Click on the link below to view our diary for w.b. 19th Feb 2024.

HF Diary 19022024

Primary 3 January Update

It was so lovely to see the children again after the Christmas Holidays! They were excited to share all of the stories of their time spent at home with family and friends.

In  Literacy this term, we are continuing to develop our reading skills, remembering to change the tone of our voices so that we keep the listener interested.  We have been learning to stop at full stops in our reading and read smoothly, trying to sound out unfamiliar words using our spelling skills such as :

• look for a phoneme
• syllabification (break word into parts eg, win/dow)
• blending the letter sounds together

In listening, we are focussing on turn taking in conversations as we sometimes get very excited to share our news and answers that we end up speaking over one another.

In writing, we continue to focus on using our Core Targets which is helping our writing make sense and be neatly presented. We are very proud of the progress we are making and can’t wait to show our hard work on Parent’s Night!

Numeracy and Maths 

Throughout the last few weeks the children have been working on division, they have used a variety of concrete and pictorial materials to help explore this and are able to use a variety of strategies to help. They are recognising that secure knowledge of multiplication facts can help them. They have also been exploring the properties of 2d and 3d shape with Miss Cairney.

Literacy

The pupils are enjoying their new novels and are further developing their reading strategies through these. They have been taking notes as they read and then  and writing summaries to express their understanding . They have been also been writing Instructions, using our Science Experiments as a stimulus. This has really helped the children and they have have produced some really good writing.

HWB

The children have been learning about how important it is to ensure they keep their bodies and minds active. In PE we have been developing new skills in Hockey  and are currently competing in a class tournament. They are really enjoying this and are able to identify the rules of the game, use specific terminology associated with the game and recognise and describe how to keep themselves and others safe in the game.

OTHER AREAS

Primary 5 are busy learning  about the skills and qualities that they will need both now and in their future. They have considered future employment and what this may look like for them and have researched various jobs and what was required to work in that field. They had an interesting workshop delivered by the Social Enterprise Academy which taught them about ‘Social Enterprise’ and how we can use our skills to bring about positive change. The children are very excited and they are working hard on their business plans; watch this space Our Primary 5 Entrepreneurs have some fantastic ideas.

Welcome back!

In January we came back to school after our Winter break, and we were so excited to see our friends and catch up with all our news. We celebrated the new year by learning all about Hogmanay and we made some amazing new year’s resolutions. We enjoyed discussing all our targets for the year ahead, learned about how the new year is celebrated around the world and we even danced to Auld Lang Syne.

We have now settled back into our class routine and reminded ourselves of our class rules. We love our new Beat the Teacher chart and have been trying our best to behave well and work hard in order to win Beat the Teacher points. We try so hard to follow our Golden Rules when we sit on the floor during teaching time. Our Golden Rules are:

Eyes Looking

Ears Listening

Good Sitting

Brainboxes Switched On

Hands Up/No Shouting Out

Within Maths we have continued to work hard on number. We have learned lots of new strategies to help us add within 20 such as doubles, near doubles and friendly numbers. We enjoy learning through play, and we have participated in active learning to explore number bonds for numbers up to 20. We like to try to solve problems mentally and help each other lots by discussing ways that may help others. We began working on Chilli Challenges this month and we love to solve problems and share how we get our answers. We have also been learning about Time in January. We have been doing lots of activities in order to learn about the days of the week and months of the year. We are now able to recognise both o’clock and half past on both analogue and digital clocks. Please ask us to tell the time as often as possible so we can practise our new skill. We will work on Subtraction and Fractions in February.

Within Literacy we have continued to work on our weekly sounds and common words. We completed an assessment and will bring home a list of sounds/words that we should spend time working on with an adult, to help us to become successful learners.

In Writing we began learning about writing instructions. We thought about where we have seen instructions, and why we need them. Linking to our Scotland topic, we learned the Skyscraper Wean song and we made jam sandwiches then created instructions on how to make a ‘Jeely Piece’.

We have also been learning about writing persuasively. We learned about Nessie and wrote a lovely letter asking her to visit Holy Family. We also wrote a letter to Mrs Harley to ask if we could have a longer lunch break. We thought of lots of interesting ways to persuade her. We hope she considers these requests!

We try very hard to remember our core writing targets both within our weekly taught writing lesson and within our class daily writing but sometimes this can be a bit tricky for us. Please try hard to practise writing words that include our new sounds, our weekly common words and simple sentences with us. This would really help us to write more independently.

We have been working hard on our talking and listening skills this month and trying to remember not to interrupt when others are speaking. We have been practising how to be good listeners by working in pairs and groups to complete tasks. We have also been super listeners as we explore books related to our new topic.

In P.E we have been learning about Gymnastics. We have discovered lots of new body shapes and ways to move our bodies. We have enjoyed working with the mats in our gym hall and have begun to link actions and skills together in a routine.

In R.E. we have studied the topic ‘My Uniqueness’. We have been learning that God created us all as special and unique. We have been embracing our differences and the unique gifts that God gave us. We have also learned that many people have different beliefs but that we should be kind to everyone. We will now begin to explore other world religions and will begin by developing our knowledge and understanding of Islam.

Our new topic is Scotland. We have looked at pictures of Scotland on the map and spoke about some big cities in our country. We learned about Loch Ness and the story of Nessie. We made our own pictures of Nessie to hang in our classroom. We learned about Heilan Coos (highland cows) and plan to make our own mini highland cows in February.  Last week we celebrated Burns Day at school. We learned so much about the Scottish poet Robert Burns and we also tasted shortbread and some yummy Irn Bru. We made beautiful portraits of Rabbie Burns and they are displayed in our class. Mrs Simpson thought we were brilliant, and we earned a ‘Beat the Teacher’ point for our hard work.

Miss Cairney has been teaching us all about Space. We can now name the planets in our solar system and have learned that we live on Earth. We can’t wait to explore this topic further.

We can’t wait for February and all the exciting learning opportunities we will have. We will learn about internet safety next month and we will soon celebrate Global Play Day when we can bring a toy to school to play with our friends. We will also begin our Easter preparations and learn about Ash Wednesday and Lent.

Just a reminder that our P.E. days are Wednesdays and Thursdays. We should wear yellow t shirts, black shorts or tracksuit bottoms and appropriate footwear. We should bring a water bottle to school as we often feel thirsty when exercising.

Homework is given out each Monday and should be handed in on Thursday. Homework helps us to consolidate all the learning we have done in class. It also allows our grown ups to see what we need extra help with. Please try to complete this every week and speak to Mrs Simpson if you find this difficult. Reading our reading book every night will also help us to develop important reading skills which will help us lots.  We should try hard to remember to bring our reading book to school each day as we need to use these for reading and associated tasks.

Welcome back everyone!

January has been a very busy month and we all have been working hard on getting back into our daily routines. Primary 6 said goodbye to our Scottish Myths and Legends topic and ventured onto learning our brand-new topic of Circular Economy. Which we have all been enjoying and being able to work in small groups creating and designing a product/service that fits into the circular economy business plan model. This is a current live challenge hosted by Young Enterprise Scotland who will be visiting our class in the upcoming weeks and by the end of the challenge, one group being selected to go through to the final showcase where they will be presenting their business plan to a panel of judges.

In Literacy, we continue with our spelling programmes which is very important to keep up regular practise at home to help carry out our spelling strategies in class. We have also started new novels, Marvellous Matilda’s have been reading ‘A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll’ and Fantastic Foxes have been reading ‘Dinosaur Trouble by Dick King-Smith’. We continue to use a range of reading strategies while reading our novels which include, creating detailed visualisers of a character within the book and analysing and drawing evidence from the novel. This helps us build a character profile and we can refer to this throughout the rest of the novel.

In Maths, we completed our Term 1 maths assessments covering topics like place value, rounding, addition and subtraction. It was good to see prior knowledge coming into play when they came back from the holidays and achieving good results in this assessment. Mr Rice wants to ensure the retention of maths skills remains high so for homework each week, we will be given a worksheet covering a range of questions to consolidate prior learning throughout our new term. We have been continuing with multiplication and division through a range of strategies, looking at multiples, factors and primes as well as working with Mrs Nixon on properties of 2D and 3D shapes.

Primary 6 have also been working alongside Mossend Primary with the charity, Nil by Mouth, focusing on raising awareness of the issues surrounding sectarianism within our society. Drawing out personal attitudes, views and experiences while encouraging people to challenge sectarianism in our own lives and in wider society. We have also enjoyed participating in a NLC Resettlement workshop with Primary 6/7 which focused on raising awareness of refugees.

Within PE, we have moved on to our new topic, Gymnastics. We started learning about each other’s experiences in the topic, we have some classmates who attend a gymnastics club after school which was good to share some of our personal achievements together before we started the topic. We have been learning about different types of jumps to learning a range of different types of rolls. Performing different vaulting movements, performing a hurdle step into a cartwheel and round-off. Which has now led us onto performing a series of similar movements, linked together to form a sequence in our upcoming PE lessons.

Just a reminder for homework which will be handed out weekly on a Monday and should be brought back in on a Friday. Our PE days are both Wednesday and Thursday afternoons and children should come to school in full uniform and get changed for PE.

Thank you and have a great month of February everyone!

Mr Rice and Primary 6

After a lovely holiday, we are working hard at getting back into our good routines. We are reminding ourselves of our Class Charter as we wrote it together to help us be our best in primary 4.

• Play. Be nice to others and they’ll be nice to you. We are working on thinking about how to be a good friend to others.
• Learn. Listen to the teacher and when other children are talking. Listening to the teacher is very important for good learning, as is turn taking with other children.
• Safe. Be helpful to everyone, including teachers. We are making sure our class and school is a safe place to be in, by, for example,  following rules on how to move about the school and keeping our class tidy.

Homework

It’s never too late to start homework activities. It is always available on the school website. If your child is ever off and not too ill, you can always use the homework to keep up with the class.

First Communion

The children making their First Communion have started their workbooks which will be sent home on a Wednesday and should be brought back on a Monday. We have started early incase we have weeks where we don’t manage to do everything we need. This will give us lots of time at the end to prepare for the First Communion day in the church. The most important preparation is regular attendance at Mass.

Literacy

Reading

The Red and Blue groups are busy with novels. Please take care of these as they are a very precious resource for the school. Reading their novel at home really supports the class work and ensures that your child keeps up with their group. The Red group are reading The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark and the Blue group are reading Horrid Henry. The Yellow group have begun an exciting new series called Rapid Readers which have a fiction and non fiction part in each book.

We started with a non fiction book called How A Book Is Made. Through this book, we have been learning about Main Ideas and Summarising A Text. Summarising is a very tricky strategy because our teachers are asking us to write less, instead of more! This is confusing but we will practise until we understand it.

Spelling

We continue with our spelling programmes. This is very important work and regular practise at home will really help us with our phonemes, common words and rules.

Writing

We have been doing writing with Mrs Byrne. We wrote a Personal story about our holidays and Mrs Byrne has begun Explanation work by modelling a piece for us. We have also written a poem to celebrate Burns Day.

Numeracy and Maths

We have been working hard on our Tables, to help us with Multiplication and Division. We have been looking at strategies to support this work, like

• Repeated Subtraction and Addition
• Grouping
• Using Arrays

We have started Information handling with Mrs Byrne, including work related to Burns Day.

Topic

We are very enthusiastic in our new topic of Scottish Inventors. We have already learned about John Logie Baird and Alexander Graham Bell. Many of us have already done personal work , which will be proudly displayed in our class. All of our personal work on the Titanic have been returned to us to make way.

Art

We have just started work on Charles Rennie Mackintosh. We are learning about his life and his many talents. We are working on recreating his famous rose.

Drama

Miss Cairney has been working with us one drama work.  We have been building up our skills in expression to convey characters using body language and facial expression, then using this to make freeze frames or short improvised scenes. This is related to our Health and Well Being work in Emotionworks.

Health and Well Being

We are continuing our work on Roots of Empathy, where we have been exploring different themes, such as Taking Care Of A Baby and Crying. We love to see baby Lily every 3 weeks and see how many new skills she has acquired!

Welcome back!

January was a month of completing projects and novels! We said goodbye to our World War 2 topic. After we came back in January we learned all about Alan Turing, a brilliant WW2 code breaker who invented a machine to decipher the Enigma Code. We had a go of trying to decipher war messages which turned out to be harder than it looks! We also learned about the Allied Invasion of Normandy, also known as D-Day and had a go of creating our own version of this strategic plan. We finished off our topic with an interesting discursive essay looking at the relevance of learning about the Second World War.

We have then moved onto our next topic, the Circular Economy. This is an enterprising challenge where we have been put into groups and have to create a product or service that fits into the circular economy business model. This is a live challenge hosted by Young Enterprise Scotland who will be visiting our class sometime in February! At the end of the challenge, a few lucky groups may be selected to go through to the final showcase where we will need to present our enterprising business plans to a panel of judges.

For Primary 7, we completed our brilliant novel, Holes by Louis Sachar. From our evaluations, it is safe to say we absolutely loved this book and the fun activities we were able to do such as creating Sploosh! We are excited to start our new novel, Divided City which will explore themes of sectarianism and friendship. We think this links in nicely to our work we are doing with the charity, Nil by Mouth, alongside our friends at Mossend Primary.

We completed a Term 1 maths assessment and are super proud of our results! Miss Gallagher wants to ensure the retention of maths skills remains high so for homework each week, we will be given a maths worksheet with questions covering various maths operations. We will go through our answers in class each Friday morning.

We would like to welcome Miss Sloan to our class. She is a student teacher who will be with us for several weeks. We are sure she will be a valuable part of our class!

Welcome back!

We have all settled back into our school routines and are working hard to reach our learning goals during our school day. To begin our journey through 2024 we set some personal targets and talked about the ways that we can achieve these during our school day. We enjoyed wishing each other a Happy New Year and had a pretend Hogmanay celebration, complete with a countdown, fireworks, cannons, and singing/dancing. We made some New Year promises and talked about what a resolution is and whey we make these. Primary 1 and Mrs Stevenson are really looking forward to the months ahead and are raring to go!

Literacy

We have been working so hard to learn all our alphabet sounds in Primary 1. This week we covered our final letters and are now consolidating our learning. Our teacher would like to check that we know all of our alphabet sounds, what they sound like in words and what their names are. We are going to be working at home too to practise our sounds.

Our next step will be to learn some phoneme sounds, which we are also very excited about.  We will hopefully be able to find our sounds in stories and recognise them when reading our books. When we are writing our wonderful sentences, we are trying hard to include capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. We have been learning about exclamation marks and question marks and have been spotting them in our reading too. Our next step will be trying to use these in our sentences too.

Our common word wall is becoming very full in the classroom and we are working hard every day to practise reading and writing our words. We can build sentences using them and spot them in books and when we use the internet in the classroom for our learning. At home we should continue to learn our common words, practise our sounds and reading to help us to keep up this great learning.

Mrs Stevenson has been delighted with the excellent listening and concentrating we have been doing during our literacy tasks. We really have gained some fantastic skills since joining the school. Well done Primary 1!

Numeracy

In Primary 1 we continue to extend our knowledge of numbers and we are now comfortable in reading, writing, counting and ordering numbers to 10. We are now extending our learning to 11-20.  Some of our class can even use the 100 square and count with 3-digit numbers, fantastic! We have been practising adding and subtracting with numbers up to 10 and enjoy our daily challenges, like daily 10 and number of the day to help us to learn more. We like to talk about our mental strategies with our classmates and this can help us to share our great ideas and learn more about number.

This week we have been learning more about days of the week and calendars. We have learned how to tell o’clock times on analogue clocks and are looking forward to learning more about time during our maths activities. If we have a watch at home, we can wear it to school to help us to become more confident when reading clocks.

Interdisciplinary Learning

We have been learning all about Scotland this month. We looked at Scotland on a world map and discussed the different countries we could see. We couldn’t believe how much water surrounded our island. That brought us to our next investigation – Scottish lochs and trying to find out if Nessie is real or if it is a made-up story. We loved watching clips about Nessie, reading the story ‘There is no such thing as Nessie’, making our Wanted posters and writing Nessie stories. We made some 3D Nessie artwork that is displayed in our classroom.

We have explored Scottish artefacts and even held a real sporran, glengarry hat and a quaich. We learned about Scottish clans and tartan. Primary 1 thought this was great fun and asked lots of excellent questions. We hope that Mrs Stevenson’s dad gives her more artefacts to share soon.

To celebrate Robert Burns’ Day on the 25^th of January we held a Burns celebration in the classroom. We learned all about the Scottish Poet’s life and heard some of his songs/poems. Our favourite was ‘Auld Lang Syne’ which we danced to after our shortbread.

Click on the link below to view our diary for the week ahead.

HF Diary 15012024

Primary 6 have been busy in all areas of the curriculum this month, learning new skills and working hard within the school too.

In Literacy, we have been working in our reading groups working very hard throughout our reading comprehension strategies. Marvellous Matilda’s have been reading a book called Tribes by Catherine MacPhail and Fantastic Foxes have not long finished the book The Queen’s Nose by Dick King-Smith. We have also been continuing to work our way through the NLC Active Literacy programme focussing on spelling strategies and rules, and a range of writing genres with both Mr Rice and Mrs Nixon.

In Maths, we have been currently learning about Multiplication and adding and subtracting Decimals, multiplying large numbers, and using different strategies to work out our answers. We continue to focus on mental maths skills and have been learning a variety of strategies during Number Talks to explain our thinking.

Primary 6 have been working collaboratively with the Primary 6’s from the Primary 7/6 class on their Scottish Song ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’ by The Proclaimers, which they performed on St Andrews Day at the school assembly. Well done to all that practised their lyrics and did a fantastic job on the day!

In RE, Primary 6 have been learning about the different Saints we have and researching about the faith and inspiration of the Saints. Also, we have been carrying out God’s Loving Plan and have been making great progress in this aspect of the curriculum. From making class contracts and having great discussions in class together to understand what God’s Loving Plan is.

In IDL, we have moved onto our new topic ‘Scottish Myths and Legends’ and have been carrying out a lot of independent research as well as group research. We are currently working on home projects, creating a Scottish Myth or Legend out of recyclable materials to display at our IDL wall. The class have really enjoyed this topic and enjoy sharing what they know about different Scottish Myths and Legends they research.

In PE, we have not long finished Target Games which we have all enjoyed and, in the end, creating our own target game in small groups and presenting these games to the class to carry out as a whole class, demonstrating our skills that we have learned and consolidating our learning together. We have also moved onto Social Dancing for the lead up to our Christmas Party this year and have been working hard alongside Primary 7/6 and Primary 5 in practising different Scottish songs and dances to carry out at the Christmas Party.

Some of our Primary 6 pupils also participated in Cross Country which we were training for during parts of our PE slots and some Friday afternoons. A couple of pupils in Primary 6 had some successful high places within our Primary 6 Boy and Girl races, which we were all so happy for and congratulate them in reaching the finals for next year to participate in! Congratulations to all pupils in Holy Family that had taken part, you should all be so proud of yourselves!

Primary 6 also carried out the Christmas Fayre and Tombola stalls which was a great success, and we are all very proud of each other for how busy the day was and to have a result of each stall sold out by the end of the day was a great success for each of the classes Christmas Crafts. Well done to everyone who worked extremely hard in creating these Christmas Crafts, they were all fantastic!

We have a busy and fun filled couple of weeks leading up to Christmas so please continue to check the school website for any important updates.

Thank you and have a great month of December!

Mr Rice and Primary 6