Hello everyone and welcome to our October Reflective Friday post. This month has been a very unusual one for our class as we have been isolating and learning at home for some of the time  We have been working so hard at home and completing all of our tasks posted on the website. Well done boys and girls!

This month our class target was to talk about our feelings. We have been doing this every day and using our mood monsters on our classroom wall to help with our emotional vocabulary. We are getting better at using our feeling words and have enjoyed exploring the emotion works orange cog in the assembly hall and classroom. At home we have been talking to our families about how we feel and sharing our worries, if we have any, with adults.

We have been working so hard with our number work and have had some fun in class learning more about counting and adding to 10. We can order our numbers to 10 and can even write the number names! At home we have been learning to measure, using the language of measurement – tall, small, order, measure, compare, size.

In literacy we have been learning how to write a sentence and how important it is to add finger spaces. We had lots of fun reading sentences that didn’t have any finger spaces and we noticed that they didn’t sound right! We have been text detectives and have been learning more about our sounds and common words. The boys and girls have been creating fabulous stories, writing about Percy the Park Keeper, Autumn and our October holiday. We can even include a feeling in our writing! Great job!

We have been exploring the season of Autumn together and have become Autumn detectives, noticing the changes in our outdoor environments. Here we are trying to find signs of Autumn.

During our Autumn topic we have been learning about Percy the Park Keeper and all of the animals that he works with in the park. We learned about animals who hibernate during the cold winter months. One of these animals was a hedgehog and we made our own using Autumn leaves that we collected on our walks. Before we began learning from home we made fantastic stick wands and pretended to be witches and wizards! We cast spells on each other and had lots of Halloween fun!

Well done Primary 1! Superstar workers!

We have had a fabulous month of new learning in primary 1 / 2. We have continued to work hard on learning our new school routines and have tried so hard to show great behaviour and work. Mrs Simpson thinks we are superstars. Our Rainbow Reward chart, Class Dojo and winning lots of Golden Tokens encourage us to do our best every day.

Within literacy we have made excellent progress within the Active Literacy programme. We have learned lots more sounds and have been learning to use the sounds we learn to build new words.

Our reading is constantly improving . We have read lots of interesting reading books and have enjoyed learning a variety of Read to Write tasks. We love completing Sticky Sentences. This is where we sequence jumbled up sentences. We have created lots of interesting pieces of writing this month also. We have been learning about recounts and have enjoyed creating our own. We have written about our October holiday and a Halloween story recount. We have been trying hard to assess our own work by becoming Charlie Checkers. We have been checking our work to ensure we have included capital letters, full stops, fingers spaces and that we are writing on the line. We carried out solo talks this month in class. We shared lots of interesting information with our new friends. Mrs Simpson said that we prepared very well and listened so well to others. Here is one of us carrying our our solo talks.

Within maths, the Cubes group have made an excellent start to Addition. The Counters group have been working on Subtraction. Both groups have been using concrete materials to help them understand these concepts. We love practising our number formation on our ‘Show Me’ boards. Mrs Simpson says we are getting good at counting forwards and backwards from a range of different numbers.

Our class has continued to develop their emotional literacy through Health and Wellbeing lessons. We especially enjoyed playing the Emotions board game where we had the opportunity to discuss times in our life when we felt a range of emotions.

Our topics this month have been Autumn and Halloween. We have participated in a wide range of lessons based on both topics. As well listening to spooky stories, we have had the opportunity to create various pieces of Halloween artwork. Our favourite was making 2D shape witches. We also enjoyed going on an Autumn treasure hunt. We were able to find lots of things relating to Autumn including lots of brightly coloured leaves which we used to make Autumn hedgehogs. We praised God for creating our beautiful Autumn world by creating Autumn leaves with praise words on them.

Mrs Simpson has been teaching us lots of Spanish in class. We have learned lots this month including a range of colours, some classroom commands and we can also bless ourselves. Our favourite game so far is Spanish Eye Spy.

Welcome back to primary 2/3 and our first Reflective Friday post. 

I hope that all the children are delighted to be back with their school family after lockdown. The boys and girls have settled in really well and have been working hard to adjust to the one way system and the play and learning zones. We have had a huge focus on Health and Wellbeing and the children have learned all about keeping themselves and others safe through increased hand washing, sanitizing and social distancing.   

This will be a very busy term for Primary 2/3 but the children have shown they are ready and willing to learn. In Math’s and Numeracy we have been focusing on developing their mental agility, counting forwards and backwards in 1’s,2’s,5’s and 10’s.  They have been exploring up to 3 digit numbers and will go on to apply this to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I hope you will continue to support your children by encouraging and supporting them with homework tasks which will always reinforce their learning in class. 

In Literacy the pupils will continue to develop their skills in reading, writing, listening and talking, and are progressing well through the core programmes. These last few weeks we have been revising and consolidating phonemes and spelling taught to date. To further support your child at home, please encourage them to read aloud every night and to discuss what they are reading as this will be beneficial to their understanding of the book. Please also practise weekly taught phonemes and spelling words as this will really help your child in their class work. Children have been issued with a homework jotter and should take opportunities to develop handwriting skills by completing any written tasks here. 

We take every opportunity to get outdoors, and participate in the Daily Mile. In addition to this the children have been developing their communication skills and physical fitness through participation in a variety of outdoor and indoor activities and really enjoy this.

This has been a very busy time in Primary 3 as we began the new term after a long break from school.  The children have been working hard to learn the new one way system and also learning to keep themselves and others safe by washing and sanitising their hands.

Our priorities have been Literacy, Numeracy and Heath and Well-Being with the children revising aspects of all areas in class and for homework.

We have been spending lots of time outdoors doing our Daily Mile and participating in outdoor games.  We are still operating our indoor and outdoor bubble system to keep your children as safe as we can.

In literacy. we have been revising all of the phonemes taught to date as well as focussing on proper letter formation.  You can really help by encouraging your child to write letters the correct way when completing homework tasks.

In maths, we have been counting on and counting backwards as well as learning our days and months.  The children know songs that they can share with you and you can help them learn them well by asking each day what the day, date is and asking questions such as, “What day will it be tomorrow, what day was it yesterday.

Could I please ask you to try and listen to your child read each night, check to see if they can read/write their common words and play counting games with them.

Primary 7 are enjoying being back at school and are very much enjoying being “top of the school.”  The children are obviously disappointed that they can’t work with their buddies in the usual way, but we have been looking at inventive ways we can get around this. The children have already sent a Welcome to Holy Family poster to their buddy with a note and we are looking forward to hopefully having a virtual link up with the P1s very soon.

We are currently reading Divided City by Theresa Breslin as a class novel. The children are all really gripped by the book and enjoying the story and the many themes it covers. It is so lovely to see each and every child so engrossed in a book.

In numeracy we have been revising rounding, estimating and place value and we are now focusing on addition and subtraction with numbers to 1 000 000.  We will move on to work on multiplication and division.

The children are also enjoying a Health and Well being focus and this month we have been thinking about how we can stay safe, especially during the pandemic. We have written instructions to show anyone how to stick to our new school safety rules and designed posters to promote this too. We are looking forward to continuing with our outdoor PE even as the weather gets a little colder.

The children have really enjoyed looking at Scottish Inventors. We have been researching the lives of famous inventors as well as imagining what it would have been like when these inventions were first discovered by creating newspaper articles and diary entries. Most of all the children have loved creating their own invention and writing a persuasive piece to encourage others to buy it.

In RE we have been looking at the liturgical year and reminding ourselves of the special times in our church year and the colours that symbolise each one. We spent some time thinking about Mary and why she is so special and will continue to do this in the month of October. We are also learning about Luke’s Gospel.

Finally the highlight of the month has to be the election of our new House Captains. All of the children worked really have to complete their application and the short listed candidates all produced really interesting speeches. I think those voting must have had a very difficult decision to make. Congratulations to Ava, Sophia, Shannon and Alfie.

The children have made me feel very welcome at Holy Family and we are looking forward to what October brings.

Remote Learning Arrangements

Please note that if your child has to self isolate due to possible or confirmed infection or as a result of quarantine then contact us at school on 01698 274967 or email ht@holyfamily.n-lanark.sch.uk to let us know.

In the case of individual absences learning packs will be provided but where a large number of children are affected eg. a full class we will revert to remote learning for these pupils using the model created during lockdown March – June 2020.

All classes have now had Microsoft teams created by their teacher and the website has been updated to reflect our new classes. It is here you would locate tasks under your class tab on a daily/weekly basis if required.