December 2020  Reflective Friday Post 

December has been a very busy month for us in Primary 1. We had set a class target to learn more about the Nativity Story and we have agreed that we have enjoyed learning about the Story of Christmas. Over the past few weeks we have listened to stories about the birth of Jesus. We acted out the Nativity in the classroom and all had a part to play. It didn’t matter that we didn’t get to sing, as we got to be actors instead! It was so much fun! We listened to Away in a Manger and said special prayers to the baby Jesus, his Mummy Mary and his Daddy Joseph.

Our next target for January will be to learn even more about the numbers up to 20. We are getting so good at recognising the teens numbers and we would like to focus on counting, reading the numbers, writing their names and putting them in order on a number line.

We had so much fun on our Christmas party day! We went to a virtual panto and got up to dance. Then we made some magic reindeer to food to help Santa’s reindeers on Christmas Eve. After that it was time for our disco with special disco lights and even more fun and dancing! We really enjoyed pin the nose on the Snowman game. When we were having our snack in the dining hall we heard bells and Santa had come to our classroom and left lots of presents for us! We couldn’t believe it! Thank you Santa and Jingles the Elf!

Primary 1 and Mrs Stevenson hope that you all have a very special Christmas with your families. Stay safe and enjoy a relaxing time!

Merry Christmas! Here are some photographs of us enjoying our Christmas Party Day!

What a month we have had in Primary 1 / 2. We have had so much fun preparing for Christmas and learning all about the Nativity story.

We have had a special visitor in our class for the past few weeks – Snowball the Elf. Snowball has been a little bit cheeky sometimes. We laughed when he spilled the paper out of our paper recycling bin. We also enjoyed when he brought us a lovely story to read and asked us to write a letter to Santa. Our letters were amazing so fingers crossed they have reached the North Pole. Here are some pictures of us posting our letters to Santa.

We have also created lots of fabulous Christmas artwork in December. We have made penguins, Christmas puddings and Christmas cards to name a few. Mrs Simpson is delighted that our work is getting so neat.

Our target this month was to learn lots about the Nativity story. We have achieved this target by reading stories, story sequencing and doing artwork. We made lovely Advent promises and learned about the Advent wreath.

One of the highlights for our month was our Christmas Jumper Day. Look at how smart we all looked.

We loved our Christmas party. At the party we played ‘Pin the Carrot on the Snowman’ and the paper plate game. We did lots of party dancing and enjoyed a lovely snack. Our favourite bit was when Santa wrote us a letter and delivered some lovely treats to our class when we were out.

Looking back over the past few months we are so proud of everything we have achieved. This has been a very unusual year in our school but we have tried hard to follow the rules and still managed to work extremely hard. Mrs Simpson says we deserve a lovely rest with our families now it’s almost holiday time.

Looking ahead to 2021, we have so much to look forward to. We will continue to make lots of progress within literacy and numeracy as well as having lots of fun learning in other curricular areas.

Mrs Simpson and Primary 1 / 2 wish our families, friends, parish and school community a very happy and holy Christmas. We look forward to the year ahead and all the new things we will accomplish.

COMMUNITY SUPPORT FOR FAMILIES

We have recently been contacted the General Motors Club, Holytown who have been collecting gifts and food to make up Christmas gifts and food parcels for families who would welcome some support this year.

All gifts and food parcels are ready to be handed out and would be dropped off at school for discreet collection. All the information they would need is the age and gender of the children to match a gift accordingly.

If there are any families from Holy Family that could benefit from this please email me in confidence at ht@holyfamily.n-lanark.sch.uk and I will liase directly with the General Motors Club to arrange this.

Frances S Wilson HT

Looking back over this last month, we have achieved a lot here in P4/5! After the Hallowe’en celebrations, it was soon Bonfire Night and then Remembrance Day. This gave us some great opportunities to make beautiful artwork – we hope you enjoyed seeing it when the children brought home their pieces. The children have started their Christmas-themed Art; having made reindeer pictures already.

We will continue getting arty during December. There are so many restrictions in place at the moment, Art is something we can all do safely and can be a great way to take our minds off any worries.

The boys and girls have been working hard in Maths. We do Daily Ten mental maths warm-ups, Number Talks where we explore different ways to calculate the answers, and have been focusing on times tables recently, too. We also started looking at measure and the children knew that the safe distance adults are meant to keep is 2 metres, but they were surprised to see how long 2 metres really is! We also made hugs to send to a loved one of their choice. We hope these were well-received. Here are some photos of them being made:

The boys and girls have especially enjoyed reading their reading books this month for Literacy and got a special treat in Book Week Scotland of being able to bring in their own books and read more in class. Some of our fabulous pupils also volunteered to read books for the nursery children and we all made bookmarks to use in our favourite books. What’s your favourite book?

Welcome to Primary 2/3’s Reflective Friday post for November.

Another busy and hardworking month in primary 2/3. This week we have been reflecting on and discussing our achievements over the last few weeks and the children have all worked really well and I am delighted with their progression.

Our target this month was to try really hard to stay in our seats in order to keep everyone safe. The children all try really hard to stay in their class bubble.

This month we have agreed to look at Maths and how we could improve in this area. This month the children have all identified a personal target that they are going to work towards and I am sure that they will as always work really hard to achieve success in this.

In Maths we have spent a great deal of time working on addition and subtraction and I feel that the children are really confident in applying strategies to solve both written and mental calculations. We will continue to do this throughout the year through our Number Talks. This week we will be applying our skills and moving on to look at multiplication. The children will be looking at 2, 4, 5 and 10 times tables.

In Literacy the children have been learning trickier words and applying word attack strategies when reading and writing in class. They have been listening to popular fairy tales and are developing the ability to pick out the important parts of the story. We are now practising our letter writing skills with our first letter sent to Santa asking very nicely for a class elf. I hope he has heard our plea! We will continue to develop our skills in letter writing over the next few weeks. Please continue to support your children with handwriting and letter formation during any written homework tasks. I can see a real improvement in their handwriting.

In addition to our Christmas preparations and celebrations we are continuing to remember the real meaning of Christmas and the children will be learning about Advent as a time of preparation. We will be discussing ways that we can make a difference through our acts of kindness. We are still also looking at our Knights and Castles topic and the children really are very enthusiastic when discussing this. I have asked them to complete a personal project over the next few weeks, researching Scottish Castles. Choosing their favourite and explaining why? They should be able to share with us who lived there and when, battles or important dates and should also be able to identify the features of the castle.

I hope that the next few weeks will bring some well-deserved, fun, festive cheer for the children who have all adapted remarkably and worked incredibly hard during this first term.

Primary 7 Reflective Friday November 

Welcome to Primary 7’s Reflective Friday post for November. 

In literacy we have started working on new novels. Some children are enjoying reading Wonder, whilst others are reading Mosi’s War. We are focusing on our comprehension of both books and have been spending time discussing and writing about what we have been reading. We are also continuing to work on grammar, spending time on the correct use of apostrophes.  We have all really enjoyed learning to write persuasive arguments and have all become very good at this.

In numeracy we are have focused on multiplication, working hard to practise both mental strategies for multiplication and the standard written method. We are also working very hard to improve our speed and accuracy recalling times table facts. We are now regularly completing a timed challenge to recall our tables facts as quickly as we can and each time trying to beat our personal best. The children are really enjoying this, for some it is absolutely a highlight of the week.

November is the month of the Holy Souls which we have been learning about in RE. We are continuing to learn both Hail, Holy Queen and Memorare, saying both each day.  The children have also enjoyed learning about Jesus and Justice looking for evidence in the Gospels of Jesus’ goodness and fairness.

Our theme until the end of term for learning across the Curriculum is Japan. We have been learning to say the numbers to 10 in Japanese and we have written the numbers and our names in Japanese Kanji too. We have been locating Japan on a world map and finding out lots of interesting facts about it’s capital city. As part of our work on Japan we are also learning about Volcanoes and The Ring of Fire.

We are very lucky to be working with two fantastic active schools co-ordinators every Tuesday until the end of term. Our first outdoor session with them was athletics. We sampled a range of athletics challenges last Tuesday, but the definite highlight was learning a new, and particularly tricky  game of “pairs tig” which we managed to include in our own Thursday PE session too.

We are looking forward to a very busy December with lots more interesting tasks and challenges.