Dear Parent/Guardian,

I hope you all had a wonderful summer!
This letter will provide you with a brief overview of the learning that will take place this term in Primary 6. This information provides you with an insight into your child’s learning and I look forward to the year ahead as the Primary 6 teacher.

Literacy
The children will continue to follow North Lanarkshire’s Active Literacy programme for Spelling, Reading, Writing and Listening and Talking. This programme will help to develop further their literacy skills and provide exciting and new challenges.
The children will take part in a whole class novel study to reintroduce them to the Active Literacy Reading Strategies. The novel this term will be ‘The Silver Sword’ written by Ian Serraillie. The text will be read in class alongside the children to model reading skills. In addition to this, the children will be given a novel to take home and this should be read each night to develop fluency and encourage reading for enjoyment.

Numeracy
This term Primary 6 will explore place value with numbers up to 100,000, length and weight and addition up to 100,000. The children will have the opportunity to learn these skills and concepts through a mixture of both active and written tasks. This will enable the children to apply their learning across contexts and see a real purpose to their learning.

Health and Wellbeing
Health and Wellbeing will be taught across the curriculum. This term in Physical Education the children will develop their skills in Aesthetics through gymnastics and dance. The children will also explore substance misuse this term with Mrs McLaughlin.

Interdisciplinary Learning
The children of Primary 6 will be exploring the Rainforest this term. Various element of the rainforest will be examined such as, animals and plants, deforestation, indigenous people and much more. The children will apply their learning across the curriculum with a particular focus within the curriculum areas of Social Studies, Expressive Arts and Technologies.

Religious Education
Religious Education will be taught through the ‘This Is Our Faith’ programme. This term Primary 6 will explore Prayer with a focus on personal prayer. Additionally, the children of Primary 6 will explore their God-given role to care for and protect God’s creation, including themselves.

The children’s homework will help to support their on-going classwork and I would appreciate your support in ensuring the children keep up with all homework tasks.

Many thanks,
Mrs Williamson

Dear Parent/Guardian,
I hope you have all had a wonderful summer break and I would like to welcome you back to the new school year. The children have had a week to settle back into their normal school routine, get to know their new classmates and have been hard at work setting their targets for the new term ahead. This week however, it is back to business as usual with high standards to ensure that your child achieves his/her potential. We are excited for the term ahead and would like to share a brief overview of the learning that will be taking place in our P3/2 class.
Literacy
Children will continue to follow North Lanarkshire’s Active Literacy Programme for spelling and phonics. They will continue to learn new words and a new sound every week and this will be consolidated through class and homework.
In reading, the children will work at their own level and experience a variety of books to challenge their imaginations and comprehension skills. They will continue to take a book home, which they should read for pleasure and to help develop fluency.
Numeracy
Children will begin this term by learning the sequence of days in a week, months in a year and will be able to group the months into seasons. Our Primary 2 children will learn that months are made up of a different numbers of days with our primary 3 children learning to specify how many days are in each month. We will then move on to learn about our number system. Children will discover that this is built around the digits 0 – 9 and be able to use the digits 0 – 9 in different combinations to make numbers. Children will also learn how to read, write and order a range of whole numbers. Our Primary 2 children will work with the numbers 0-20 and our Primary 3 children developing onto numbers 0-100.
Religious Education
During this term our focus for R.E will be ‘Creation.’ Children will be learning about God’s Role in making them and the world as we know it. They will discuss God’s love for us and the qualities that make us all both unique and special. Children will also be learning about many well known Saints, their lives and lessons.

Health and Wellbeing
This term children will explore the theme of friendship and discuss the qualities that make a ‘good’ friend. This will be supported through the education pack ‘Friendship Terrace.’ This pack stimulates discussions by using stories of various situations and asking the children to explore their feelings and reactions to each story. We will also be looking at the choices we make and the impact this has on our general fitness. Please not that P.E is a mandatory part of our curriculum and our school aims to deliver 2 hours every week. Science this term will be taught by Mrs McLauchlan and the focus will be living things and the environment.
Social Studies
This term the children will take part in the whole school theme of ‘Our Wonderful World.’ Primary 3/2 will explore the local area and will enjoy looking at Scotland in a wider context. Children will learn through play, discussion and many group activities to develop their understanding of our local environment and places of local interest.

Thank you in advance for all your support this term, please continue to use your child’s homework diary to communicate any concerns/ comments.
Many Thanks
Jodi Cassidy
Class Teacher (P3/2)

Dear Parent/Carer,

A big welcome back to all of the children who will be joining me, Miss Burns, for their time in Primary 3 & Primary 4. The children in Primary 4/3 have come together from three different classes & we have had great fun getting to know one another properly during the first week back at school.

As you will be aware, with both stages preparing for Sacraments later in the year, the class will be in for a very busy and exciting time in Primary 4/3.

Literacy

All children will be continuing to follow the North Lanarkshire Active Literacy Programme to support their learning in spelling, phonics, reading and writing.

As in the previous stage, Primary 3 children will be introduced to a new sound and set of common words each week. Words and sounds will be consolidated through work in class and our active homework programme. Children will also continue to build their fluency and comprehension skills in reading by working with banded books in class and at home.

To develop further their accuracy in writing, our Primary 4 children will begin to focus closely on the different representations of phonemes in addition to learning new strategies and rules for spelling. The children will start the term undertaking a novel study of the text ‘The Invisible Dog’.

Numeracy

In numeracy, the class will continue to apply what they learn in active and practical ways. Each week, the children will experience direct teaching, partner/group activities and written tasks to build and consolidate their understanding of concepts.

Over the course of the term children will revisit familiar topics including place value and addition, with the children working at their own level. Our Primary 3 children will be working closely with numbers up to and including one hundred, while our Primary 4 children will be further challenged by working with numbers up to and including one thousand.

RE

In RE, our class will be focusing on Sunday, the Lord’s day, by learning about the story of creation, the importance of Sunday as a holy day and the Mass. Later in the term the children will also be learning more about the Saints and how they can inspire us to show our faith everyday.

Health & Wellbeing

A wee reminder that PE for Primary 4/3 will take place on a Monday and a Wednesday. We would encourage the children to bring their kit into school on a Monday and take it home on the Friday. All items of children’s kit should be clearly labeled with their name and class. This term, our focus will be on Athletics.

Social Studies

Our class topic for the first term will be ‘The Wonders of the World’. The class will be exploring the Wonders of the World – old and new – and making comparisons. This will provide lots of inspiration for learning in different areas and, as always, any support/contributions from home are welcomed.

I am looking forward to working together with both you and your child to help him/her to make the very best of their year in Primary 4/3. Please feel free to communicate any comments or concerns using the homework diary.

Many thanks

E Burns

Class Teacher

At the end of term, Primary 2/1 have been busy right up until the last minute! We all really enjoyed our topic – ‘The Lorax’. We opened a Recycling Centre in the school and encouraged all of the children to bring in their used plastic bottles, old paper, card and cans. After weeks of collecting we went on a long walk up to Netherton Recycling Centre with our heavy bags of rubbish! It was rainy but we had great fun. We have also been visiting lots of beautiful green spaces. We have walked to Baron’s Haugh in Muirhouse with the RSVP and even took a trip to Calderglen Country Park! We now know all about our beautiful environment and how to take care of it. We are all very excited about moving on to our next stage and we are sure you will hear lots more from us after the summer.
We hope you have a wonderful summer holiday!

Miss Burns and Primary 2/1

Primary 6 cannot believe the summer holidays are almost upon us. It has been the quickest year but we have had so much fun and learned many new things! For the last couple of weeks of term Primary 6 will be learning all about the Commonwealth Games…we can’t wait to get started on this! We thoroughly enjoyed our Summer Fete on Saturday and we are so delighted that the parents managed to raise so much money and that all of their hard work paid off. We have been learning all about 2D shape in maths and have had fun creating lovely designs with compasses. We are now going to be looking at the nets of shapes and making 3D models out of them.

We have been busy in P1. learning lots of facts about our topics.

We created a colourful display about Springtime and showed good handcraft skills when making flowers, caterpillars and butterflies. Mrs McCarron was very impressed with our art work.

For our current topic we travelled back in time to the Swinging Sixties and have been finding out interesting facts about what life was like way back then. We love the music of the sixties especially a song called “Yellow Submarine” made famous by the Beatles.Twister and Ker Plunk were popular games in the sixties. We’ve had fun playing these games and they have become our favourites too. Thank you to everyone who handed in artefacts of the sixties. They helped to make our topic more interesting and meaningful. We are looking forward to our visit to Summerlee Heritage Park in Coatbridge. It will be fun. We can’t wait!

Well, what a busy time we have had recently in primary 4!

We have worked so hard on preparing for our First Holy Communion and we enjoyed our very special celebration. Many thanks to everyone for their support and prayers.

Recently, we had fun taking part in our Eco/Fairtrade week. We started the week by doing some planting with Davie from Dobbies. Later, we went on a nature walk along Adders Gill. We enjoyed learning more about our local area and watching the sand martins feed next to the Clyde. Some of us felt that the ‘hike’ back to school wasn’t as much fun, though it certainly was good exercise!

We listened to our eco and fairtrade members presenting powerpoints on raising awareness of Fairtrade products and the problems of littering. Then, we did some litter picking and gardening at the front of the school and in the quadrangle. We think we have made it look much nicer but there’s still work to be done to keep it looking nice. We had a great day at Ravenscraig where we took part in judo, dance, badminton and athletics and later in the week we had fun during an orienteering lesson.

We really enjoyed seeing the beautiful birds of prey and some of us had the chance to hold and interact with the birds. We got to see the three baby barn owls too which looked nothing like Apollo, the adult barn owl!

We loved the Fairtrade tuck shop and the fruit tasting session. We did some fun and interesting tasks in class such as designing a Fairtrade product and making an anti-dog fouling poster for a Dogs Trust competition.

All in all we had a busy, fun filled week. Now we are looking forward to continuing our topic on ‘Natural Disasters’. For this we have been finding out about all sorts of disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and extreme weather. Everyone is really enthusiastic about learning new things about the topic and we are producing some really interesting pieces of work. Mrs McLauchlan is already very impressed with the things that we know!

We’re back! Primary 7 have returned from a fantastic and action packed week at Kilbowie. We all had a ball and have lots of fun memories to take with us to Our Lady’s High School. This is our final term at St Brendan’s Primary before we go off on a new exciting adventure and we are looking forward to this new experience.

We returned to an eventful week as the school celebrated Health, Eco and Fairtrade week. We had lots of opportunities to get involved and we thoroughly enjoyed our visit to Ravenscraig Sports Centre. We also worked as a team as we took part in an orienteering activity. Great fun was had by all!

This term we will have the opportunity to re-visit Our Lady’s High School for our transition visits on the 10^th and 11^th June. We cannot wait for this experience as it will help prepare us further for our new adventure at secondary school.

What an exciting week for Primary 3! As part of our school eco and health week, we were given the opportunity to visit Tesco in Wishaw, where we learned all about where our food comes from. We baked our own tasty tiger bread in the bakery, tasted some fruit and cheese, and even had a shot on the tills. It was a very fun and interesting trip. On Tuesday we visited Ravenscraig Sports Centre with the rest of the school to take part in our St. Brendan’s Commonwealth Games. Our activities were football, athletics, rugby and dodge ball. We loved it! On Wednesday we took part in a birds of prey presentation and some baby barn owls came to visit us in the class. They were really cute. We ended our health week on Thursday with some Fairtrade fruit tasting and we did some healthy cooking with Mrs McLauchlan. We made spinach and feta cheese filo pastry parcels and they were really yummy.  We all had a fantastic week and really enjoyed all the fun activities.

Well…this has been a very exciting term so far! We have been lucky enough to have the opportunity to do a joint topic with Muirhouse Primary. It is all about the Muirhouse Towers and the surrounding area.

We are working with people from Culture NL and we have been involved in some exciting tasks. We have; researched about the towers, made 3D models of them, had a reminiscence session and also been involved in filming and interviewing.

We had our reminiscence session today where the children got to move round stations looking at old maps of the area, blueprints for our school and they also got the chance to play with some old fashioned games and toys.

Here are some pictures from today.