Primary 7b have been working very hard during the month of October!

In literacy we have been using our spelling strategies and active spelling activities to help us practise our spelling words each week. We have been learning more about areas of grammar and how to improve our persuasive writing skills too.

Linking to our class topic of Sectarianism and Discrimination we have been reading the novel ‘Divided City’ and working together with Primary 7a to complete a variety of workshops and tasks, deepening our understanding of these themes. This term we will begin a mini topic of Scottish Democracy which the children are very much looking forward to.

In maths, we have been consolidating our knowledge of place value through lots of active maths and games. The children have loved being able to get practical with tools in maths and this really seems to help them progress further too. We have also been learning about the properties of 2D and 3D shape with Mrs Gilfedder on Thursdays. We are now moving onto multiplication and every child has been encouraged to practise their times tables as often as they can to help them achieve success.

We have been exploring a topic of healthy eating within health and well-being too. The pupils have loved researching important foods, vitamins and minerals our bodies need to function and have used a variety of materials, including painting watercolour fruits, to create a display wall which looks beautiful.

In PE, we have had some visits from Cardinal Newman High School and their young leaders who have been teaching both Primary 7 classes lots of skills. These sessions will continue in November as well.

In RE, we have been learning about Saint Bernadette and the mysteries of the Holy Rosary throughout October. Today we also had our First Friday Mass during the week of the Holy Souls and All Saints Day.

Overall, the children of Primary 7b have been working very hard to improve their skills in all areas, I am very proud of them. We have had lots of fun too so please make sure to check out the school’s twitter page to keep up to date with pictures of their learning experiences.

Primary 5 have been working extremely hard learning and successfully applying their reading strategies as well as practising their verbal reading skills. Primary 5 completed their novel, ‘Kaspar Prince of Cats’ by Michael Morpugo. We have now moved onto their new novels, ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ and ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’. Primary 5 have also been learning and successfully applying their spelling strategies.

In Maths, we have been working very hard learning our addition strategies. We have now moved onto subtraction and will be exploring the linkage between addition and subtraction. We have also been learning a ‘times table of the week’ in conjunction with our number strategies.

During topic time, Primary 5 have been exploring the solar system and have investigated impact craters, constellations and Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. We will explore the solar system further in November.

In PE, we have been playing netball. We have learned the different passes, how to shoot and the different positions.

We have been learning about the life of Jesus during RE recently. In particular, we have looked at Jesus the Healer and Jesus the Teacher.

Primary 5 have been successful learners and Miss Gallagher is very proud.

Please look to our school’s Twitter page to see the great learning.

Primary 3 have had a very busy few months since returning to school so we would like to share some of this learning with you.

In Numeracy and Maths the children have been learning numbers up to 1000 and they know how to estimate and round numbers to the nearest tens and hundreds. They have used concrete materials to explore Place Value and are currently learning a variety of strategies to help with addition. They use Number Talks most days and have been counting on from the highest number, using number lines, 100 squares and making friendly numbers to help with addition. They are learning to explain how they got the answer and this is really helping with their understanding. This will also help as they continue to develop skills in subtraction, multiplication and division.  The children are demonstrating that they are confident individuals as they eagerly share their responses, solutions and justifications.

In Literacy the children continue to work hard on their Spelling, Reading, Writing, Listening and Talking.  The children are working through the Active Literacy Spelling programme and are learning new phonemes and common words each week. They love to look for these sounds and words in their surroundings and get very excited when they spot them. Please encourage them to do this in their home and local environment also. The children are reading a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts each week and are developing their accuracy and fluency. They made their own Alien Masks after reading ‘Aliens Love Underpants’. They have loved listening to stories, sharing stories with each other and choosing books from our class library. Please continue to encourage children to read for pleasure as much as possible as this helps in all areas of Literacy.

I have been impressed with the quality of the stories that the children have written so far. They have recently written some spooky Halloween Stories, which saw them creating their own characters and settings, using some excellent adjectives to add to their story.

With October, being the month of the Holy Rosary the children have been learning how to pray the Rosary and have been learning all about our parish of Holy Family. We have been learning our Mass Responses and hymns to sing at mass. We have been learning all about Creation and Laudato Si. The boys and girls know that they have a responsibility to protect and care for the amazing world that God created for us.

Our IDL topic has been Space and the children have developed a range of skills across many areas of the curriculum, they learned about Neil Armstrong and completed line drawings of astronauts. They used their knowledge of 2D and 3D shape to create rockets and during Maths week, the children collected a series of materials from our local environment and put these together to create rockets in the yard. They have listened to lots of fun stories about Space and even listened to a story told by an astronaut from the International Space Station. They have learned the order of the planets from the Sun and have learned a mnemonic to help them remember. Ask them to tell you? They love to get it right. As we come to the end of this topic they are making a Diorama of our Solar System. I think you will be impressed.

Without doubt the highlight of the month for the children was the Halloween Party. The children were so excited and loved to dress up, play games, dance and have fun with their friends and teachers. It was so good to be able to celebrate this together in the hall.

As you can see, the children have had lots of fun learning activities and experienced many successes as learners over the last few months. Thank you for your continued support. Please see Twitter for any class pictures or updates throughout the month.

We have had a very busy month in primary 2! Here is a summary of some of our fantastic learning and achievements in October.

In Maths we have worked very hard on numbers to 100. This has been a big challenge, but we have tried so hard and achieved great learning. We have been working on numbers before, numbers after, numbers in between. We have used partitioning and learned about odd and even numbers with the help of Mr Odd and Mrs Even. During Maths Week we participated in the NLC Sumdog competition. Mrs Simpson was so proud of how hard we worked. We also learned about symmetry and made some symmetrical pictures using materials we found outdoors. During Maths Week we enjoyed learning new number games. Our favourite game of the week was Hopscotch! We will soon move on to addition and subtraction.

Within Literacy we have been consolidating previously taught sounds and common words, as well as learning lots of new ones. We have enjoyed using our magnetic boards to build words which contain our sounds. Within reading we have been working on a variety of Read to Write tasks which allow us to work on important reading comprehension skills. We should try hard to read our reading books every night with an adult as this will develop our fluency and accuracy. In writing we have used our topic as a stimulus to create imaginative stories. We love our brainstorming sessions where we create our own who, when, where, what and why. Our favourite story was based on our class book ‘Aliens Love Underpants’. We wrote hilarious stories which made our teacher giggle.

October is the month of the Holy Rosary and we spent time learning about the rosary and how to say this beautiful prayer. We were excited to learn about when Our Lady appeared to St. Bernadette in Lourdes. We also finished our mini topic on ‘Jesus’ Family and Ours’. We enjoyed thinking about our own families, and learning about the holy family.

We are just about to finish our topic on Space. We have enjoyed learning about the solar system and impressed our teachers with lots of super knowledge. We also learned lots about Neil Armstrong. We have created our own rockets using 2D shapes and made some fantastic spacemen for our class display.

Without a doubt, our favourite time of October is Halloween! We had a ball at our disco and enjoyed seeing our friends dress up. In class, we explored lots of different Halloween stories and we enjoyed our purposeful play sessions where we made haunted houses, made Halloween posters, repaired jumbled skeletons and completed some playdough challenges.

Mrs Simpson gives us homework on a Monday and we should submit it on a Thursday. We should also read our reading books every night. This will help us to develop essential reading skills. We should try hard to bring our reading book to school every day so we can use it in class.

We are looking forward to November and all the super learning we will do. We will be shortly beginning our Nativity rehearsals and preparing for Christmas. Please check Twitter for regular updates and photos.

We are working hard in primary 4. Our teachers are very proud of our attitude towards learning and our growing independence in class.

Literacy

We have been using Reading Strategies to talk about a class novel, group novels or reading books. We are getting using to talking about Prior Knowledge, Inference, Visualisation and Metalinguistics. Although these are tricky words to learn, we are showing examples of them in our written work. We have talked about Main Ideas and Summaries, which we will be moving on to.

After lots of useful revision, we have moved on to new spelling work. Some children have started the Stage 4/5 programme which is different to what we are used to. We are coping well. Mrs Daisley was very pleaded with our super phoneme charts!

Mrs Smith is continuing to support our writing in class, where we spend time planning our writing. We have worked hard on Recounts and Instructions and are now moving on to Explanation Texts. Mrs Smith is pleased at our hard work.

Numeracy

We have moved on from Place Value to Addition. We used Number Talks strategies to help us find the best strategy to help us. We are also keeping up our Times Tables practise so we don’t forget!

We have started doing Maths Stations one day a week and everyone agreed that it was good to get a chance to play different types of Maths games, online and with solid materials.

Beyond Number

We have done Information Handling, 3D Shape and are working on Patterns and Relationships.

Health and Wellbeing

We are thrilled to be taking part in Roots of Empathy and have a lovely little baby boy teaching us all about relationships. Over this year, we expect to learn a lot from him.

We have been doing Gymnastics and Dance but will now be moving on. We will take a vote in class to decide on what. Later this term, we will be doing Social Dancing in preparation for our Christmas party!

Science

We have been studying The Rainforest. We will let our pictures show you what we have been doing.

R.E.

We are continuing to learn about the Apostles as we cover saints. We learning about the Glorious Mysteries in October. We will move on to Advent by the end of this month. We continue to work on the Gospel and Mass Responses in class.

Social Studies.

We are pleased to be starting The Victorians. We have already learned that schools in Victorian times were very strict!

Homework

Some children find homework challenging. Remember to talk to us if this is an issue.

Finally. if you ever thought homework needed to be boring, look at our marvellous display from our creative children! Everything here has been done at home!

Primary 5 are hosting a Halloween costume exchange this week. If you have any old costumes that no longer fit your child, can you please donate these costumes to the school this week? Primary 5 will be accepting these costumes from Wednesday-Friday. On Friday, your child will be given the opportunity to look through the donated costumes to see if they would like to pick a new, ‘recycled’, costume.

For information about the upcoming Hallowe’en Parties and meeting minutes from the Parent Council go to the website tab Getting Involved –> Parent Council for all the latest. 

Welcome to our September update which has seen us very busy indeed!

Literacy

We have begun to read our new exciting novels The Queen’s Nose and Dragonfire. Both are very topical given that we celebrated the life of Queen Elizabeth II as well and looked at the connection she had with Edinburgh where Dragonfire is set.  In reading aloud, we have been focussing on reading clearly and with expression in order that we can entertain our reader.  If possible,  encourage your child to read some of their novel aloud to someone at home in order to boost their confidence when asked to read to others in their group or class!

We continue to work on revising all spelling strategies taught in order to read and spell both common and unfamiliar words.  We have again revised diacritical marking and have attached a short clip which will help parents what this means and how we do this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y1-QFjT5yc

Numeracy

We have completed our work for now on Place Value to 10,000 and I would encourage all pupils to continue to spend some of their time completing the Sumdog challenges which will reinforce what has been taught in class.  We will return to this topic throughout the year to ensure sound knowledge and understanding this important aspect of number.

We have also completed our block on Estimation and Rounding and can successfully round numbers to 10. 100 and 1,000 to routinely estimate the answer to a problem.

RME

As October is the month dedicated to the Holy Rosary, we will say these prayers together for peace in our very turbulent world and would encourage our families to join their prayers to ours by saying some or all of the Rosary together with everyone at home.

Science

We have been exploring our amazing bodies and began by looking at the Leonardo da Vinci painting of the Vitruvian Man where the dimensions on many aspects of our bodies are linked to other parts.  One of the most fascinating facts was that our foot is the same length as the distance between our wrist and inner elbow, try it out at home!

We are now exploring our 5 senses and have some brilliant experiments planned.

HWB

This month’s focus has been on being kind and focussing on what makes a good friend.  We were helped greatly by the parents and families that came to our Meet the Teacher afternoon and assisted us in creating an Autumn themed Friendship Tree.  Pictures to follow.

Helpful resources from Nessy all about dyslexia:

Science of Reading, September

Interesting reading for you if your child has dyslexia or you suspect they might:

Dyslexia Explained