Primary 3/4 February Update

Primary 3/4 have had another busy month in class with lots of fun learning activities. We have had Pancake Day and World Book Day as well as an exciting day spent carrying out Science experiments. This month we have been lucky to have student teacher Miss Bradley joining us each Thursday, she will be working with us over the next few weeks and is delighted to work with the children who have welcomed her warmly.

 

Maths and Numeracy

It has been all about the Money in Maths. Children are able to recognise and identify all coins and notes to £20 an can record these in pounds and pence. They are able to calculate the total cost of items and work out change. They have had lots of fun in class using the cash register and solving money related problems.

As always it is great for them to get some practical experience of using money and paying for items in store, alternatively get them to look at receipts and detail amounts and totals.

Please try to encourage children to spend 15 minutes each day on Sumdog, unfortunately I have noticed that only a few of the children are accessing this so would like to take this opportunity to remind you that this is used as homework to reinforce and consolidate what the children are learning in class.

We are currently looking at 2D shapes and 3D objects and will then be moving on to Fractions.

Literacy

The Green Group have now finished reading Horrid Henry and have enjoyed reading all about Henry and the Bogey Babysitter.  We are looking forward to starting our new novel. The children in this group are reading fluently and with expression and are developing their comprehension skills and demonstrating this in their writing. You can help them with this by asking them to answer in full sentences when discussing their homework.

The Red Group are making good progress and are enjoying the range of novels that they are reading.

Children have completed some excellent writing this month; they wrote a narrative piece where their fictional character encountered a storm, or extreme weather force. The children really enjoyed writing these and used some good adjectives to enhance their writing.  The boys and girls also carried out research and note taking to apply to the genre of explanation writing. Pupils chose whether to explain the cause of a Tsunami, an Earthquake or a Volcano. Ask them to explain to you! I am certain you will be impressed!

Religious Education

This month started with our class leading First Friday mass on the 4th February, the children prepared carefully and did themselves proud in their readings and participation of the prayers and hymns. The children are making good progress with their Sacramental preparation and I thank you for your support in working with the children to complete the Home Sessions. The children who are involved in Sacraments will attend a retreat in the Church Hall to help in the very special preparations for Reconciliation and Communion. All children will be learning about forgiveness and have been listening to parables and bible stories. We attended Mass for Ash Wednesday and are learning about Lent and the Easter Story.

OTHER CURRICULAR AREAS

We have spent the last few weeks learning all about the layers of the Earth, Extreme Weather and Natural Disasters.

We created Tsunami’s in a bottle, which showed us the impact of a Tsunami on the coastline.

We moulded Volcanoes from clay and used a chemical reaction to watch them erupt.

We built model towns in trays and used card to act as tectonic plates to show us what causes Earthquakes.

This visual representation in each activity allowed the children to develop a deeper understanding of their learning.

We cannot wait to learn about Hurricanes and Tornadoes.

HOMEWORK

We have decided as a class that we are going to use our ICT skills and access our homework from Teams each week. This will be posted on a Monday under the Primary 3 / 4 Team and on our class tab on the school website.

Please remember to sign homework diaries to confirm completion each week.

Thank you once again for the support provided and please do not hesitate to contact me should you need to discuss anything.

Primary 6 February Update

Welcome to our February update, we have had another very busy quick month due to our long weekend. Here are some things we have been up to in Primary 6 this month.

Maths

We have been working hard in maths on money. We have been using our 4 calculations to work out profit and loss, bills, totals, change and even working on budgets.  We now are aware of the importance of wants and needs when we are planning our budgets and how important this will be for our future life skills. We will be moving on to measurement next which we are all very excited about.

Literacy

We have continued to apply our spelling strategies to help us learn our spelling words each week. We have continued with our new novels, applying our reading strategies to gain a greater understanding of the plot, characters and setting. One group is reading Santa Maria by Kenneth Steven and the other group is reading The Eleventh Orphan by Joan Lingard. So far both groups are really enjoying their new novels. We have really enjoyed our instructional writing this month and if you go to twitter you will see pictures of what we have been making.

Health and Wellbeing

We have been working on peer pressure and what effect it can have on our mental health. We are now aware of the importance of good friendships and how others can have good but also bad influences on you. In the month of March we are going to be looking at substance misuse.

Science

We are now looking at Space and focusing on The Solar System. We have already investigated the position and size of each planet. We are now looking at the craters of the moon and the chemicals that help make up each planet.

RE

We learned all about Saint Valentines and gained a deeper understanding of Other World Religions looking particularly at Islam. As we now move into March we are going to be learning all about Lent.

Topic

As you can see from Twitter we have been very busy making our cabins at home as part of our home project. We have had the whole school coming up looking at our display and the children all really enjoyed making them. Thank you very much too any parents/ guardians who helped with this home project. We have been really enjoying learning about the disaster that changed the shipping world and how this happened. We have recreated our own boarding passes and even painted our very own portal art which you can see on Twitter.

P2/3 February Update

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.

 

 

 

Primary 5/6 Update

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!

P4’s February Update

Even though it’s been a short month with a holiday, we’ve been working hard in Primary 4.

Literacy

We have been continuing with our daily spelling which is supported by our weekly homework tasks. This month we have been getting more confident using spelling strategies and Mrs Daisley was surprised at how good we were at Mnemonics. This is where we use each letter to make a little saying that helps us to remember how to spell words.

big

elephants

can

always

understand

small

elephants

This is helpful to remind us how to spell because. Mrs Daisley had to admit that the children did this better than she could manage!

In reading, we have been continuing to work on our group reading activities. We have to remember to take our reading work home and to bring it back. It’s very tricky to look up words or find clues if we don’t have our books in class. We are working on making sure that we do our best written tasks by talking about what makes our work good. Some of us a working on Summaries, for example, and we know that a good Summary shouldn’t be too long and should mention the Main Ideas from our novel. Others are working on answering question in full sentences with good punctuation.

Mrs Cooney has been reading a novel called Orion Lost to us in class.

We have had great reading materials about Space to read independently in class. We got some from our school library. We are very proud of our hard work restoring the school library with Mrs Cooney. The other classes are delighted to get a turn using it now.

In writing, we have learned the features of explanation pieces of writing, written about Chinese New Year and identified key vocabulary around our topic on space, so that we could write a report on that too. We watched Authors Live to listen how a real author plans his stories and we have started planning a very special narrative piece for someone we love.

We continue to work on talking, through class discussions and through our reading work. Listening to follow instructions is ongoing in class.

Numeracy

We have been working on Subtraction in class. Some of us are working up to 50 and others are now working with 3 digit numbers. All of our good work on Addition has helped us to progress with this, as we can use strategies like adding on for this work.

We continue to work on Times Tables. This month, we have concentrated on the 3 and 6. We know that the 6 Times Table is double the 3 Times Table.

We also continue with Time and we worked on Fractions as we could see patterns in Time.

This month, we started to work on stations-we go round different stations such as practical activities. We enjoyed this and we will do more in the future, now we can share resources more.

Health and Well-Being

We continue to work on Gymnastics and are delighted to be able to work inside using the equipment, such as the wall bars.

We are spending a lot of time discussing our friendships and ways to keep them strong. It is normal  for our age to have some difficulties in dealing with friends. With the help not our teachers and family, we can get stronger at dealing calmly with tricky situations.

Here are some issues that we face

  • feeling left out
  • feeling hurt by someone’s words or actions
  • feeling lonely in the playground
  • getting carried away with play fighting
  • not knowing how to calm ourselves down after a disagreement.

In class, we get best results when we discuss our problems once we have managed to calm down. We can then see both sides and we are getting good at finding a solution. We are also stopping to think how we would feel if we were the one left out, for example. The best way you can help at home, is to talk calmly with us and help us to find a way to deal with it ourselves.

 

Topic

We have enjoyed learning about Space. We are impressed to learn about the careers of astronauts, such as Tim Peake and Neil Armstrong. We are real scientists as we have had to do the same experiment over again to see what works best. Our rockets didn’t go straight up into the air , so we discussed what we will do next time. Real scientists don’t give up!

RE

We all learned about Jewish Passover this month and why this celebration is important.

The First Communion children are getting through their workbook and we will be finished in March. You can help by making sure that the home sections are finished by the time we finish Unit 7. We will do Unit 8 after the First Communion itself.

Primary 2 February Update

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 3rd 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

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 3rd 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!

 

Primary 6 January Update Post

Welcome to the first post of the year from Primary 6. Wow what a busy January we have had and we cannot wait to tell you all about it. We hope you all had a lovely Christmas and New Year and are ready to enjoy term 3 with us all. We only have 9 weeks left now till the Easter holidays and have so much to fit in. This term we are lucky to have Miss Carr join our class for the next 6 weeks and we cannot wait to see what she has planned for us.

Maths and Numeracy

We have continued on with Division since more reinforcement was needed. This week we will start on our new maths topic Money. We have already planned a lot of active maths games to help us gain a better understand and link this in with four key operations of maths (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division).    

Literacy

We have now all finished our group novels in class and will be starting our new novels this week in class. We have also started to read a class novel called Survivor Titanic by Stephen Davies. So far we are already on Chapter 4 and we want to read more. This novel is a success as this relates to our new topic Titanic. We have been doing great with our spelling, exploring different spelling rules, and developing our skills in applying our spelling strategies. In story writing we are now working on Instructional Writing, now we are in Primary 6 we will need to go into more detail and make sure we are using our checklist properly. Next week we are starting off with making Empire Biscuits and then the following week we are getting to make Fairy Bread.  

RE

This week if First Friday mass, unfortunately we will not be able to attend however we will be watching this online in the classroom. We really enjoyed learning all about the Epiphany and investigating Missio. We have investigated world missionary organisations and discusses the poor people of the world. We are now moving on next week to Other World Religions.   

Topic

Our new topic this term is Titanic. We have already looking into what we know and what we would like to investigate within the topic. So far we have investigated on the journey she took and the stops she made before the disaster. We have researched first, second and third class cabins and compared them. We are now looking into the company who build Titanic and how she became the most talked about ship ever.   

Science

Our new Science topic is Space, particularly we will be looking at the Solar System. So far we have looked at each planet and how close they are to the sun. We have investigated each planet and now researching the size and functions of each planet. We cannot wait to create our own PowerPoints about this. We have finally managed to do our experiment ‘Rain Cloud in a Jar’ which we all loved and got amazing results from (check twitter for the pictures).     

Health and Wellbeing

During Health and Wellbeing we have been looking at food labels and identifying which foods are healthier than others. We have investigated food packaging which highlight the traffic light system to help guide the consumer. We have also created our own labels down in ICT. During PE this term we have started Badminton and slowly working on our serve.  

 

Thank you for taking the time to read what we have been up to in the month of January. We are looking forward to sharing more pictures on twitter of our work so please remember to have a wee look.

From Mrs Speirs and Primary 6

Primary 5/6 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.

Primary 3/4 January Update

Welcome back everyone and I hope that you all had an enjoyable and restful period over the holidays.

The boys and girls have settled back well and have enjoyed seeing their friends and classmates. We have shared our holiday experiences and have discussed our hopes, wishes and targets for this coming Term.

 

Maths and Numeracy

Since we returned to school, we have been learning all about Division of 2 and 3 digit numbers by a single digit. We have been sharing, grouping and using concrete materials to help us with this, we can see how important it is to learn our Times Tables and will keep practising them all year.

We have now moved on to Measurement and have been measuring the length of various objects in our class. We even measured our own heads, necks, wrists and ankles using measuring tapes. We can describe what we would measure in mm, cm, m and km. We are looking forward to measuring weight in g and kg and capacity in ml and l. Later this month we will be learning to use and solve problems using money so maybe we can help when out shopping or at the supermarket. Practical experiences will really help us to gain a better understanding of what we are learning in class.

Homework for Maths as always is set via Sumdog; this corresponds and reinforces what we are learning in class so please try to spend 15 minutes each day online.

Literacy

We are busy working through our spelling programme and continue to learn new phonemes and common words each week, it is a busy programme and schedule so it is important that we make sure we are practising our words and reading our books at home each week.

The Green Group are delighted to be reading Horrid Henry and have given themselves new names to tie in with the theme, ask them about them. Their names suit their personality like ‘Perfect Peter’ and ‘Moody Margaret’. The other groups are reading small chapter books and should receive one or two books home each week, please continue to support the children by listening to them reading aloud and asking them questions about the characters, the settings and the main ideas/plot in the story. This will help the when they are using what they are reading in their writing.

Health and Wellbeing

Our focus in Health and Wellbeing is on being active and we have chosen to learn and develop our skills in football. We have named our own football teams and are competing in a class tournament. We are very competitive! We are also learning how to be good teammates and opponents, to be ambitious and try hard but also to be gracious in winning and losing.


 

Religious Education

Some of us have some special Sacraments that we are preparing for. Primary 3 children are beginning preparation for the Sacrament of Reconciliation and will be bringing our special workbooks home to share our journey with you. Primary 4 children have already started their workbooks and have been learning all about being part of a community and how in making their First Holy Communion they become an important member of our Church Community with God.

OTHER CURRICULAR AREAS

We recently celebrated Burns Day by listening to some poems by our national bard Robert Burns, we wrote our own poems about love, made tartan bags and kilts and explored the Scots language. Do you know any? Ask us and see if we can translate?

Primary 3/4 have decided that this Term they would like to learn all about Natural Disasters. We have started looking at Tsunami’s and the children have used their research skills during ICT to find out some information about them. We are excited to learn about Volcanoes and Hurricanes and Earthquakes and look forward to creating some experiments and extending our knowledge on each of these.

Finally, thank you for your support in preparing the children for school each day. We look forward to a busy month of fun learning opportunities and hard work with pupils striving to become successful learners, responsible citizens, effective contributors and confident individuals.

 


 

 


 


 

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