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.

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 3^rd 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!

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.

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!!