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

November has been a busy month for Primary 4.

We started with All Saints Day and All Souls Day. We have been very conscientious in talking about people we love who are no longer with us. We also did work on saints, including St Margaret of Scotland. We learned a bit about her life and the kind deeds that she did as queen. We finished the month by preparing for our First Friday Mass.  We also started to learn about Advent at the end of November and learned more about the Liturgical calendar. Whilst over at church, we took the chance to look around at the statues, especially of Mother Theresa and Pope John Paul, who are now both saints.

We are very proud of our new Mini Vinnies, who have already been working on plans to help the poor and help out at Mass. Some have already helped at Sunday Mass and the parish were delighted with their help.

We prepared for St Andrew’s Day by learning Ally Bally Bee, which we sang beautifully. We have also been learning a dance for the Reindeer Rave to support St Andrew’s Hospice.

For the Christmas Fayre, we enjoyed making marshmallow snowmen and decorating biscuits.

We also have a guest in our class. Ralph, the elf is offering us advice on  staying on Santa’s Good List. Here is his advice-

• Listen well to our teachers and the adults at home
• Help around the class and at home
• Be kind to our friends and siblings.

Look out for a letter from Ralph as he visits each child’s desk.

We have made some lovely Christmas artwork to decorate our school. We made Christmas trees which are now in the hall and step by step Reindeers which will go up soon.

We are continuing to have baby Lily visit us for Roots of Empathy. Mrs Le Blond and Mrs Anderson are already impressed at how gentle we are to little Lily! We have been learning about different themes, including crying and how a baby communicates with us. We had some super responses to this topic.

It’s hard to believe that we have had any time left to do Literacy and Numeracy but we continue to work hard to make good progress in these areas. We continue with Addition and Times Tables. We have been working on Number Pattern and Time In Reading, we continue to develop the confidence to use strategies such as Prior Knowledge and Inference to support our learning. We are concentrating on always answering in clear sentences. We continue to follow the NLC programme for Spelling. We have our phonemes, common words or spelling rules placed around the class so that we have plenty opportunities to see our lists. We have been working on Instructional Writing with Mr Hamill.

This a good time to remind all adults that we have weekly homework which is very easy to find on the school website. The children completing it regularly are gaining an advantage in their learning and their confidence.

Finally, we have recently introduced a job chart and we have all had a chance to choose a job to help our class stay organised. We are the biggest class in the school and we continue to work on taking care of resources that we all share. With this in mind, can the adults at home please ensure we return all resources to school, like reading books, pencils or rubbers accidentally taken home. Can you also label children’s personal things such as jumpers in order to find them more easily.

Primary 5 have been extremely busy in all areas of the curriculum this month, enhancing existing and developing some new skills.

RE

We started the month by leading the school at First Friday mass where we prayed for all the Holy Souls, during the month of November we remembered in our thoughts and prayers all our loved ones who had died.

IDL

Primary 5 this month planned and delivered a highly successful Enterprise Project which saw the budding entrepreneurs in our class plan and deliver ‘Poppy Day’. Each year in Holy Family the primary 5’s are responsible for arranging a whole day of activities to celebrate and remember everyone who has died during conflict. This year Primary 5 decided that they wanted to think about the ‘Poppy for Peace’, very poignant considering what is happening in the world around us. The children very much enjoyed learning all about the different colours of poppies and what they represent. The children worked together in teams to create a variety of fun filled activities to suit all children from Primary 1 to Primary 7, they created a timetable for the whole school – giving each class a designated slot to participate . They used their skills and talents to make bracelets, iced, cookies, hand and face painting and created a photobooth with a green screen which the classes all used to dress up. In the afternoon a panel of judges chose the best dancers from each class during our ‘Danceathon’.

The children have now come to the end of their Swim and Gym sessions in Sir Matt Busby, each child has made excellent progress and very much enjoyed learning this vital, life saving skill.

Maths and Literacy

We continue to work our way through the NLC Active Literacy programme focussing on spelling strategies and rules, our writing genre has been narrative and we have completed some excellent stories with interesting characters and settings, we will be looking at persuasive and instructional writing in the lead up to Christmas.

We have been learning to add and subtract decimals, and to multiply by 10 and 100. We are multiplying by 2 digit numbers. We continue to focus on mental maths skills and have been learning a variety of subtraction and multiplication strategies to explain our thinking.

Primary 5 have been working hard to learn their Scottish Song ‘Wellerman’ they performed this to the school on St Andrews day and did a fantastic job of learning the lyrics – well done to everyone.

We have a busy and fun filled lead up to the Christmas holidays so please continue to check school website for any updates.

Thank you

Mrs Preston and Primary 5.

Primary 2 have had a very busy month.

In Literacy we have been learning more new sounds. We love to use our new sounds to create words using our magnetic boards. We have also been working lots on sentence writing using our common words and words that contain our focus sound.

This month we learned about writing recounts. We wrote a fantastic recount of our trip to see the ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ pantomime. We have also been trying hard to write more independently and to check our writing to make sure that it makes sense.

We have been continuing with our reading, making sure that we use good expression  and fluency. We must remember to read our reading books every night at home and to practise our common words and sounds so that we can continue to develop our reading skills.

In Maths we have been continuing to focus on numbers to 100. We have been estimating numbers using a blank number line and we have been rounding to the nearest 10. We have also been learning about Area within our topic on Measure. We have begun our topic on Addition and have been revising our number bonds to 10 to prepare us for adding to 20.

As it was November, we spent time this month learning about the month of the holy souls. We thought about those who have died and we remembered them in our prayers. We also paid tribute to those who had lost their lives in war on Remembrance Day. We made beautiful poppy pictures to decorate our classroom door and we observed a minute silence to show respect. P5 also organised a fun filled day to raise money for people affected by war. We had lots of fun and lots of money was raised for a good cause. Thank you to everyone who made a kind donation. This month we also produced beautiful pictures for the ‘Keep Christ in Christmas’ art competition. Hopefully we will have a winner in our class.

This month we have been really busy with practising for our Nativity show ‘It’s a Baby’, which we will perform on Tuesday 5^th and Wednesday 6^th December. We are so excited to be the narrators. We have been working hard on learning our lines and songs. You will love the show!

We celebrated St. Andrew’s Day with a fun school assembly this week. Each class learned and performed a Scottish song. Primary 2 learned the song ‘Three Craws’. Mrs Simpson said she was so proud of us. We also learned all about St. Andrew, made a St. Andrew stained glass window picture, listened to Scottish stories and tasted some delicious shortbread.

Next month we are looking forward to lots of new learning, our Nativity show and Christmas party. Please keep checking Twitter for photos of our adventures.

Well, November proved to be an amazingly busy month full of exciting learning experiences as well as lots of fun events including Guy Fawkes Night and St Andrew’s Day!

We have had the pleasure of having a student teacher, Miss Mooney with us this month and she has enjoyed herself so much that she will be returning in March for 5 weeks. Thank you for all of your hard work in class and we look forward to welcoming you back in the new year.

We have spent most of the month rehearsing for our upcoming Nativity play which will take place next week, 4th, 5th and 6th of December.  The children are singing beautifully and have learned all of the words to their songs and hymns and we look forward to seeing you all there next week!

In literacy, we are continuing with our reading, making sure that we use good expression  and fluency. We are learning to break down words that are unfamiliar or difficult using our knowledge of phonemes and sounds taught. I would be grateful if you could try and practise their sounds an reading with them.

We have covered some new concepts  in maths including addition of TU using the mental maths strategies learned in Number Talks.  We practised adding the tens together first then adding the units together and finally adding both answers together. I will post examples of this on next week’s homework for you to try with your child.  In the meantime, could I please ask that you begin introducing telling the time to your child in preparation for learning this key life skill.  We will start this next term but it can be very tricky for some children and will require additional support from home in order that they learn to confidently tell the time.

We spent lots of time combining our learning about the Holy Souls in Heaven with our celebration of Poppy Day in early November.   Many of our families lost loved ones in the many wars and troubles fought and we remembered their sacrifice by having a day of fundraising which helps support people in need following their sacrifice for peace. Thank you to everyone who sent in their money on this day, your donation was very gratefully received especially at this time of the year when families are busy preparing for Christmas.

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

HF Diary 20112023