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.

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.