Welcome to our new Primary 7 class page. Have a look here to see what learning is going on in our class and what fun activities we get up to in and out of class 😀

Read On Cancer Fund for Children 

World Book Day

FUNdamental Skills 😅

We began this week by reviewing our learning on angles. We progressed to working with much larger angles and had the job of ‘directing ships into port’ by calculating angles to get them to their destination.

We also looked at the ‘cheats way’ of finding some angles, which involves less calculation!

We learned Makaton sign language for our song ‘The Belfast Child’ for the Peace Proms on Sunday.

The children were tasked with a creative activity for Literacy, where they had to use the medium of Art to summarize the chapter they had just read for the previous night’s homework.

 We had a great day out on Tuesday when we were invited to the ‘Bee Safe’ event at An Riocht. We learned how to keep ourselves safe in the home, when travelling and when we are out and about. We got a lovely little gift from Newry and Mourne council. Our children were also commended on their exemplary behaviour 😊

For Irish, we spent time learning little statements to use in our Gaelic football games at Friday’s Blitz. We have been practicing using them during our break and lunch time games and hope to use them all day on Friday.

We were very lucky to get lovely pancakes in class on Tuesday. It was a great way to get us ready for Lent. On Wednesday we celebrated the beginning of Lent when we attended Mass with the rest of the children in school. The singing was absolutely beautiful 😊

Congratulations to Brea who did so well at the Irish dancing Feis. Great job 😊

Well done to Ellen and Noah who stood on stage at assembly shared the Poetry entry for Warrenpoint Feis.  Well done 😊

Bee Safe

What a great day of filming 😀 Thankyou to the Trailblazers team 🙂

We had great fun learning our moves for the peace Proms. We thought it was important that everyone knew what to do before we got together as a group to show off our dance skills.

Remember the songs and moves are on our website so you can practice away on your own at home.

We had a great session with Mr Hardy, where we honed our fundamental skills, which included running, jumping, coordination, throwing, catching, kicking and striking. We also had a Camogie practice session with the girls from KS2.

In Literacy, we have been learning about Similes and Metaphors. We took some time to examine poetry pieces and we worked in pairs to find all the examples we could. We then read a story called @As Smelly as a Sock’ (aimed at young children but full of similes). Next we set to work describing ourselves and our personalities in 5 similes and accompanied that with a lovely self-portrait.

In Numeracy we have been practicing our multiplication skills with a focus on Fractions. We have also been working on angles as part of our focus ‘Position Direction and Movement’. We had fun trying to find out which targets our lasers would end up destroying.

We had a visit from Noel Lyons (ECO) to remind us of all about the rules of recycling. We talked about what goes into our blue bins and how we can use pieces of recycling in an artistic way. We had the opportunity to discuss dumping grounds and got the opportunity to smell ‘Bin Juice ☹.

We played a Target game with the chance to win a JIF toy. Then we enjoyed a lovely art activity, using up our old cereal boxes. We are now the proud owners of lovely, recycled pencil cases 😊

In Numeracy this week, we started with a quick overview of what we had been working on before the break. We reviewed our work on Division – ‘Long’ and ‘Bus Stop’ Methods.

On Monday we met as a whole school on Teams, to share the learning that had taken place during Internet Safety Week. It was lovely to be able to watch and listen to all the other children share their experiences.

We also spent some time on our Trailblazers project. We completed group work on our story board and made decisions about how and where we are going to film (which is starting this week). We also talked about what props we will need and how we are going to access them. As this is a zero-budget film, we must either borrow or make what we need!

In Literacy, we have been completing our work on Explanation Texts. We began by studying a text on Global Warming where we discussed our personal responsibilities for the Earth. We answered given questions in Scientific terms, as best we could, then went on to design posters and leaflets demonstrating our knowledge and commitment to saving the Earth.

In ICT on Tuesday, we discovered the fun that is AI. We used Adobe Express to help us generate some beautiful pictures according to our data input. We also created our own personal Posters based on our Global Warming text and intend to use these in our classroom display to promote our ECO ideals.

On Tuesday afternoon, we enjoyed a PE session with Ms Rooney. We all played as a class and enjoyed the movement breaks and time away from the classroom. We loved playing Chocolate Chip Cookie. Thankfully the rain stayed away 😊

The girls are looking forward to their first Camogie match and training with Mr Hardy.

We are working hard in Irish learning our new poem ‘An Crogall’. At the minute it is all about pronunciation, but we hope to add expression and actions very soon. We spent time working on the flags of Ireland as well as revising how to tell the time. We also talked about events that happen in each day and learned the first 5 in Irish.

We worked hard on Problem Solving tasks this week, and focussed on ‘Finding all Possibilities.’ We had to calculate all the different scores form a game of Target Practice where children played in groups of 3. After we had exhausted all possibilities, we moved on to examine data from a scores table and calculate more possibilities.

We had a fabulous day out on Monday when we visited Greenhill YMCA in Newcastle for a fun filled day of art and craft activities, courtesy of the Trailblazers Project. We took part in group activities including Badge Making, Digital Portraits and Oil Pastel work. We were provided with a lovely treat bag at break time 😊

Congratulations to our Mathletics certificate winners this week. We missed our assembly on Monday. Star of the Week went to Shea, who showed amazing perseverance during last week’s Maths sessions.

On Tuesday, we took part in a live lesson where we had to create a poster on J2create for Safer Internet Day. Our theme this year is ‘Too good to be true? Keeping yourself and others safe from scams online’

 Well done to our Digital Leaders who prepared a presentation on E Safety for all the children on Tuesday at lunch time. They showed off our School Internet Safety mascot – Cloudi 😊 and some of the posters they prepared.

 On Wednesday, the Eco Team gave a presentation on the big Battery Hunt, where they explained the dangers of disposing of batteries and the negative effects this can have on the environment for many, many years. We will now be collecting old, used batteries in the classroom to ensure they are properly disposed of at the end of the school year.

We have all now had the opportunity to engage with our peers and present our Environmental speeches. We got the opportunity to watch all the speeches and vote for the one we think should represent our class in the competition.

St Louis Taster Day

We had a great day out on Monday when we joined other local schools for the St Louis Taster Day. We began with a drama class with Mrs Cunningham, followed by Home Economics with Mrs Morris, where we baked our own cinnamon rolls. We then headed off to the ICT suite for some coding. This was followed by lovely pancakes in the canteen and then an Irish session.

After a lovely lunch of Pizza and hotdogs, we went to our last session which was a Maths practical Problem-Solving activity. All in all, we had a great day.

Trocaire

On Tuesday we had a visit from Laura (Trocaire) to discuss Sustainable Development Goals. She told us that all governments have pledged to implement all 17 goals by the year 2030. We played a game which educated us about the state of affairs in Sudan and showed us how difficult life is for some people, especially those in war torn areas.

Well done to P7 for performing their song ’Trassna na Donnte’at assembly on Monday 😀

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School Council hard at work looking through all the suggestions from the children on how to spend the money made from the sale of tickets for our Christmas raffle. 

Our first Trailblazers session.

Trailblazer's Project information for Parents 

We had a great start to the week with a PE session with Mr McAleenan from St Loius Grammar School. He will be with us for two more Monday morning sessions so make sure you have your PE gear on!

 Congratulations to all our Mathletics Certificate winners this week😊

Congratulations to Tomas who won this week’s Star Award for brilliant Spelling😊

We had a visit from Mrs King from St Louis who came to give us some information prior to their Open Day.

We watched a video detailing all that St Louis has to offer their new intake of children. Mrs King answered some of our important questions to help put us at ease.

It was lovely to see some of our past pupils again. Thank you to Nicola, Ella and John Paul for coming to visit us.

In Literacy this week we have been working on Explanation texts. We began by looking at the structure of texts and the rules for creating a good Explanation text. We worked on ‘How a Bee makes honey’. We also worked on Idioms and Cliches and had some fun trying to use example in and out of the classroom.

In Numeracy we spent time working on Timetables, figuring out how to calculate journey times and choosing the best travel options.

In WAU, we got round to completing our Topic Artwork and hope to get this displayed in the classroom soon.

On Wednesday, the School Council took time to thank all the children for the money they raised from the Christmas Hamper draw. They have been invited to present suggestion to the Council about how they would like this money to be spent for the benefit of all the children.

On Thursday we began our first workshop with Trailblazers. We look forward to sharing what the children get up to in the next few weeks.

Mr McAleenan from St Louis visited us on Monday to give us an idea of the kind of sports activities we will be getting up to next year. 

Congratulations to our hard working Mathematicians 😀

Welcome back to our Primary 7 class. We hope you had a lovely break and are well rested and ready for the new term.

In Literacy we have been busy working on our Poetry focus – Kennings. We began by working in our groups to create a Kenning chosen by the teacher, then moved on to work on our own – free choice was given here. We used our ICT time to add some lovely pictures to our work, then we emailed them to the teacher to get some feedback before we edited and printed our work. Some great work!

In Numeracy, we have been working on multiplying and dividing by 10, 100 and 1000. We completed some whole class activities, as well as group mental Maths work and individual work. We also worked on Timetables. We had to look at Bus and Train timetables and calculate journey lengths. We also worked on solving problems involving start and finish times, with break times in between. We had great fun working on Word Problems. These encourage us to think more deeply about what we are being asked to do. We reviewed previous learning on ml and litres as well as g and kg.

In Irish, we have been working hard on learning the verse and chorus of our new song. We hope to have it ready soon!

We began our new topic – The Rainforest, this week. Our first job was to watch a video giving us brief details about the Rainforest. We worked together as a class to complete our topic overview sheet, sharing facts we already know about the Rainforest and discussing all the things we would like to find out. We made a start on our Artistic overview for our topic wall and hope to finish this in the coming days. We then worked individually during out ICT time to locate rainforests in different areas of the world and place them on a world map. We looked for the Equator as well as the Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer. We located the 7 continents and made lists of some of the countries we are more familiar with.

Toy Friday 😃

Some photos of our Christmas party 🥳 

Thank you kindly to Mr Hardy for taking us for PE no matter what the weather was like. Thank you for the gifts and certificates and especially for the delicious home baked shortbread (big thank you to Mrs Hardy).

We had great fun with Mrs Ryan learning about the counties of Ireland by playing with these lovely jigsaws. 

Well done to our KS2 children on their lovely Carol Service. We thought you all sang beautifully and created such a lovely Christmas atmosphere with your performance ☺️

St Louis Technology Challenge

Congratulations to Aidan & James who successfully represented Holy Cross in the recent St Louis Technology Challenge. A great experience was had by both pupils and they did their school proud by coming third in the competition.

Congratulations to Brea who won the Farm Safety competition. Here she is proudly showing off her entry. Well done!

Christmas Jumper Day 

The children were tasked with producing a Nativity scene for our Sacred Space. Dylan took on the job as Team Leader and allocated jobs to everyone. Great job everyone!

We had great fun this week in Irish, playing the game of Snap. We all love playing Team games.

We worked on 3D shape this week. This involved practical activities looking at the nets of provided 3D shapes. We also had to find the 11 different nets of a cube which we found quite tricky.

Congratulations to our Mathletics certificate holders this week – it was a bit cold to present them outside on Monday.

It’s beginning to feel a lot like.......

We have been busy getting ready for the coming Winter season, by preparing a display for the corridor. The children worked so hard to make lovely star decorations for the tree, as well as cutting out intricate snowflake designs. We have been focusing on Poetry, so we included some lovely Winter poems.

Our Literacy focus has been on Poetry and this week we have been working on Diamantes. We tied them in with our Winter theme.

In Numeracy we were working on 3D shapes. We had to identify and name given 3D shapes and then sort them according to their characteristics. We also continued delving more deeply into our work on Fractions, Decimals and Percentages.

This week we were working really hard trying to compose our own music to accompany our Famine animation. We had to be careful with the instruments we chose as well as the beat and rhythm, to ensure that the music matches the mood of the topic. We cant wait to share our work and from what I have heard, the music composition seems pretty impressive.

In Literacy this week we reviewed our Peer Assessments on our Instructional Writing. We discussed how important it was to use feedback constructively to help us improve our written work. We continued work on our Report writing by examining a text on Protected Wildlife in Ireland. This will form the basis of our work this week. We used our ICT time to research our chosen animal. We decided on our Audience and created a piece of Report writing directed at that audience.

Congratulations to our new Digital Leaders who will be using their expertise in all the classes in our school, helping children and checking all our equipment is charged and ready to go at all times 😊

We started off this Anti-bullying week with Odd Socks Day. We watched a PPT telling us about how we can show respect for each other everyday in school and at home.

In Literacy we worked on simple, complex and compound sentences. We learned how to make the content of our writing more interesting and how to keep the reader engaged.

We also began our work on Report writing, by studying a report on Protected Wildlife in Ireland. We then had to choose and research another animal protected by Law in Ireland and research some facts ready to create a report of our own.

In Numeracy, our focus this week is Fractions, Decimals and Percentages. We began by working on equivalent fractions and progressed to Improper fractions. We also worked hard to learn FDP facts so that our working out can be made much easier by simply recalling learned facts.

We have set up our Quiz teams and the children are busy learning facts and figures for the final in Castlewellan on the 24^th.

Gaeilge24

Have a look at our backgrounds for our ICT animation project on the Famine.

Woolly Hat Day

This week we have been working hard on Numeracy. We began by learning how to calculate the area of a triangle. We will be going into more depth with this next week. We spent time on using the Column method for our large calculations- our aim was to make sure our work was clear so that when we needed to return to a piece of work for Problem Solving, it is clear to us what our thinking was. This enables us to explain our thinking, to both our partners and our peers, as well as the teacher. Congratulations to our Mathletics certificate winners – great work 😊

Congratulations to James who won our Supervisers Award this week for being so kind and helpful with the little children during Break times.

In Literacy we have been working on adverbs and pronouns. We worked with a partner to solve some online activities related to our Literacy work and completed some group work activities. We spent some time learning the songs for the Peace Proms as well as perfecting our dance moves! 

Happy Halloween everyone 👻 🎃 

Problem Solving and Investigating with Pentominoes. Lots of group and partner activities and lots of fun 😀

We had a great time on Friday playing with and sharing our Maths games with the Primary 4 class.

Huge congratulations to our new School Council.

We had great fun playing Snap in Irish. What a fun way to learn and practice our numbers. We were able to swap partners and play with each other.We also learned how to read the times in o’clock and half past.

We talked about what we do each day – waking up, getting up, eating breakfast etc and learned how to say these words in Irish.We learned how to say a prayer in Irish and discussed the weather.

In WAU we worked on a Maths activity which involved interpreting information from a Line Graph related to the Famine. In Numeracy we learned how to Square and Cube numbers and completed activities involving the use of a calculator. We reviewed learning on angles, by working out missing angles from given diagrams. We studied Triangular Numbers and completed Problem Solving activities on Patterns and Relationships. To finish the week, we learned all about Negative Numbers and read and interpreted information form Thermometers and charts. We worked hard on our Times Tables and recorded our learning along with the related Division facts.

For Art, we have been interpreting the lyrics from a lovely song as a stimulus for our Autumnal art piece. We completed our entry for the Environmental competition and have begun work on our Credit Union posters.

In Literacy we have been working on Adjectives and how to use them creatively in our writing. We have also been examining some Procedure Texts and have had a go at writing one ourselves.

Huge congratulations to our new school council – Ellen, Dylan, Robin and James

and our P7 reps – Noah and Cormac.

We had a fabulous day exploring all that Shimna has to offer. We began with Home Economics, followed by History and Irish, then had a Sports session. After that we had a great time in Tecnology and apparently “the best chicken goujons ever!!”. We finished the day with an English class before heading home. 

Ipad workshop with Gemma

Working on our Inference Skills

Fun with Irish

School Council Elections

Our School Council is a group of students who are elected to represent the views of all pupils and to improve our school. 

The School Council Election will take place on the 9th October 2024.

Please watch our videos below before you vote!!

What an exciting week for our Primary 7 class. They have been waiting so long to record their videos for the School Council Election. They were very nervous going into their recording, but what a great experience for them😊

We had fun watching each other on screen and can’t wait to see who will be picked as School Council members on voting day – 9^Th October.

In Literacy this week we have been working on how to use nouns within sentences. We looked at Concrete and Abstract nouns as well as Collective nouns. We also worked on completing our Biography work during our ICT session. We have reviewed our first draft, and we are on the editing process at the minute.

In Numeracy, we discussed what Prime numbers were and how to recognise them. We then filled in our Prime numbers on our 100 grid and when we know them off by heart, we will be able to play the Prime number game. We worked on complementary angles as well as estimating and measuring angles. We worked on a Problem-Solving activity where we had to write totals as a sum of consecutive numbers.

Congratulations to our Mathletics certificate holders this week.

In WAU we completed a Literacy based activity on Cause and Effect. After watching a video about Cause and Effect, we discussed what we had learned and gave a selection of examples from personal experience. We then completed a Famine activity where we had to discuss and decide whether statements given could be seen as the cause or the effect of the Famine. We also worked on a link with Numeracy, where we looked at line graphs dealing with large numbers with reference to the Famine.

In Numeracy this week we have been working hard on 2D shape. We learned all about triangles and their angles, concave and convex shapes as well as regular and irregular shapes. We had fun estimating and calculating the value of angles. We used a protractor to make sure our measurements were exact. Some of us completed practical activities outside.

For World Around Us, we shared facts about the Famine and had a question answer session with our peers. We completed a cloze procedure.

Also in Literacy this week, we have been focusing on Writing for a Purpose. We had to fill in an application form for Digital Leaders and we hope to get to the interview stage. We also had to write our speech for the School Council, outlining what position we would like to have and what we can do to improve our school for all the pupils.

We had our first swimming session this week, which we all thoroughly enjoyed.

We also had our first Irish session with Mrs Ryan on Wednesday. We reviewed all our previous learning on numbers and names. We learned how to say where we came from and we played some fun games, including movement breaks.

In Literacy this week, we began by looking at multi-syllabic words. We had to identify and colour code the syllables. These formedthe bulk of our spelling assessment on Thursday. Our focus writing area is Recount and this week, we examined different types of recount texts. We worked our way through each text to highlight the evidence that makes it a recount text. We studied an extract from Anne Frank’s diary, a letter from the Blitz and a biography.

In Numeracy we reviewed very large numbers and had to fill in a table to show that we understood the value of each digit. 

In WAU we continued with our Visualisation task (linked to Literacy) where we had to create a piece of work depicting a scene from our Famine novel. We laid all our pieces of work out and each child had a chance to discuss what they liked and what could be improved. We then group assessed our pieces and critiqued a variety of pieces we admired.

We managed to complete our Kandinsky pieces and have begun work on our Abstract pieces.

For Religion, we talked about the Rosary. We discussed when we have had experience of saying the Rosary e.g. at funerals or at Cemetery Sunday. We talked about the decades of the Rosary and have promised to try to pray more at home every day.

We had a fabulous time on our Sponsored Walk on Friday and raised a lot of money for such a worthwhile cause.

Visualisation Task based on the novel ‘Under the Hawthorn Tree’. The children chose the chapter they wanted to revisit - The Soup Kitchen-  and proceeded to peer assess each other’s work. 

In Literacy this week we have been working on improving the depth of our reading. We will be getting a library book every week and at the end of the week the children will give an oral synopsis of what they have read, to the class or small group or partner. This week’s volunteers were Robin, Henry and Tomas and they did a brilliant job sharing their learning with the class and answering lots of questions from the children.

We reviewed previous learning on Grammar and Punctuation and have promised to try our best to make sure every piece of written work is of a high standard. We began our work on Recount texts by discussing rules and reviewing samples of Recount texts. We formally began our Reciprocal reading groups and are having a great time discussing our books and looking for connections from books we’ve previously read or from the world we live in.

For WAU we began our topic work by recording what we already know and what we would like to learn about the Great Irish Famine. We had some great discussions and are really looking forward to finding out more.

In Maths, we began work on very large numbers. We watched videos telling us about when we would need very large numbers, eg in Space or calculating the area each of the large bodies of water on earth, or perhaps air travel journeys. We also looked at how to record large numbers and what the values of each digit was. We practiced writing numbers using a provided Frame to make sure we all understood the value of each digit.

During our ICT sessions, we reviewed learning on Recount texts by watching recommended videos eg Michael Rosen explaining to us how to write a good recount. We spent some time exploring Newsdesk.

As usual, we all enjoyed our time out playing Team Sports

We were delighted to see Mr. Hardy back on Thursday 

All About Me - back to school activity

For Religion this week, we were thinking of signs and symbols that reminded us of God.