St. Brendan's Primary School and Nursery

Dear parent/guardian,

It is a tremendous honour to welcome all of you to our Primary 6 class for this year! Trusting that you all had a wonderful summer, we have spent the first few weeks getting reacquainted with one another and creating relationships with our new peers…and teacher. See below for an outline of what your child will be learning in Term 1.

Numeracy

Every numeracy lesson will begin with a Number Talks starter activity, which will present the children with the opportunity to further enhance their mental agility. Following the school’s Pathways programme, the class will look at Place Value; Length and Area; Addition and Subtraction; and Money. The children will be provided with a range of active and written tasks to enable them to learn these skills, with each topic being assessed.

Literacy

Continuing on from their excellent work in Primary 5, the children will work through the North Lanarkshire Active Literacy programme across all areas within literacy: Spelling, Reading, Writing and Talking and Listening. New spelling words will be given on a weekly basis, with the children working through a variety of tasks both in the classroom and at home. A modelling block will take place through Term 1, using a well-loved novel within school titled “Saving Finnegan” by Sally Grindley. We will take the modelling opportunity to revise our comprehension strategies. The “Big Writing” area of the curriculum will start this term with Mrs McLaughlin, who will be with the class on Thursdays.

Health and Wellbeing

Like many areas, Health and Wellbeing will be taught throughout the breadth of the curriculum. For this term, we will look to focus on a series of lessons on Growth Mindset. A big push across the entire school, the lessons will provide the children the chance to challenge their own mindsets and grow their self-belief. For Primary 6, our P.E days will be Monday and Thursday of this year. We will be looking to start with Basketball this term, looking to develop our ability to receive and distribute the ball effectively with teammates. We will also be looking to improve our ability to use movement effectively to create space and attacking opportunities! If children could be reminded to bring in P.E kit on a Monday of every week, to remain in class for the week, that would be appreciated.

Interdisciplinary Learning (I.D.L)

Our I.D.L theme for this term is “Enterprise”. This topic provides a wealth of opportunity to interact with Social Studies, Technologies and a wide range of other curricular areas. We will look at the “ins and outs” of a business, focusing on how different functions interact with one another. We will conduct forms of market research within the school to help us launch a class pop-up shop, using our knowledge of Budgeting, Profit and Loss to run a successful day of trading. Any profit we make will be used to purchase something of worth to our class. We will look to tie in a Topical Science focus, looking at how scientific advancements have changed the face of business and still impact on its success today.

R.E

This term, we will be further exploring the “This Is Our Faith” programme. We will look to refresh our memories by looking different areas such as Prayer, the Bible and Jesus’s divinity. We will also study Justice and Peace and look at our Scottish/Celtic Catholic Faith Heritage. Given our responsibility as role models as senior pupils within the school, the children will be expected to sing out well when attending Mass.

Homework

This term, we will look to support our learning from class through homework. I would appreciate the support in making sure that children keep up with these.

I am keen to have an open dialogue throughout the year as a class community of pupils, families and myself. With that in mind, please do not hesitate to reach out by popping a note in your child’s diary for me. I thank you, in advance, for all the support this year.

Mr Bradley