus when we began our new topic within the R.E. syllabus ‘New Birth’. Within the topic we learned about Mary’s visit to see Elizabeth. We learned about the words that Elizabeth said to Mary and we linked those words to the ‘Hail Mary’ prayer we often say in class. These children wrote the prayer in their jotters beautifully.

We then researched new babies and welcomed a new baby into our class.

This is baby Rosie. We all helped to choose a lovely name for her. Our next steps are to think about Rosie’s baptism. We would love to hear about our Baptism and see photographs from our special day if our grown-ups can find any at home.

We absolutely love our new class topic; Scotland. We have covered lots so far. We were very lucky to have access to lots of Scottish artefacts brought in by Mrs Stevenson. We saw lots of interesting things such as a Quaich, a bodhran and some very old Scottish money. Thank you to Mrs Stevenson for letting us have a look!

We have enjoyed learning about Nessie and even made our own Nessie pictures. Here are a few of our artists hard at work.

We loved learning the Scottish version of Wee Willy Winkie and we designed our own character puppets.

On Burns day we learned about Robert Burns, learned to dance the Highland Fling and we even tasted a yummy Scottish treat; a Tunnoch’s Teacake.

When we came back to school in 2022 we learned about New Years Resolutions and we created our own. Lots of us decided that we wanted to become healthier this year, so we have been learning about healthy eating. We learned some facts about the different food groups and then we worked in pairs to decide what foods we should eat lots of, and what foods we should only eat a little bit of. We made some very sensible choices.

In February we will continue to work very hard on handwriting and our core writing targets. We are also looking forward to learning about other world religions. Keep an eye on Twitter for regular updates from Primary 2.

Thank you to all who attended the Parent Council meeting last night. The minutes have been added below. Please click the link to access…

PC minutes 18th January 2022

The next Parent Council meeting will take place tomorrow, Tuesday 18th January at 6.30 pm. We are hoping that as many of our parents/carers as possible will be able to support our school by joining this meeting. New faces always welcome!

The meeting will take place on WebEx. Please download this app prior to the meeting. Then click on the following link or copy it into your address bar-

https://meet166.webex.com/meet166/j.php?MTID=mff7b41730cccfb8ee125ada56f24d5a9

We look forward to seeing you then.

Sit back, relax and enjoy our infant nativity, now ready to watch on our You Tube channel ……

https://youtube.com/channel/UCvgs7vh2alwTED-b16m-QPg

Please follow this link for information about Primary 1 enrolment of children due to start school in August 2022. Please note that  children should be registered by 24 January 2022 for starting Primary 1 in August 2022.

https://www.northlanarkshire.gov.uk/schools-and-learning/school-admissions/primary-school-registration-p1

Welcome to our P2/3 November learning update.

As always, we have been busy learning new concepts in numeracy and literacy and have been busy focussing on COP 26, Book Week Scotland and Anti-Bullying Week.

We researched the issues being discussed during COP 26 and watched Newsround each day to explore the important issues in a way that we could understand.  We created posters during writing time trying to encourage others to take care of our planet.

We were very lucky to each be given a special bag with books  and games to celebrate Book Week Scotland.  We had a very special visit from the children from Primary 6 who came to help us read and play the games in the bag, we loved our visit, thank you Primary 6!

In literacy we have been focussing on improving out writing through our core writing targets.  These include using the correct pencil grip, using capital letters, full stops and question marks.  We have been self assessing our own work so that we can learn from our mistakes and improve our writing.

In maths, we took advantage of learning all about money to tie in with Money Week.  We looked at what we can do with money, what coins and notes we use in the United Kingdom and we spent lots of time making amounts using different coins.  We found working out change from 10p, 20p and 50p quite challenging and we have been asked to try and play at shops at home to help us learn more about money.

One of the main  highlights this month has been that many of us have learned how to tie our shoelaces!  The teacher gave us lacing cards and taught us 2 different ways that we could learn this important skill.

We can’t wait for all of the fun that December brings and are practising for our eagerly anticipated Nativity Play, Wriggly Nativity.  Stay tuned for the very special showing!

Continue reading Primary 3/4 November Update →

November has been a very busy time for us in Primary 2. We have been learning lots and having so much fun.

Within Literacy, we have continued to work on new sounds and common words using a variety of tasks. We enjoy listening to stories which contain words with our phoneme, then trying to work out which words contain the sound. We also love using our magnetic boards and building our own words. Mrs Simpson tells us that we are super spellers!

In Writing, we are learning to be very independent. We plan our own stories (making sure they contain the important parts like who, what, where, when and why). We then try to use our ideas, plus the common words we have learned, to help us build our stories. Here are some of our Star Writers in November. Mrs Simpson is so proud of them all!

In Maths we have all been working together on Measure. We enjoyed learning about length and had great fun comparing the lengths of different flowers then putting them into the correct order from shortest to longest. Our Cubes group have worked so well on numbers to 20 and have revised addition to 10. The Counters group have been busy working on numbers to 100. Our next job is to start adding to 20. We are very excited!

This is a very special month when we remember all the people who have died. It is called the Month of the Holy Souls. In class we have been learning the ‘Eternal Rest’ prayer and saying it for all our loved ones. We have been praying that they are with God in heaven. On Remembrance Day we also paid tribute to the brave men and women who lost their lives during war. We made amazing pictures of poppy fields to mark the day. Mrs Simpson said we are little artists!

We have also started working on our school Nativity show alongside p1 and p3. We have learned our lines very well and we are amazing at singing our Nativity songs. We have been practising in the hall almost every day. We must remember to keep practising at home too, and hand in our outfits if we haven’t already done so.

This month we celebrated Bonfire Night. We learned how to keep safe when using fireworks. We also went on a bonfire word hunt in the classroom. Our favourite part of the day was making Rocket Fruit Kebabs. They were healthy and delicious.

This month we also celebrated Book Week Scotland. During the week, we had fantastic helpers from p7 come and read some stories with us. We also all received a special gift; a bag full of exciting books to read at home. We are so lucky!

On the last day of November we learned all about St. Andrew. We made stained glass window pictures in class. Later in the day we had a Scottish celebration with shortbread, Singing Kettle and stories about the Loch Ness Monster. We wore tartan too. We all looked so fancy!

We are looking forward to the fun month ahead in Primary 2. Don’t forget to check Twitter to keep up with what’s happening in our class.