Primary 2 November 2021
November has been a very busy time for us in Primary 2. We have been learning lots and having so much fun.
Within Literacy, we have continued to work on new sounds and common words using a variety of tasks. We enjoy listening to stories which contain words with our phoneme, then trying to work out which words contain the sound. We also love using our magnetic boards and building our own words. Mrs Simpson tells us that we are super spellers!
In Writing, we are learning to be very independent. We plan our own stories (making sure they contain the important parts like who, what, where, when and why). We then try to use our ideas, plus the common words we have learned, to help us build our stories. Here are some of our Star Writers in November. Mrs Simpson is so proud of them all!
In Maths we have all been working together on Measure. We enjoyed learning about length and had great fun comparing the lengths of different flowers then putting them into the correct order from shortest to longest. Our Cubes group have worked so well on numbers to 20 and have revised addition to 10. The Counters group have been busy working on numbers to 100. Our next job is to start adding to 20. We are very excited!
This is a very special month when we remember all the people who have died. It is called the Month of the Holy Souls. In class we have been learning the ‘Eternal Rest’ prayer and saying it for all our loved ones. We have been praying that they are with God in heaven. On Remembrance Day we also paid tribute to the brave men and women who lost their lives during war. We made amazing pictures of poppy fields to mark the day. Mrs Simpson said we are little artists!
We have also started working on our school Nativity show alongside p1 and p3. We have learned our lines very well and we are amazing at singing our Nativity songs. We have been practising in the hall almost every day. We must remember to keep practising at home too, and hand in our outfits if we haven’t already done so.
This month we celebrated Bonfire Night. We learned how to keep safe when using fireworks. We also went on a bonfire word hunt in the classroom. Our favourite part of the day was making Rocket Fruit Kebabs. They were healthy and delicious.
This month we also celebrated Book Week Scotland. During the week, we had fantastic helpers from p7 come and read some stories with us. We also all received a special gift; a bag full of exciting books to read at home. We are so lucky!
On the last day of November we learned all about St. Andrew. We made stained glass window pictures in class. Later in the day we had a Scottish celebration with shortbread, Singing Kettle and stories about the Loch Ness Monster. We wore tartan too. We all looked so fancy!
We are looking forward to the fun month ahead in Primary 2. Don’t forget to check Twitter to keep up with what’s happening in our class.
Primary 1 November Update
The boys and girls in Primary 1 have been very busy learners in the month of November. Here are some of our highlights.
In Literacy we have been learning more alphabet sounds and we now know an amazing 15 sounds! We are using our magnetic boards and letters to help us to build our words. Using the 5 finger approach, we say/make/break/read and write our words. Here we are being independent learnings during our literacy tasks.
Primary 1 children love to read! We were really excited to bring back our classroom library and have had so much fun exploring the different genres and authors. Some of our children have learned to read independently and can blend the sounds to read words. What successful learners! We are using our stepping stones to help us to look at the first letter in a word and other special tricks to make reading easier.
For Book Week Scotland our buddies came to read to us. We really enjoyed listening to different stories and having fun with our friends from upstairs.
In Primary 1 we can now read, write and count the numbers to 10. We have been learning lots of new strategies during our numeracy time that help us to add our numbers and we love to use all of our concrete materials to help us with this. Adding is so much fun! We like to play number games and beat the teacher. We have been learning more about shapes and measuring too.
We love music and dancing in Primary 1. Our friend from Primary 7 came to play his instrument and we had a concert. We were so delighted to learn more about the accordion and listen to the wonderful music. Thank you!
On Remembrance Day we took part in lots of activities that helped us to learn more about Poppy Scotland. We made poppy crafts and prayed for the people that fought in war. We also prayed for the holy souls and our loved ones who are no longer with us.
We know how to be safe in Primary 1. We learned all about firework and bonfire safety when it was Guy Fawkes. We learned the story of Guy Fawkes and created our own firework pictures.
Here we are celebrating the feast of St Andrew. We wore tartan and Scottish clothing to school. We learned all about our Patron Saint and had lots of fun eating shortbread and dancing to ceilidh music.
As it is now Winter we have been investigating the changes that happen to our environment during this season. We went on a Winter walk with our friends and spotted lots of signs of Winter.
We have been working really hard to prepare for our Nativity show ‘Wriggly Nativity’ with our friends in Primary 2 and 3. Primary 1 have all been given a role to play and we are really looking forward to our show being posted on the Holy Family Youtube channel. Our singing and dancing is amazing!
December is going to be a very exciting month for us and we can’t wait for all of the festivities. Look out for our photographs on Twitter!
Primary 5/6 November Update
Primary 5/6 have had another successful month during November.
We have been working extremely hard in maths developing our multiplication and division skills. We have been learning new strategies and problem-solving skills to solve our sums. Through our consistent hard work during maths, we are now recognising the correlation between multiplication and division which aids our understanding of these numeracy topics even deeper, and as such, strengthens our skills.
We do a range of active maths exercises to supplement our learning such as Daily 10, multiplication and division bingo, Number Talks, and some others.
We have been showing great progress in literacy. We have been reading our literacy novels, ‘Holes’ by Louis Sachar and ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ by Roald Dahl. We have been applying our reading strategies throughout our novels, enabling us to gain a greater understanding of the texts. We have also been practising our oral skills by reading to our groups, in pairs, or to our self. We have also been enjoying watching chunks of both movie adaptions once we successfully complete our tasks.
Furthermore, we are enjoying learning our new spelling words each week. We work hard at learning our new phoneme of the week, spelling rule or common words.
We have been successful learners during our topic time. This month we explored interesting facts about capital cities. We played a Kahoot quiz during ICT time to assess our knowledge and later in the week, had another quiz where we had to press the buzzer to answer the capital city question. We then moved onto investigating foods from around the world and enjoyed tasting French cuisine by munching on crepes, macaroons, and croissants, whilst making our own menus.
We have been confident individuals during PE. We have been practising our striking and fielding skills on a Wednesday when we play Handball.
We have also been responsible citizens by making Christmas crafts to sell to the school on Wednesday, December 1st to raise money for Mary’s Meals.
P4 , November
We have been very busy in Primary 4. We are pleased to be back sitting in groups, where it is easier for us to work with partners. We have enjoyed taking part in upper school assemblies for the first time since Covid.
Literacy
We have 2 Spelling groups who have been working hard on Phonemes and Common Words. One group has also been working on Spelling Rules , which can be tricky. We get our new words on a Monday and then spend the week doing activities including Dictation ( with a partner or a teacher), Phoneme or Common Word Stories and whiteboard work. Ask us about Diacritical Marking- we are getting really good at it.
Sometimes , for fun, we play games like Spelling Tennis or Beat The Teacher. We are surprised when our teacher makes mistakes! Oops!
This month, we began some work on non-fiction. We have been learning about the features of a non-fiction book , such as Contents Page, Glossary or Index. We read Incredible Insects where we were shocked about what insects live in our homes. We started working on note-taking. We used bullet points so we didn’t need to write in full sentences.
During Anti- Bullying week, we explored how to be a good friend and wrote information reports about this. We’ve been trying to fit more conjunctions into our writing pieces.
We’ve also been working on letter to tell our families about some ways that we can be more eco-conscious at home and at school. Some of these changes may be too big to try ( such as getting an electric car) but even small changes make a big difference.
We tried blackout poetry on Remembrance Day, working with In Flanders Field, whilst remembering everyone we know who has been affected by war.
Numeracy
We have been working hard on Addition. We have been doing a variety of different activities to support our learning. We do Number Talks, Daily 10 and Textbook work swell as playing games, doing board work and worksheets.
Every day in class, we talk about time. Here are some examples of the types of questions we answer.
- How long is it till lunchtime?
- When will it be 3 o’clock?
- You have 10 minutes to finish, When will the be?
- How many seconds are left in a minute, if we have gone through 30 seconds?
This will all help us to be more confident using Time. We have started talking more about minutes to, which is a bit tricky. Please help us with this at home.
We keep up with out Tables by playing games. We know that the 4x Table is double the 2x Table. Some of us have realised that this can help us with the 8xTable. We will do the same with the 3x Table and the 6x Table.
RE
We have learned a lot about Saints during this month. We were very disappointed that our display on the Apostles was ruined by a leak from upstairs. We learned about St Margaret of Scotland on her feast day.We are now concentrating on St Andrew. We had a Remembrance Tree to remember everyone that we have loved and lost.
We often watch Being Catholic where we can see Sunday’s Gospel. We watch parts of the Mass to help us with our Mass responses. This is a big year for some of our children who will be making their First Communion. We want to be ready for that special day.
Social Studies
As part of our RE work on Remembrance Day, We read a novel called War Game. It had a very sad ending and was based on the author’s real family. We new able to do some lovely artwork for Remembrance Day.
Health and Well -Being
We have worked hard on anti bullying lessons and we will continue to talk about how to be a good friend.
We have continued to work on ball skills. We have followed warm ups on YouTube which help us to keep our bodies safe. We are working with partners and in groups.
We have lots of pictures over on Twitter so please go over to see what we are up to!
P4 update
We are so sorry you haven’t had an update from P4 for a while now. The good thing in, there’s lots of news to share with you!
We started the year harvesting fruit and vegetables from the school grounds. The children absolutely loved this experience and trying all the different flavours; some of them for the very first time!
In RE, we learned about how Liturgical Colours are different depending on the time of year in the Christian calendar. We worked in groups to create decoupage vestments to be displayed.
In PE, we have been working on our ball skills. We’ve used footballs for passing, dribbling and shooting using our feet; basketballs for passing, dribbling and shooting using our hands; and tennis balls for bouncing and returning shots.
We have been studying The Victorians and learning all about Queen Victoria’s reign. What do you think of our Victorian portraits?
As an extra project, the pupils in P4 are helping Mrs Cooney sort the library. They have had some great ideas about how to improve the area and have been a great help gathering and sorting some of the books.
During Maths Week Scotland, we looked at 2D shape and tiling. Look at all these happy faces doing active maths:
(some of their ideas for the library)
HHelping to sort the library and also using it to do some independent reading.
During October, P4 learned about the Mysteries of the Rosary. Here is some super artwork showing the Joyful Mysteries:
Some of our FANTASTIC readers from the past few weeks:
As part of our Eco work on Climate Change, we took part in a live lesson involving schools from all over North Lanarkshire. We watched and responded to presentations by NL Youth Climate Ambassadors about Travel and one from Stuart Naismith from Gartcosh PS all about renewable energy.
Look out for a letter from your child very soon!
Of course, there was also Hallowe’en! Everyone came in dressed up in weird and wonderful outfits! Even Mrs Cooney was dressed as Cinderella – but after making messy donut-and-pretzel spiders, she felt a lot more like Cinders BEFORE she had met her Fairy Godmother!
We bowled a pumpkin at some toilet rolls and we did a spooky parade. I will also send everyone their very own Hallowe’en portrait – check your emails, P4!
It won’t be long before I’m updating you all about the Christmas activities we’ll be getting up to!
Primary 6 Update
Welcome, Primary 6 have had a very busy few months since returning back to school in August. We would like to share what we have been doing with you all.
Maths – We started off with revision, after the year we have all had we needed to remember the foundations of maths. So far we have covered place value, addition, subtraction, fractions decimals and percentages (which will be getting covered again in term 2). Number Talks have really helped our mental agility and helped with our number bonds and doubles for our sums. We are now looking at multiplication and division before moving on to co-ordinates and symmetry. We had lots of fun for Halloween making 3D pumpkins and Halloween sum pictures. Mrs Speirs has planned lots of fun Christmas maths actives for us so we are really excited about this.
Literacy- We started off this term by all reading the same novel called Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo. This is called a model text so Mrs Speirs could demonstrate all the reading strategies to us and help us understand the novel/ author better. We really enjoyed this novel as we got to find out about the different countries and the history of Kensuke. There was lots of cliff hangers that kept us wanting to read more. After the October holidays we have been put into groups. The Yellow group is reading Dark Isle by DA Nelson and the red group is reading Saving Finnegan by Sally Grindley. This time we have the novels home with us to read which is helping our fluency and expression. We all still love story writing and so far we have enjoyed recount, persuasive, imaginative and now instructional. We are learning to add in more details to our story and new interesting vocabulary to make sure the reader stays engaged in our stories.
RE – We started off by looking into the Feast of the Assumption which we celebrated back in August. We have created a wonderful RE wall and Alter in our classroom. We have been exploring the Bible in more detail and looking into Jesus first miracle. We explored the importance of Mary as a mother figure and the impact she had on Jesus. We compared Mary as the mother of Jesus and the qualities and skills she had as a mother comparing her to our own mother. We have been lucky enough to take part in our class First Friday Mass. We all loved being back in chapel to celebrate as a class and the Holy Family parishioners. The month of October being the Holy Rosary, the children have learned to pray the Rosary and have visited Holy Family Church to pray in the garden. We have been learning about All Saints Day and creating our own November List for our class.
Topic/ Science – Our topic this term has been Oceans and Continents which has also been incorporated with climate change and COP26. We have been learning how many there are, the names of countries that are in each continent, the climate, economy, tourist attractions and culture. We have been taking a closer look at how we can help look after these continents and Oceans and how we can cut back on pollution. Having COP26 take place in Glasgow has made us very aware of the problems we face in this world and how change needs to happen and how we can make this change happen. We have been very active in this and even managed to make our own Rain Gauge. We were very shocked at how much rain we collected in such a short space of time.
Expressive Arts – We love Art in this class and we really enjoy experimenting with different materials to create different pieces of Art. We have been learning about Vincent Van Gogh and his love for oil pastels and water colours. We even managed to recreate his famous water colour painting called Sunflowers. We enjoy mixing the paint with the water and creating different colours. We created lots of topic art included pollution posters. We also created Halloween bats and Autumn wreaths and we even collected our own leaves from the park. We have beautiful firework chalk drawings this week and we all cannot wait until we can start with our Christmas activities.
Emotion Works/ Heath and Welbeing – We have been working hard on dealing with our emotions and talking about how we feel. There has been so much happen to us all over the past year we feel it’s better to talk and draw about how we are feeling. We have been trying out meditation in class, we found this hard to begin with as staying still and switching off was hard but now finding this a lot easier and receiving the benefits from this. We have been acting out different emotions our bodies go through and are aware that a lot can happen to us in Primary 6. God’s loving plan will start on the 8th November for the Primary 6.
We are all becoming Responsible Citizens, Successful Learner, Effective Contributors and Confident Individuals in Primary 6. We cannot wait to show you what else we have planned for the rest of the term and for term 2. We have really enjoyed being back at school now as things slowly start to get back to some sort of normal. Thank you for reading what we have been up to,
From Primary 6 and Mrs Speirs
Primary 7 October 2021
Primary 7 have been working really hard in the month of October. They have really enjoyed being buddies this year and have been able to accompany their buddies this month on the beat the street walks. They also have had some joint playtimes with them.
In literacy we have just finished our modelling block of ‘divided city’ all of the children seemed to really enjoy this and have learned a lot about sectarianism. We have now all started novels, there are 3 in the class, ‘Mosi’s War’, ‘Kensuke’s Kingdom’ and ‘no trouble at all’ Each group will be working on these in class and may have some reading to do at home also in the coming weeks.
In Maths we have been working on addition and subtraction. The class are very good at this and are developing their written and mental strategies. Next we will be moving on to multiplication. If they could practise times tables at home this would be great.
In health and wellbeing we have been looking at peer pressure and they effects this can have on us. We have also been looking at ways to avoid and tackle these types of situations. In October we also started to learn about DNA in science. This is very interesting and will have us all thinking about our inherited traits.
For our topic we have been looking at the continents of the world. This has been really fun and has prepared us for the COP26 conference which we are focusing on now. We will be looking at a lot of climate change problems and thinking about what we can do to help with this problem. We have a good project for homework which is due on the 16th of November.
Thanks for reading
Parent Council Meeting
Here is the link to tonight’s Parent Council Meeting….
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85098589089?pwd=bG9xZkU4Nm9mNW90TDBVSGo2RXFtdz09
Meeting ID: 850 9858 9089Passcode: 6U7CER
This will take place at 6.30 pm. Please help support your child’s school by joining.
P3/4 October Update
The children in Primary 3/4 have had a very busy few months since returning to school so we would like to share some of their learning with you.
In Maths the children have been learning a variety of approaches and strategies to aid them in their learning. In Number Talks they are developing secure mental strategies that they can draw upon when faced with any calculation. Through this the children demonstrate that they are confident individuals as they eagerly share their responses, solutions and justifications. The children know how to estimate and round numbers to the nearest tens, hundreds and thousands. They have used concrete materials to explore Place Value and this has really helped with Addition so far and will help as they continue to develop skills in subtraction, multiplication and division.
In Literacy the children continue to work hard on their Spelling, Reading and Writing. The Green Group have been learning all about phoneme families and are learning to use spelling strategies such as ‘word within a word’, ‘compound words’ and ‘syllabification’. Ask them to demonstrate how these help them work out tricky or new words.
The Red Group are working through the Active Literacy programme and are learning new phonemes and common words each. The children love to look for these sounds and words in their surroundings and get very excited when they spot them.
In addition to their various Home Reading Books, the boys and girls have been reading ‘Poppet’, a story about a baby African Elephant who becomes friends with a little mouse. The children have used this to develop their comprehension skills and are working hard to produce answers in full sentences. 
In Health and Wellbeing the children have been learning about staying safe and healthy. They take every opportunity to get outdoors for PE and have been effective contributors to our school community by participating in Beat the Street. Friday afternoons are spent with their friends in Primary 2/3 at Hope Street Park as a fun way to end their hardworking week.
With October being the month of the Holy Rosary the children have learned how to pray the Rosary and have visited Holy Family Church every Tuesday with primary 2/3 to pray in the gardens. This has been a really lovely experience for us all and it is wonderful to see the children enjoying being in the Church again. Please try and provide this opportunity for children by attending Sunday Mass, especially if the children are making their sacraments this year.
The boys and girls also participated in their Class STEM challenge ‘Spaghetti Towers’ where they used Spaghetti and Marshmallows to design and build a freestanding tower. They loved this and look forward to doing more challenges throughout the year. 
Our IDL topic has been the Vikings and the children have developed a range of skills across many areas of the curriculum, they made 3D Longships and explored symmetry when designing their own Viking shields. They also used the knowledge that they have gained to create posters giving others information all about the Vikings, their lifestyles and their beliefs.
The children have recently began to learn all about Climate Change and what is happening during COP26. They have been learning about what Pope Francis said in Laudato Si and are eager to demonstrate that they are responsible citizens by contributing individually, as a class, and as part of the whole school to help tackle the impact of Climate Change on their World.
As you can see the children have experienced many successes as learners over the last few months so what better way to celebrate this than a fun filled Halloween Party which they are so excited about.
