Primary 4 Update.

We have had a busy month , which has gone by very quickly.

First Communion

Our biggest event was the First Communion for many of our students. It was a beautiful day for everyone. The teachers were very proud, and we are sure the families were too. This is the start of a life long journey of faith and we are very proud to have been part of it . We hope the children continue to have a close relationship with Jesus, through the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist.

Literacy

We have been very impressed with the amount of children who have created their own presentations and shared them with their friends. We have learned so much about the natural world from these young investigators! We have many future David Attenborourghs in our class!

We have been continuing with our spelling programmes, with weekly homework to support our work in class. We have many pupils who say that doing their homework regularly has made them much more confident. As part of our class work, we have been working on making our sentences more interesting through good vocabulary and punctuation.

We have all been reading novels this month. We have enjoyed talking about different characters, examining the vocabulary used in the novels and working out what the author is really telling us. We also enjoy talking about what we already know. This relates to the reading strategies that we will use in the future. Some groups have been working on writing summaries of the chapters we have read. It really helps us in class, if we bring our novel every day as we need it to do our written tasks.

We have been working on recounts as part of our writing work and working on extending our work and editing it , by ourselves or with a partner.

Numeracy and Maths

We have worked very hard on Multiplication and Division , which then helped us as we moved on to Fractions. Our teachers were delighted at how well we grasped how these are all connected. If we can multiply, we can also divide. This helped us to understand fractions, where we worked on halves, quarters, tenths, fifths and some children managed more tricky fractions. Some really smart children even mentioned percentages and understood how these worked.

We were even able to connect this to our work on data handling. Many children knew that 11 out of 22 children who chose chocolate as their favourite snack was the same as one half.

Health and Wellbeing

Our teachers have been so impressed with our levels of fitness during athletics lessons. We have been working on building our stamina and skills, with impressive results. We have also been working on co-operating with our team members and supporting everyone in our group. Our teachers have noticed that we are getting much better at that as the year goes on.  Well done everyone! Give yourself a pat on the back!

Topic

We did some work on natural disasters . We loved to see what can happen to our world, such as tsunamis and earthquakes. We really enjoyed making our own volcanoes with Miss McCulloch.

June

By the time you read this, we will have had a chance to have a party for our First Communion. We will be joined by our class-mates who supported us over the last few months with great patience. We want to thank them for that.

We have taken many photos which are over on Twitter.

Primary 2 have had a very exciting month. We have been working very hard and celebrated lots and lots of successes in May.

In maths we have been learning about multiplication and division. We began by making sets of items. We then learned about the multiplication sign and what it means. We are able to solve lots of multiplication problems now. We have also been sharing things equally when learning about division. Here are some of the fun activities that we have been doing to help us to be great learners.

In literacy, we are still working hard on all our sounds and common words. We have been doing lots of work with Mrs Simpson on writing sentences independently. We are getting so good at this. We have been reading lots more reading books and completing lots of activities based on our books. We must remember to read our books every night at home as this will help us lots in school. Some of primary 2 boys and girls have been very lucky and have a Reading Buddy from primary 5/6 who reads our books with us. We really appreciate the help that those kind children give to us.

In May we have been celebrating the Month of Mary. We learned about the Holy Rosary and said lots of prayers to Mary our mother. Primary 2 also lead the First Friday Mass at the beginning of May. We were such a great example to the other boys and girls in the school, and we made Father Brown and all the teachers very proud. Here are some of the children who read aloud and who participated in the offertory during our Mass.

We have been working hard on our Fairyland topic this month. We received a very important letter from Cinderella who had a very important task for us to do. She had lost one of her glass slippers and she asked us to design a new one for her. We all made beautiful creations.

Cinderella was so pleased that she sent some fun tasks for us to complete.

We also helped the sad troll from the Three Billy Goats Gruff story by writing a letter to the king to tell him that the billy goats had tricked him and that he is actually very kind. We made fantastic troll pictures to decorate our class.

Through the story of Little Red Riding Hood we have been learning about Stranger Danger within Health and Wellbeing. During this topic, we identified safer strangers and what we should do if a stranger approached us. We loved playing safer stranger bingo with Miss Goldie.

We have also been learning about our teeth and how to keep them healthy. Our favourite active learning this month has been our karate lesson during Health/Eco week. We learned lots of new skills whilst having lots of fun.

Primary 2 have also been learning about the Platinum Jubilee. We read a lovely book about the queen called There Once Is A Queen and discussed the upcoming celebrations. We researched lots of information about Queen Elizabeth II and we made our own bunting and silhouette collage pictures. Our class looks fit for a royal visit with all our new artwork.

Our favourite part of the month was the cinematic experience organised by Mrs Anderson and primary 7. We had a ball watching our favourite movies and eating lots of snacks. We want to say a huge thank you to primary 7 for our fun afternoon.

We are looking forward to our last month in primary 2 and the adventures we will experience in June. We can’t wait for lots more fun and learning. Please keep an eye on Twitter for regular updates from our class.

Please click this link for the latest newsletter:

April Newsletter (Word version)

April Newsletter (PDF version)

We will also be collecting batteries to potentially win the school £4000 to spend on our outdoor area! Please start collecting batteries. You can hand them in to school or into your local supermarket. Just let us know how many you’ve collected and we can add it to our total. More info here:

https://www.bigbatteryhunt.co.uk

1st Prize  £4,000 for outdoor playground equipment £200 of Schools Direct vouchers towards school equipment 1x Nintendo Switch and £100 games voucher for winning pupil 1x certificate for each participating pupil in the class 1x trophy

1 x Runner up £200 of Schools Direct vouchers towards school equipment £125 of Waterstones vouchers for the school library 1x iPad for winning pupil 1x certificate for each participating pupil in the class 1x trophy

 

March was a very busy month for Primary 2. We finished off term 2 with lots of great work and fun activities.

Maths

In Maths we continued to work on Addition. We used lots of concrete materials to help us to understand lots of different strategies for solving addition problems.

We also worked very hard on our topic about Fractions. We learned all about halves and quarters of shapes or amounts, and how to half/quarter numbers. Here are some of our superstars investigating which shapes can be quartered and which ones can’t.

When we studied Data Handling, we had lots of fun learning about bar graphs. We found out what everyone was having for lunch one day then made a huge bar graph on our class smartboard. At first we found Carroll diagrams difficult, but we quickly began to learn that they were easy!

Literacy

In Literacy we have been working through our programme of sounds and common words. We know that we should practise these lots at home to help us to get even better at reading and writing.  Here are some pictures of us practising our common words on a sunny March day.

We have been working hard on our independent writing again this month. Mrs Simpson can’t believe how neat our handwriting is! We have also been trying really hard to give things a go when we write our stories and recounts. If we are stuck on how to spell a word, we don’t let the word beat us – we try to think of all our strategies for spelling words that we have already learned. Here are some of our March Star Writers.

R.E.

March was a very special time in Holy Family Primary. At the beginning of the month we had Ash Wednesday which led us into Lent. During Lent we tried very hard to stick to the Lenten promises which we made. We also participated in lots of fun activities in order to raise money for Lenten charities. Here are some photos of all the fun things we did during Lent.

We also spent lots of time thinking about the Easter story. We felt very sad for Jesus that he had to face lots of pain and suffering. We thought of ways that we could be kind at Easter too.

This month we had Science Week. The focus for Science Week 2022 was Growth. We did lots of exciting activities based on growth during our week. Some of our favourite activities were going on a scavenger hunt, growing rainbows, growing cress and learning about the life cycle of a frog. Here are some pictures of our Science Week activities.

At the beginning of March we celebrated World Book Day. We came to school dressed as our favourite book characters or wearing dress down or pyjamas.  That day we did lots of book related tasks. We even went on a trip to visit our school library. Our favourite part of the day was when we had our Booknic in the afternoon with our friends from P1, P2, P3 and P4.

We had so much fun in our last month of Term 2. We can’t wait to start Term 3 and do more exciting learning! Please keep checking Twitter for regular updates from Primary 2.

Welcome back everyone and I hope you all had a happy and restful holiday break.

Maths and Numeracy

During the month of March pupils have been learning all about Fractions. They have worked hard throughout the month and can name the numerator and denominator, can name equivalent fractions and calculate the fraction of quantity. The children participated in lots of practical activities to deepen their understanding in this area. They are then going to take this knowledge forward and apply it to Telling the Time. As always, mental maths skills are a focus throughout the year and we encourage children to access Sumdog as often as possible and continue to practise the 2,3,4,5 and 10 Times Tables.

Literacy

The Green Group have been developing their comprehension skills using the story of The Twelfth Floor Kids. Children have been applying the six main reading strategies of prior knowledge, metalinguistics, visualisation, inference, main ideas and summarising. Going forward children will continue to apply these skills to help make sense of increasingly complex themes and narratives. It is important that children spend time not only reading the texts but exploring and discussing the language and tools used by the author to enhance the reading experience.

The Red Group are making good progress and are enjoying the range of novels that they are reading. In Term 3, we are going to look at longer novels and continue to work on answering in more detail and full sentences.

Children have been working on the genre of explanation writing this month; they have been learning about extreme weather forces and have been researching and reading about a variety of extreme weather forces. Children were able to demonstrate their learning in this area by completing an independent piece of writing about a topic of their choice. Children have also prepared a presentation to deliver to the rest of the class with a focus on timing, presentation, volume, eye contact and information. We have really enjoyed listening to these.

Religious Education

The children who are making the Sacrament of Reconciliation and Communion attended and participated in a retreat in the Church Hall. This was a very special and reflective time for the children to come together to appreciate and consider the importance and relevance of this Sacrament in their lives. We have also been spending time with Mrs Celino and Mrs Le Blond during Lent learning all about the Stations of the Cross.

OTHER CURRICULAR AREAS

We have come to the end of our topic on Natural Disasters and the children have very much impressed me with their enthusiasm and ability to retain so much of the information that we have gathered.

During Science Week, we completed a number of fun experiments using a variety of materials and substances.

On World Book Day we dressed up as our favourite characters and had a wonderful ‘Booknic’ in the hall where we shared our favourite stories and books.

We sadly said goodbye to Miss Bradley who has been working with us over the last month. Miss Bradley was a great help to us and she helped us make healthy fruit smoothies, taught us all about inference and even taught us some sign language. We will miss her very much and wish her well with the rest of her studies.

Going forward we look forward to celebrating the Sacrament of Reconciliation on Tuesday 26^th April and the Sacrament of Communion on the 14^th May. We are also looking forward to deciding on our topic focus for the final Term, which will involve lots of fun, and Outdoor Learning.

It was lovely to get the chance to speak with you all on Parents Evening and I want to thank you once again for your continued support. Please do not hesitate to contact me should you need to discuss anything.

P2/3 March Learning Update

As we prepared to get ready for our Easter break after a very hard working term it was lovely to take time to reflect on all of the learning experiences that have taken place in P2/3 over the month of March.

We have worked hard to ensure that we are developing the whole child by broadening our children’s experiences within and outwith our school.  We have worked together with children at all stages through our Eco activities, taking part in our whole school Lenten Fundraisers as well as showing love for our community by litter picking in out local area.

Here are some photos of some of the fun learning times we have had in March and look forward to having lots more learning and fun in the remaining months to come.

 

We began the month by participating in World Book Day!  We had great fun coming to school dressed as our favourite characters, we read and heard lots of stories throughout the day and finished it all off with a fantastic picnic in the hall.

During Science Week we had the most amazing time exploring the world around us!  We undertook an experiment over time where we were tasked to chose and plant vegetables and flowers and record the growing process over 2 weeks.  We were allowed to take them home at Easter and we have been encouraged to send pictures of our plants via Twitter.  We also explored rainbows by growing them in 2 different ways.  We loved watching our paper rainbow grow but our favourite was making a Skittles rainbow as the teacher gave us the extra Skittles to eat as a treat!

As part of our commitment to looking after the health of our planet and wildlife, we were asked to take part in a big community litter pick.  We collected the equipment to do this safely then worked in teams to tidy up our environment.  We concentrated on the football pitches and park across from our school as it was covered in harmful litter.  They looked so much better when we had finished!

Some of our friends in P3 have been preparing to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation on April the 26th in Holy Family Church.  As part of our preparations, we took part in a teacher-led Reconciliation Retreat in the hall at Holy Family Church Hall where we focussed on what this special sacrament means to us.  We listened to the story of Zacchaeus and acted it out together with costumes which brought the story to life for us.  Please keep us in your prayers.

And finally, we said a very tearful farewell to our visiting student teacher, Mr McCrae!  We had so much fun getting to know him during his time in our class and look forward to him coming to visit us soon.   We wish him all the very best in his future studies.

P5/6 March Update

 

March was another busy and productive month for Primary 5/6.

 

Numeracy

We have been working extremely hard learning all about decimal numbers. We have been learning to add, subtract, multiply and divide decimal numbers. We have used our prior knowledge of our addition, subtraction, multiplication and division skills to do so. We have then moved onto measurement, and we were introduced to converting units of measurements. We will continue with measurement after the Easter holidays.

 

Literacy

We have continued to apply our spelling strategies to help us learn our spelling words each week. We took advantage of the great weather one day and created our spelling words on the ground using chalk. We have continued with our novels, applying our reading strategies to gain a greater understanding of the plot, characters, and setting. Once we completed our literacy novels, we explored various non-fiction texts. We have been working extremely hard in our writing lessons, focusing on narrative, information reports and recounts. We have been able to link our topic and science lessons into our writing such as writing excellent recounts from science investigations.

 

Topic

In topic, we explored lots more interesting things about the Romans. We learned the  different ways the Romans travelled throughout the Empire such as boats and ships. Once we investigated the various forms of travel and transport, we used this information to write an information report. We have also looked at other ways that the Romans were skilled engineers such as exploring Roman aqueducts. We even worked in groups to build our very own aqueduct. This task required teamwork, collaboration and problem solving.

 

Science

We have had lots of fun during science exploring our space topic of the solar system. We explored Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and re-created this storm in a jar. We also enjoyed exploring the different star constellations by creating homemade telescopes to look at the constellations. Our final aspect of our science topic looked at the windiest planet in the solar system, Neptune. We investigated wind by predicting if objects would blow by the force of wind.

 

RE

We have been exploring the Easter story during March. We have explored the story of The Last Supper and Stations of the Cross.

 

 

Keep up to date with the school’s twitter page to see even more photos of all our fantastic learning.

As we are over half way through P4, we are developing many skills and working on our talents. A lot of what we are learning will support our work in P5 and beyond, so this is a very important year for us.

Literacy

Spelling and Reading

The more we read for pleasure, the more we realise that it can support our spelling. Recent Common Words Assessments have shown that reading for pleasure and working on our school resources, makes a real difference in our confidence in spelling Common Words.

We continue to work through our Spelling programmes, which concentrate on building our Phoneme Knowledge and Common Words/Spelling Rules. Our teachers encourage us to focus on Phonemes during our homework tasks as this can make a huge difference for us. Our teachers are very proud of the people who work hard at their homework as they are making good improvements.

We have been doing some more Non-Fiction reading, which has been very popular in class. One group were reading The Search For Tutanknamen, which ignited so much interest in the Egyptians that we took a few weeks to do some research. As Covid rules are relaxing, we have had great fun sharing resources to learn more about the boy king. Mrs Daisley was delighted at the partner work that we did. This will help us in P5 and beyond.

Some of us have done personal presentations to share with our class mates. We have shown good respect in listening and responding to these presentations.

As Mrs Cooney was off, Mrs Daisley decided to do some Writing. She was very impressed to see that we can plan our Writing and many of us are also working on editing our finished work. She really struggled to pick Star Writers as we were really working hard!

Numeracy

Although we spent a long time on Subtraction, it was  time well spent as we will build on our knowledge in P5 and beyond.

We then moved on to Money. Some of us were working on Money up to £2 and the others were working on Money up to £20. It was obvious to our teachers that some of us have real life experience using coins and notes in shops. Hopefully everyone else can get more experience now that Covid rules are relaxing. Pocket money is a great way for children our age to learn  more.

We are moving on to Multiplication, which should be supported by the regular work that we have been doing throughout the year.

Health and Wellness Being

As the year goes on, our teachers are proud at how we have been sorting issues relating to football. This is the first year that we have been able to take part in the yard and it was a bit tricky at the start. It’s ok if we still have issues but we should remember to discuss them calmly with a friend or grown up.

We will continue to work on our friendships so that they grow stronger. Some friendships change and new ones can develop as our hobbies and interests change. We keep working on having empathy for other people so that we can see things through their eyes. This is tricky at our age so we will keep working on it throughout primary school.

We continue to work on good manners. Our teachers love to hear good manners and so do other members of staff. We bet that our families do too.

We have enjoyed using the gymnastic equipment to improve our skills. We are learning how our body works and how we can control our movements, like travelling on a gymnastic horse. We have been learning what parts of our bodies we use on the ropes and when hanging from the bars. We also work together as a team to sort out the equipment, as it was a lot of setting up.

RE

We had a visitor during Lent. It was the Easter Bunny and he visited each of us with a treat and a little card with our special talents on it. We were very excited each day to find out where he was.

The First Communion children went on a retreat and had a lovely day out of school. We got a chance to do some Meditation and art activities. We also managed to do a modern day Last Supper.

\We learnt a lot about Lent and made a Lenten tree where we put Easter decoration with friendly advice on them. Each day we would pick one with a message like

• Share with your friends
• Use kind words
• Don’t leave people out of games.

Topic

We did some more Space work with Miss McCullock, who will return nest term. She started work on Natural Disasters and will continue with that after the holiday.

We have lots of photos over on Twitter showing what we have been up to.

The month of March has been a very busy one for Primary 1. We have been working very hard but also having lots of opportunities for fun!

We started the month with World Book Day. On this day we dressed up as our favourite book characters or in our pyjamas. We brought our favourite books in to share with our friends and talked about why we liked them. We made bookmarks and read books with our buddies. The highlight of our day was the ‘booknic’ that we had in the hall. We took our blankets and relaxed with our friends from other classes, read books and heard a story being read aloud. What a fantastic day we had!

We have been learning more about how to write our own stories. We are able to use a plan to choose a When, Where, Who and What for our own imaginative stories and are creating fantastic characters! We are working very hard to include our core targets when we are writing independently. We must remember to include capital letters, finger spaces, full stops and write all of our words on the jotter lines. Keep working so hard Primary 1!

In spelling we have been learning our phoneme sounds and we can read and write words that have sh, ch, th and ng in them. Great job! We must continue to learn all of our common words at home so that we can read, write and spell them when we are making our sentences. Our teachers are so pleased with our hard work and can see that some children are reading books at home and doing lots of extra homework. Fantastic!

Primary 1 are really enjoying our number work this month because we are completing chilli challenges using adding and subtracting. We are becoming so confident when asked to complete our challenges and we do not give up if we find something tricky. We are learning to count in 2’s, 5’s and 10’s. We now know odd and even numbers and are able to sequence numbers from highest to lowest/lowest to highest. Ask us to try to count to 100 – some of us can even do that! We like to count to 100 together, during circle time, so that we can listen for the big numbers before and after.

We have enjoyed learning about volume and shape this month. After our holiday we are going to be focusing on Time and this is something that we are excited and to learn more about. If you have a watch at home maybe you could even wear it to school to help you learn more about time.

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In RME we have been learning about Lent and have taken part in lots of different Lenten activities. We know that during lent we focus on almsgiving, prayer and fasting. We made Lenten promises and have tried really hard to stick to them. With the rest of the school we have raised important funds for charity and had fun while we are doing so. We came to school with crazy hair/ mad scientist, a p7 funday and cake and candy. We can talk about the Easter Story and have been learning about why Easter is so important to us. We are looking forward to our Easter Eggs on Easter Sunday!

It really has been a very fun month for us. Here are some photographs of the highlights. We really enjoyed Science and Eco Week, making empire biscuits and pancakes with our buddies.

We are looking forward to our Easter holiday and spending time with our families. See you in April!