We are now in the final term, time flies when you’re having fun! We will continue with our usual homework routine. Spelling will be given out by Mr Woods on a Monday and returned on a Wednesday. Mrs Kirkwood sets us reading homework on a Wednesday to be completed for a Friday. Please check and sign your child’s yellow reading record each week. Children also get time in class each morning to read their Accelerated Reader book. When children complete a book they can then do a quiz online which allows staff to see how well they have read and understood it. Lots of children have been in the 100% club, let’s hope this continues this term!

We have been participating in the Virgin Money project ‘Make £5 Grow. ‘ This is a great way for children to learn about managing money and enterprise. We sold ice creams at our school show. We made £117 profit from this. We plan to have a special ‘Toast Thursday’ tuck shop, make keyrings and bracelets to sell and have a snack stall at Sports Day. We greatly appreciate support from parents with this project.

Mr Woods will continue to work on number, place value and the 4 operations with us in maths. Mrs Kirkwood will be teaching us about measure once we have finished our money topic. This will involve lots of fun practical activities.

For the next few weeks PE will be on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Caitlin from Active Schools teaches us on a Tuesday and on Wednesdays we will join with P7/6 to take part in inter-house competitions in preparation for Sports day. Please ensure your child has a full change of PE kit on these days, including t-shirt, shorts/trousers and shoes. No jewellery should be worn on PE days please.  Outdoor learning will continue this term. Please check the newsletter dates for the diary for specific dates.

Our topic for this term will be ‘ Our Community’. Mr Woods has a special art project planned, keep an eye out for this! We will also be learning about lifecycles in Science.

We started this term with learning about the Scots Language. We learned the songs “The New Teacher” and “Wild Mountain Thyme” and performed them at our Scottish afternoon. Primary 5 learned the poem “The Dusty Miller” and Primary 4 did “Graffiti.” We also completed projects about the life of Robert Burns and designed our own kilts, which you will see around the hall. Well done to our poetry, artwork and project winners.

We have been writing our own poems. We have written Haikus, Limericks and rhyming poems. We are now moving on to our next Talk for Writing unit, which is based on the text “The Class Trip.”

Reading homework is given out on a Wednesday and should be completed for a Friday. It is important this homework is done as we then complete a quiz on Accelerated Reader on the book we have read. Lots of children have been achieving great scores and we are all aiming to be in the 100% club! We have a display of our reading achievements in the library area. Spelling homework is given out on a Monday and is to be completed for a Wednesday.

In Science we have been learning about our senses. We have already completed smell tests, taste tests and a guess the sound test. This is a fun topic and we have been sharing some of these activities, plus learning in other curricular areas on Learning Journals. Please make sure you login to see what your child has been learning. We have also been learning about the weather, which was a very significant topic during Storm Eowyn. We wrote and presented our own weather forecasts and have been looking at how the weather impacts us. We will be learning more about climate change too.

In maths we have been working on fractions and division. We will soon become young entrepreneurs when we begin the Virgin Money project Make £5 Grow. One of our parents will be helping us and hopefully we can make lots of profit for our school funds. This project will help us to learn all about managing money.

This term we have PE on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Caitlin from Active Schools has been doing football with us on Tuesdays and Mrs Kirkwood has been teaching us gymnastics on a Wednesday. Please ensure your child has full PE kit on these days, including a change of shoes and no jewellery.

We would like to share with you our learning from Term 2. We have been looking at a story called The Old Mill in our Talk for Writing lessons. The author uses different techniques to build suspense and we have been using these techniques in our own writing.

We have been using Accelerated Reader to complete quizzes on our class reading books and library books. This shows us how many words we have read and shows if we have understood the text. Reading homework is sent home on Wednesdays and reading records should be signed and returned to school on Fridays. Please ensure reading homework is completed as we sometimes do quizzes on our books and like to aim for a score of 100%!

Spelling homework is given out on Mondays to be completed by a Wednesday. This term we have been doing lots of revision of common words.

In maths we have been learning about angles and directions. We have been doing lots of work on place value, number calculations and times tables. On Thursdays we look at different problem solving strategies.

In PE we have been focusing on dance. We have been copying routines, creating our own moves and doing some Scottish dancing.

Our science topic this term is materials. We have been looking at the properties of different materials and their uses and completing investigations, such as which material is best for absorbing water.

Don’t forget to regularly login to Learning Journals to see more about what your child has been learning.

Welcome to the Primary 5/4 page! Mr Woods teaches us on a Monday and Tuesday and Mrs Kirkwood teaches us on a Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Mrs Vance supports us in class every day and Mrs Morrison helps us with our writing sometimes too.

We had an exciting start to our Talk for Writing unit when a strange creature appeared in the field opposite our school! We then looked at the text The Tree Giant and have been innovating this to create our own information texts.

In maths we have been doing lots of number work with Mr Woods. We have been learning about time with Mrs Kirkwood and we also do problem solving every week.

Our Science topic is electricity. Our school has some new equipment that we have been using to create electrical circuits. Our next step is to design a model or a game that contains an electrical circuit. We are also learning about the inventor Thomas Edison.

In our classroom you will see our Class Charter which displays our rights and also our SHANARRI display. We have been learning about our wellbeing and feelings.

This term has been busy already with our open morning, where parents and carers joined us for fun maths and science lessons. We are looking forward to our Harvest Service, where we will perform what we have been learning with our music teacher, Miss Gibson. We are also looking forward to our beach adventure day at Maidens and Culzean on the 3rd October.

In PE we have been focusing on the rules in the gym hall and following instructions as a team.  Caitlin from Active Schools works with us on a Tuesday. We are also lucky enough to do lots of outdoor learning. P5 and P4 go outdoors on alternate Fridays.

This term we finished off our topic on Ancient Egyptians with a showcase of our learning. We invited parents/carers to our Egyptian “museum” where we performed a song and two dances and showed off the wonderful work we have been doing, including our dioramas, Egyptian collars and papyrus paper. We managed to raise £30 through kind donations at our museum café. Thank you to everyone who came along.

In maths we have been working on data handling, addition, subtraction and multiplication. We will continue to work on multiplication and division next term and we will also be focusing on time.  We complete Barvember challenges, where we had to solve problems using bar models.

Our Talk for Writing text this term was The Multifunction Mobile Phone. We learned the text through story mapping and actions and we then turned it into a tv advert. For our innovations we created posters for next products then wrote a persuasive text about our products for our hot task.

In Science we have been learning about Space. We researched the Milky Way and made our own pictures of it.

We have had a fantastic first term in Primary 5/4. We have been learning about Ancient Egypt. We will continue this topic next term where we will prepare our museum for parents to visit! We have been learning a song to perform too. Keep an eye out for more information soon as this will also be an enterprise project for us next term.

The most exciting day was our ACE day where we got to try out paddleboarding and canoeing. All of the children were so brave and confident in the water and everyone had a great time.

We will end the term with a trip to Dumfries House to participate in a workshop about food and farming. We have been learning about food production. We will continue this topic next term as well as learning more about the zones of regulation.