Literacy – The children have continued to work through our reading programme which challenges them with longer, trickier texts that demand more focus and application of reading and comprehension strategies. Please ensure that your child is given the opportunity to read their book aloud each night as this really helps with their fluency and discussing what happened will help them to develop greater understanding.

In class, in addition to reading our book we have been working on a media study using the film ‘Zootopia’ which was inspired by the pupils. We had been learning the song ‘Try everything’ as part of our Health and Wellbeing focus where we had discussed being resilient, and not giving up when we found something tricky or hard. We learned that we all make mistakes and how we can use these experiences to help us as we learn. We then watched the film and discussed the characters, the settings, the plot, the themes, and key messages from the film. The children were really engaged and enjoyed learning through exploring, discussing, answering questions and drawing inferences from the film.

At home children can use these skills to discuss what they are watching, reading, is it fiction or nonfiction, why do they find it enjoyable, what is the purpose, aim, or message in story/film/clip/cartoon? This all helps the children to become more engaged in their activities and start to use critical thinking skills.

Numeracy and Maths – We have been busy learning all about Fractions and Time this month. The children have been learning about the numerator and denominator and can use the correct notation. They have a good understanding that a fraction is an equal part of a whole and really enjoyed participating in lots of games whilst learning. We are currently learning about time and can tell o’clock, half past, quarter past and some can even tell quarter to. Our recent work on Fractions really helps us with this. We loved getting to do our math’s outdoors, working in groups or pairs, playing lots of time related games.

IDL – Oceans and Continents – We have really enjoyed this topic so far as it has allowed for lots of independent learning and individual choice. Having learned a little bit about each Continent we have chosen a few that we want to learn more about. We have been investigating the different cultures such as music, food, and animals. We have used our ICT skills to research the Continents and have all created a PowerPoint on Glow which we will share with the class over the next few weeks. When exploring Africa, we used musical instruments to make different sounds and rhythms which would match our dance that we had learned, we also drew some African animals and used oil pastels to create an African safari themed backdrop. These look amazing and are proudly displayed in the class for everyone to see. This week we have been learning all about Australasia, and looked at Australia and all the islands that make up the continent. We can name some – why don’t you ask us? We also made Didgeridoo’s and are going to create our own sounds using these. We can’t wait to find out which Continent we are going to look at each week and are going to end our topic with a food tasting session, trying a variety of foods from all the Continents.

RE – Our focus for May is ‘The Month of Mary’ and we have decorated our altar in class to reflect this, one pupil brought in a lovely bunch of flowers and others have contributed flowers and beautiful drawings and prayers for Mary. We also did a great job learning a new hymn to sing to Mary ‘Bring Flowers of the Rarest’.  With Mrs Gilfedder we are learning about Islam and love learning about other religions.

Homework – As we approach the end of the term there will be no homework given out in diaries to be returned each week. I will give the children their diaries this week to be kept at home so that the children can access their GLOW logins. The children will be given another personal project to work on for the next 3 weeks, details will be discussed and decided with children this week. Most of the children have now completed their spelling programme and the next few weeks will be targeted revision and consolidation of phonemes and common words. Children should continue to practise these and to read the book that they are given home each night. They should continue to practise counting forwards and backwards in 2s, 3s, 5s and 10s, and learning the 2,3,5,10 x tables.

Children could use this time to develop other skills such as learning to tie their shoelaces, school tie, shirt buttons. This will all help them to become more independent in preparation for next session.   Thank you.

The month of May has been a busy one in Primary 1, with some lovely days off to recharge and then come back to school ready for our challenges. We have particularly enjoyed spending time with the nursery children who will join Holy Family in August and are looking forward to showing them what it looks like to be a big school boy/girl. We have been excellent role models so far and have had lots of fun playing with the children at the park and in the classroom.

Literacy

We are working so hard to learn all our phoneme sounds in Primary 1. So far we have learned sh, ch, th, ng, oo, ee, wh, ph, oy, ai and oa. We have been able to find our sounds in stories and recognised 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 learned about joining words and can add and, so, but and because to our great work too. What an achievement! 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 are trying really hard to learn more about numbers beyond 20. Some of our class can even use the 100 square and count with 3-digit numbers. We have been practising adding and subtracting with numbers up to 20/30 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.

We have been learning about sharing numbers equally and dividing amounts. Ask us to tell you what half looks, we know it looks like this ½ and can colour half of a shape.

We loved learning about time and are able to read o’clock on digital and analogue clocks. It has been fun learning about time in our daily lives and talking about time during our school day. Some boys and girls can read half past. At home we should keep practising this and if we have one, we could start to wear a watch to help us to learn more about time.

Interdisciplinary Learning

This term our class have been learning all about minibeasts. We have been hunting for minibeasts in the school grounds and have learned song, listened to stories and made mini beast crafts.

We have been visiting the ICT suite on a Thursday and have been learning how to log on to a laptop, navigate websites and use games to help our learning. Primary 1 have some excellent IT skills already and they will be very useful to us as move through the school.

In PE we have been enjoying the wonderful sunshine by getting outdoors and using all our equipment. We know how to use the different balls, racquets, hoops, bean bags safely and like to learn new skills every week.  We have been increasing our fitness to help us during our Sports Day. We enjoyed attending the Nursery Sports Day to cheer on our friends and can’t wait for our turn in a few weeks.

We have been learning how to be safe in the sunshine and all about being safe in and around the water as the summer months approach.

We have been practising all of our prayers in class and our hymn singing has been wonderful. All the children have been really trying to sing out loud during our celebrations of mass. Keep up the great work boys and girls!

As we begin our last month of Primary 1, we are beginning to think about own personal targets for moving forward into Primary 2. We are so excited to be moving to our new class after the big Summer break.

What a busy and active month we have had here in P6/5!  Despite having had 3 short weeks this month, we have packed lots of learning into this beautiful month of May.

We celebrated the King’s Coronation by exploring the countries that make up the Commonwealth. We wrote a recount of the story of King Charles III’s Coronation and completed the work by creating a collage of King Charles III’s profile using the colours of the flag of Great Britain.

We dedicated the month of May to Our Lady by saying the Rosary each week in school.  We learned how important the Rosary is in our faith and how devotion to Our Lady is a central part of our faith. Some of the girls in class led the prayers during lunchtime and encouraged some of the younger children to participate too.  One of our classmates brought beautiful flowers in to decorate our May Altar which was a beautiful gift for Our Lady.

We were very lucky to have a block of 4 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  block is over.  Leaflets will be given out to the classes that were involved in the rugby sessions encouraging us to try a few rugby sessions with our local teams.

We are almost at the end of our block of swimming and dry sports at the Sir Matt Busby Centre which has been incredible fun. Most of the class are now able to swim due to the expertise of the swimming instructors and we will be able to go swimming safely during the holidays.

Most of the class have prepared so well for our upcoming show, We have learned lines, practised our songs and attended after school sessions in preparation for our production of Peter Pan.  We are so excited to show it to our family and friends next week in St Gerard’s Primary School.

Please follow the following link for information about school show week!

School Show Information- Peter Pan

As we approach the end of another month in Primary 2, we have another monthly update for you.

In literacy we have been reading our next class novel ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’. We are so excited to hear all about the magnificent plan that Mr. Fox has created. We now realise that we don’t need lots of colourful illustrations in our books. We know that we can put on our imagination caps to help us create a picture in our own heads. We enjoy making predictions about what will happen next and discussing the meaning of tricky words.

We have also continued to learn lots of new sounds and words in May. This month we have been showing super teamwork by helping our literacy partners to be great learners. We have been participating in dictation where we say a sentence and our partner tries their best to write it. This is a super way to practise sentences that contain our focus sounds and words.

In maths we have had a busy month indeed. We have worked on division problems by sharing and grouping items. We have also used our Minibeasts topic as a stimulus for learning about data handling. First, we counted minibeasts on our minibeast hunt by using tally marks. Then we discovered how to create and interpret bar charts. Finally, we learned how to read and create our own carroll diagrams. This was a bit tricky, but we worked so hard!  This month we have also learned all about halves and quarters in our fractions topic. We loved the story ‘Give me Half’ and we divided a variety of shapes into halves and quarters.

In R.E our focus for this month has been ‘The Month of Mary’. We dedicated our class altar to Mary and made our own paper flowers as we know that Mary loves them. We thought about the words that the angel said to Mary when he told her she was going to have a baby, and compared that to the Hail Mary prayer. We then learned about the holy Rosary, we made our own Rosary beads and tried to say a mini Rosary every day. We know that this is Mary’s special prayer. We used it to pray for our friends and family. We even made a special journey to the Church grounds to say a mini Rosary to Our Lady. We blew her lots of lovely kisses too!

We will soon be leading our school in the next first Friday Mass in Holy Family Church. Our readers, offertory children and all others are getting ready to lead the Mass beautifully. Please come to support us as this is a very important event in our calendar.

In Health and Wellbeing, we have been practising for our sports day. Our current topic is athletics and we have used our time to prepare. We are so excited about participating in all the races next month.

We have also been learning about safety within our Health and Wellbeing lessons. We have covered fire, sun, road and internet safety. During fire safety, we learned lots of important things about keeping safe around fire. Our teacher said we all deserved the title of Junior Fire Officer. We made Fire Officer badges for ourselves and wore them with pride.

This month we celebrated the King’s coronation in primary 2. We made beautiful crowns and learned about the life and work of our new king. We also learned about Fairtrade. This is very important as it ensures that farmers get paid fairly for the things they produce. We played a super Fairtrade game with our friends.

We also got to support the nursery children during their sports day. We were super supporters who motivated the younger children to perform well. We were delighted when we got to participate in one of the races.

We can’t wait for our last month as primary two children. We are looking forward to lots more learning and hopefully lots of time outdoors. Please keep an eye on Twitter for lots more photographs of our achievements.

Time for another update from the hardworking children in Primary 3

Literacy – The children have continued to select a variety of books from our class library or from home and often choose reading time which has helped them progress in their fluency and accuracy when reading aloud in groups in the class. They have enjoyed listening to stories and looking for facts in their topic books. We have read The Roman Beanfeast, and are reading Pugly Solves a Crime. They continue to work hard using various strategies each week to learn new common and tricky words. The writing genre focus was on letters, explanation and recount. The children demonstrated their skills by writing letters for penfriends in P3 at Mossend Primary and we delivered these to them. We were so excited to receive a letter back from them.

Numeracy and Maths – Having spent a great deal of time working on multiplication and division they are now working on Money. The children can identify and order all uk coins and notes up to £20.00. They have been using plastic coins to make amounts and calculate change up £10. We learned about the decimal point separating pounds and pence and know this is really important. We looked at receipts we had brought in from home and added and subtracted items. We loved playing games like Money Monopoly, Coin Collecter and Toy Shops which helps to reinforce what we were learning in a fun and enjoyable way. We can’t wait to move on to Fractions.

IDL – Oceans and Continents – The new IDL topic chosen by the children was Oceans and Continents and the children are really engaged in this already – asking lots of questions which we will explore in more detail over the next few weeks. Please ask children to tell you all about what they have learned. They can already name the 7 Continents and 5 Oceans and I’m certain they will all be able to impress you with their learning already.

PE/HWB–The children have come to the end of their sessions on ball skills, they learned how to make different passes and to travel with the ball. Athletics will be the focus of this term, and they will looking at improving their fitness and performance in running, jumping and throwing – all great practise for Sports Day. The class have also been talking about their emotions and explored these through the story ‘The Rabbit who was Afraid of the Dark’, we will continue to work on this,  identifying triggers and behaviours which are connected to our emotions.

RE – The children have had the opportunity to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation on a further two occasions in school with Father Brown and were incredibly lucky when Bishop Toal visited our class on a recent visit to talk to the Primary 7’s about Confirmation. We have been learning about Jesus’ apostles and how we can show love to one another as Jesus did. We will be leading first Friday mass this week and look forward to celebrating with our whole school community. Please join us if you can.

We have started our literacy novels: The Santa Marie by Kenneth Steven and The Last Wolf by Michael Foreman. We will continue to apply our reading comprehension strategies as well as work on our fluency, pace and expression when reading the chapters out loud. We have continued to apply our spelling strategies each week. We no longer do a weekly spelling test and instead will complete one every four weeks to gain a more holistic approach to spelling.

We are focusing on decimal numbers in maths. We have explored the relationship between decimal numbers and fractions and have understood the link between these two concepts. We are now working our way through the operations of maths such as adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing decimal numbers.

We are enjoying our weekly swimming and dry sports trip to the Matt Busby centre, along with Primary 6/5. We are gaining more confidence in the pool each week and hopefully by the end of the block, we will all be sound swimmers. A special thanks to all the parent helpers who have accompanied us each week.

We have recently started rugby lessons with Scottish Rugby. This will continue for a few more weeks where we learn passes, formations, and conversions.

We have started our topic: Oceans and Continents. So far, we have explored the Pacific Ocean and created our very own Great Barrier Reef. which is part of our wall display in class. We are excited to explore more oceans and the different continents from around the world. We will be investigating different cultures such as music, food and animals.

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

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. We enjoyed using concrete materials in class to help us to learn more effectively. We will now move on to grouping within division. Our next topics in maths will be money, fractions and data handling.

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. To help us become amazing listeners, we have been working hard on developing essential skills through our class novel ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’.  We love making predictions to guess what will happen next in the book. We have realised that we don’t always need bright, colourful illustrations to look at because we can just use our amazing imaginations when Mrs Simpson reads to us.

Our new topic in primary 2 is Minibeasts. We have been reading super stories about different minibeast characters and then using these stories to help us to create our own. We have really enjoyed ‘The Cautious Caterpillar’ and ‘Superworm’. We try so hard to remember our core writing targets when we write and our favourite part of the week is when we find out who our Star Writers are. We have also learned all about the life cycle of a caterpillar and can describe this cycle to others.

In April, we learned about Islam, and we investigated what happens during Ramadan and Eid. We looked at different styles of mosque and, through purposeful play challenges, we designed our own mosques in a variety of different ways. We were so proud of some of our friends in primary 1 and 2 who told us all about their prayers, traditions and described what happens when they attend mosque.

In Health and Wellbeing, we have been learning ball skills. We have learned lots of amazing new skills such as catching, throwing, bouncing and kicking. We have also looked at road safety this month. We know this is so important because it keeps us safe outside of school.

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

After a lovely Easter Break, we welcomed our Primary 7 pupils back for their last summer term at Holy Family Primary!

During the first two weeks of term we have been very busy! We had a very successful trip to Cardinal Newman for the commonwealth games where Holy Family secured the first place trophy! We are so proud of our teamwork and sports skills needed to achieve this.

Last week we began rugby sessions with our friends in P7A, which we are looking forward to continue to take part in over the new few weeks. With this in mind, our PE days are now a Tuesday and Friday this term so please remind pupils to bring their PE kits to school on these days.

On Thursday last week, alongside Primary 7A, we received and celebrated the Sacrament of Confirmation after months of careful preparation. It was such a special night for our pupils and families, we are very proud of them and all that they have achieved!

We are also very excited about our upcoming school show which will take place on the 6th and 7th of June in St. Gerard’s Primary school hall. Pupils across the school are busy practising dances, lines and songs together with lots of excitement! We can’t wait to see them all show off their talents at the end of term!

Within our own classroom, we have started a new novel called ‘The Thief Lord’ which is set in the city of Venice which is also our new topic this term! As well as this, we are taking part in an enterprise challenge with Primary 7a to help raise money for our Primary 7 treats at the end of term. All pupils are thoroughly enjoying this challenge and working with all of their peers.

We have begun working on algebra within numeracy and I am very impressed with every pupil’s efforts so far! Keep it up Primary 7B!

I hope this last term is a special one for you all and you enjoy your final few months at Holy Family Primary school.

On returning to school after our Easter break, we have been delighted to have Miss Walker working with us in Primary 1. She will be with our class for most of the month of May. We are really enjoying working with Miss Walker and all the fun and exciting learning experiences she has planned for us.

Literacy

In Literacy we have begun to learn our phoneme sounds and have looked at phoneme stories and become text detectives to find our phoneme words. We continue to use our skills in reading and writing to explore our phoneme sounds and words. So far, we have learned ch, th, sh, ng, oo and ee. Ask us to spell some words with these sounds or find them in books at home.

We are continuing to build our classroom word wall with the common words that we have learned so far in Primary 1. In class we read, write, make our words every day from magnetic letters and other materials. At home we should continue to learn our words and practise them every night.

We are learning how to write short, independent sentences. When we write independently, we are being encouraged to use capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. Some of our class can write independent sentences using joining words like and, so, but and because. Great job!

In class we enjoy listening to and reading stories and talking about what we have read with our friends. This month we have been able to ask questions about the texts we share and like to share our opinions on the texts that we read. When we read at home ask us to sound out each sound and blend the sounds together (eg c – a – t , cat). This will help us to improve our reading fluency.

Numeracy

In Primary 1 we continue to extend our knowledge of numbers and are becoming confident when discussing numbers beyond 20. We have been practising adding and subtracting with numbers up to 20 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. Some of our friends are counting up to 100 and can talk about numbers before, after and in between. Fantastic job Primary 1!

We have begun our Time block and are learning how to tell the time. So far, we have talked about analogue o’clock time and we will continue to learning more about this in the coming weeks. We will be playing time games, making our own clocks, and having fun! At home we could look at clocks and talk about time with our families.

Interdisciplinary Learning

This term our class have been learning all about the Seasons and in particular Spring. Ask us to sing our ‘Spring is Here’ song for you at home. We have enjoyed looking for signs of spring in our environment and have begun to learn more about Minibeasts. We have been on our Minibeast hunt and found lots of different creatures outdoors. We have learned about the life cycles of the caterpillar/butterfly and enjoyed listening to the story of the Very Hungry Caterpillar. We are looking forward to learning more about minibeasts and working on our classroom display.

In Primary 1 we are showing a keen interest in learning more about the human body. We will be learning more about our body parts and organs in the coming weeks. In PE w will be preparing our bodies and updating our skills for our Sports Day activities.

Our Muslim friends have been celebrating Eid Mubarak this month and we have really enjoyed learning all about Ramadan and Eid celebrations. Thank you to our friends for sharing their knowledge of their faith with us so well. You are all stars! In the coming weeks we will be learning more about Mary, as May is the month dedicated to Our Lady. We will continue to practise the Hail Mary prayer and learn more about the mother of Jesus. We will attend first Friday mass this week and look forward to celebrating with our whole school community.