Primary 3

Welcome to P3! We hope you have all had a lovely summer holiday and are looking forward to being back at school. Mrs Garden will be teaching on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Mrs Paterson will be teaching on a Thursday and Friday. Mrs Alison Forsyth and Mrs Colleen Black will be our Pupil Support Assistants this term.

Social Studies - Our Term 1 history context isAncient Egypt.The children are encouraged to bring in any books or information they wish to contribute. We will learn about all aspects of Ancient Egyptian lives, the river Nile, pyramid building, kings and queens, godsgoddesses, mummification, hieroglyphics and much more! We will follow child led learning and experiences and follow the journey of where that takes us. We will use the information we gather to develop our reading, writing, maths and expressive arts skills in a cross-curricular approach.

In Literacy we will work on our home/school reading every week. If there is anything you would like to note about your child’s reading, please communicate through the reading diary. We ask that the homework diaries be initialled.

We will use our context as a stimulus for most of our class based literacy work. We will use Active Literacy to develop our knowledge of phonemes, blending and spelling strategies to help us write words. We will be writing for a variety of purposes to develop literacy skills:

  • Imaginative Stories – imagining we are Ancient Egyptians/ creating Egyptian adventures.
  • Functional Writing –instructions, recipes, cartoons, adverts, posters, lists, letters, poems, labelling pictures.
  • Joined handwriting of upper and lower case letters will be practised

In Numeracy we will be covering a range of skills and again activities will be closely linked to ourcontext where possible. Topics include the following:

  • Mental agility
  • Mathletics
  • Consolidation of Number Bonds
  • Place Value / Patterns / Sequences
  • Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication
  • Shape
  • Symmetry
  • Area
  • Grid References

Health and Wellbeing - As always the children will continue to be encouraged to develop independence and responsibility for themselves and their choices. In Westhill Primary we talk lots about the importance of ‘Teamwork’ and how our behaviours canaffect our class and school team. This week we compared ourselves to a jigsaw and spoke about the great satisfaction you feel when you complete a jigsaw. We also discussed the feelings of frustration and upset if a piece of the jigsaw is missing. Each member of our class, including Goldie our pet fish designed a jigsaw piece for our class team jigsaw wall! We reminded ourselves about the 7 school expectations and the importance of displaying these so that our class can be a truly terrific team! For our positive behaviour management strategy, we will be having daily Secret Students. In addition to our class jigsaw we will be reading Roald Dahl’s fabulous novel ‘The Twits’to highlight important social skills. We are already enjoying this story, and so far nobody wants to be like Mr or Mrs Twit!

We love celebrating achievements from outwith school so please encourage your child to let us know about these – our class WOW wall will be a place where the children can display anything that they are particularly proud of.

Please could you provide you child with a glue stick, art apron and A4 ring binder. Filled water bottles should come to school every day.

We are happy to meet with you any time regarding your child’s progress or wellbeing. Please phone the office to make an appointment.

We are very much looking forward to working with the children and building relationships with our new pupils. Our sincere wish is for all the children to have a very happy, successful and fun year in P3.

Kind regards

Mrs Jane Garden and Mrs Leza Paterson