Firstly, welcome back to Holy Family Primary School. We hope you have all had a relaxing break and it is lovely to see all your faces once again. Primary 7/6 have had a great time settling back into school routines and seeing all their friends.  Despite being a short month, it has been an exciting time for Primary 7/6!

We have met our Primary One buddies and have engaged in buddy plays which has helped develop relationships as well as settle the Primary Ones into school. Primary Six have also been a great help with the Primary One buddies and will make fantastic buddies next year.

We have started our classroom economy which involves getting paid to do weekly jobs. We can purchase items with the money that we make, such as buying engaging activities in the classroom. These jobs that we are performing each week are giving us responsibility and independence within the classroom and around school.

Furthermore, we have been preparing for our First Friday Mass that we are hosting on Friday, 1^st of September.

We have also settled into our literacy tasks such as applying our spelling strategies and being introduced to our new novel, The Night Bus Hero by Onjali Q. Rauf. We are excited to explore our reading strategies to help develop our understanding of this novel.

We have also started place value in numeracy and are excited for trying our best in maths this year.

Finally, we have decided on our first topic which will be The Titanic. We are looking forward to exploring this inter-disciplinary topic and the interesting lessons we will be covering such as exploring buoyancy, engineering, and others.

Please note it is an important year for Primary 7/6 in their academic journey. It is imperative that reading homework, especially, gets completed each week so pupils can perform their read to write tasks in class. Thank you 🙂

Welcome to our first update from Primary 1! At the end of each month, we will share some of the exciting things we have been learning in Primary 1.

The children have settled very well into school life and have been having lots of fun with new friends and buddies! We are beginning to remember our friend’s names and are playing so well together in the classroom and playground.

The boys and girls are learning to follow new routines and are working hard to take care of their own belongings when at school. The children are being supported in unpacking and packing their own bags, taking home their own reading book and making choices for lunch.

We have had our first PE learning experiences and our buddies helped us to get dressed into our PE kits. We will keep practising this and will get even faster at getting ready all by ourselves.

In literacy we have been working with our class puppet Oscar and he has been showing us how to sit well and concentrate when we are together at the front of the classroom during teaching time. This is helping us to develop our important listening skills. We have been exploring our reading books every week and using our reading fingers to read from left to right and jump underneath our words. We love reading books from our class library and sharing stories with our friends. We have met Percy the Park keeper and will be exploring lots of his stories over the coming months to help us to develop our skills in literacy.

We have been working hard on learning our numbers to 5 since starting school. The number puppy stories are helping us to learn the numbers 0-5 and we have been so busy learning how to read, write and count these numbers. We use lots of resources and play to help us to learn more about numeracy and mathematics in Primary 1. Ask us to tell you our number rhymes and songs at home.

On Friday we are attending our first whole school mass and we can’t wait to become part of the Holy Family Parish Community. We are going to listen Father Brown celebrate mass and talk about what we see and hear when we come back to school. We are so excited!

HF Diary Week Beginning 19th June 23

Click on the link below for what’s on at Holy Family this week.

HF Diary 19062023

Apologies for the confusion earlier with this weeks diary. The link below contains the correct information.

Mrs Harley

HF Diary 12062023

This month has been very busy for primary 7 as we have taken part in a wide range of activities.

During numeracy we have been exploring chance and uncertainty as well as some algebra and revising our time skills. The children have worked hard to consolidate their basic number knowledge and strategies in preparation for high school in August. Consistent practice of these skills, especially telling the time at home, will continue to assist them in progressing their learning and help them to feel more confident using these life skills everyday.

During literacy we have created some amazing imaginative stories during our writing lessons. The pupils have such wonderful ideas and imaginations which is clear through their writing. We have been taking time to use our ICT skills to create power points and word documents in relation to our Venice topic and linking to our novel ‘The Thief Lord’. I was very impressed with the efforts all pupils gave during their Venice projects and solo talks.

During health and wellbeing, we have enjoyed continued sessions from the Scottish rugby and focused on our team building skills during PE. We have also completed activities and discussions surrounding personal hygiene, friendships, influences and a growth mindset which all pupils have participated in well.

We were very lucky to spend four days at Strathclyde Park at the end of May, taking part in a variety of activities and sports which was a huge success. The pupils attended every day and absolutely loved each and every new sport and skill they learned. I am so proud of their excellent display of behaviour and teamwork across our trip.

During RE lessons this month we have focused on Mary our Mother and learned all about her life, her names and her values. The children have also learned the Angelus prayer and we have made an effort to practice this as often as we can at 12pm each day. Pupils have also taken care dressing our May altar with flowers this month too!

As we enter our final month of primary school, the pupils are making the most of their time left at Holy Family. Their hard work is paying off and I am looking forward to making these next few weeks special for them with lots of exciting activities. Well done Primary 7B!

May has been a very special month in primary 4 as we had our First Communion for many of our pupils. After months of learning all about the Sacrament and weeks in church preparing, we made our whole school community extremely proud. It was lovely for us in Holy Family school to share in this special day and we hope that you can all now share this with your church community.

In Literacy , we have been continuing with our  spelling work as usual. We will keep doing spelling homework for a few more weeks, but look out for it in our diaries, rather than on the website. Mrs Gilfedder has been very pleased with the Friday tests, which show how hard we have been learning for the rest of the week. We have been  writing instructions, for example. reporting on our Mummification experiment. We have been doing some reading comprehension work altogether, as we have had a lot of disruptions due to school show and testing. We will finish our novels in June.

We have had an exciting month so are now getting back into good routines of listening well in class and answering out without shouting out.  We have been revising many aspects of grammar, such as punctuation, adjectives and adverbs.

Numeracy

After successful work on Division, we have returned to Subtraction. This has been the most tricky out of Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division so extra practise will help us all before we move on to primary 5 work.  A few strategies that have worked well for us are

• Using a number line to count back or forward
• Taking away 10’s first, then units
• Laying the sum out as a chimney sum.

We have been working on Money with Mrs Gilfedder. We have been working on recognising coins and notes up to £20. We have also been working how how much things cost and giving proper change.

Health and Well being

We are coming to the end of Roots of Empathy. We have a better understanding of how babies communicate and this has helped us to think about how we communicate with each other. We have also discussed safety for babies and children aged 8 and 9.

We have been continuing with Athletics, so that we are ready for Sports Day.

Spanish

We are delighted to be doing Spanish with Mrs Gilfedder and we have shown real enthusiasm for it. We are working on creating a learning wall to support our work.

The Egyptians

We are continuing to learn about the Egyptians. Some of us have begun making canopic jars  which were found in the tombs. We have been doing art of death masks and  Egyptian jewellery. We enjoyed our Mummification experiment using fruit!

And finally, many of us have been sharing our talents in the school show! What an amazing experience for a primary 4 pupil. We wish them all luck on the night!

In numeracy, we have explored identifying and measuring angles during active maths lessons. We then moved onto exploring coordinates and directions. We participated in a fun task where we had to provide coordinates around the school in a partner activity. As we completed our angles and coordinates work, we have moved onto data handling where last week we created our own surveys and gathered in information using tally marks. As we continue our data handling topic, we are looking forward to exploring the different ways to display this information gathered such as creating our own bar graphs. As always, we are continuously mastering our times tables as this will put us in good stead when exploring multiplication and division in Primary 6.

In literacy, we are working our way through our novels, The Santa Maria by Kenneth Stevenson and The Last Wolf by Michael Morpurgo. We are continuing with applying our reading comprehension strategies to better understand our novels. It is imperative that the pupils read any assigned chapters or pages for homework to be able to complete the read to write tasks in class. Furthermore, we are confident at applying our spelling strategies independently.

We have been exploring Oceans and Continents in our topic time. In May we have explored the continent of Australasia. Here, we investigated traditional Australian music and created our very own didgeridoos. We also prepared our own quiz and tested our Australasian general knowledge on our classmates. We have now moved onto Asia and we are excited to investigate what this wonderful continent has got to offer.

We have been extremely lucky to have a series of lessons with the Scottish Rugby Union who sent a coach to teach us how to play rugby.  We learned how to throw a rugby ball by spinning it to our team mates and also learned how to score a try. Grant left us treats and a quiz to complete now that the session is over.  Some pupils were extremely competent at this sport and thus Grant provided information on how to join local rugby teams in the area.

We are almost at the end of our block of swimming and dry sports at the Sir Matt Busby Centre. This time has been a fantastic opportunity for the pupils to learn basic swimming skills as well as others developing their already existing skills. It has also been a great opportunity for the pupils to gain independence and maturity by walking to and from the centre sensibly as well as following important instructions set out by the swimming coaches.

We are also almost at the end of our preparation for our school show, Peter Pan. The pupils who have been involved have attended every practise with a determination to succeed and should all be extremely proud of their effort. We are excited to show off our performance this week at St. Gerard’s Primary School!