🌟 Welcome to P7! 🌟

Hello and welcome to our P7 class page!

We’re so excited to begin a new school year filled with learning, laughter, and lots of memorable moments. This will be a busy and exciting time as we explore new topics, take on fresh challenges, and grow together as a team.

Throughout the year, we’ll be regularly updating this page with news, photos, and highlights of what we’ve been up to in class. From creative projects and special events to everyday learning adventures, we’ll make sure families and friends can stay connected with all the wonderful things happening in P7.

Be sure to check back often to see what we’ve been doing — and don’t forget to celebrate our achievements with us!

Here’s to a fantastic year ahead!

In Numeracy this week, we began by working on 2D shapes. We had to identify a range of 2D shapes and sort them according to their characteristics. We looked at triangles, quadrilaterals and other polygons. We then had to state whether they were regular/irregular and convex or concave. We progressed to working on lines of symmetry.

In Literacy we were working on nouns: concrete, abstract and collective. We discovered that a group of pandas can be described as a cupboard of pandas😊. We continued with some work on adjectives, which tell us a bit more about the noun. We also completed our diary entries, which are now ready for peer assessment. We completed a Visualisation task as part of our comprehension work and produced some lovely pictures about our texts. We used ICT time to word process our final Literacy pieces for display.

In ICT we linked our work with WAU by working on an infographic, detailing famine facts and percentages – this also linked in well with our Maths

We had another visit from Matthew @REACH to help us on our friendship and transition journey. We talked a lot about Resilience and what it means to us. We played with 2 balls – one which bounced back, one which didn’t. The message was to keep going and don’t’ give up!

We then worked in teams on little projects to see if we could complete the mission within a given time frame. We then had to evaluate each other’s work while trying to remain as positives as possible. Mathew left us with some lovely affirmation cards😊

Fr Nicky surprised us with a visit on Wednesday. He spoke to all the classes. It was lovely to see him in our school.In our Irish session we worked on our Irish song and played with the animal puppets using our Irish language.

For Art we worked hard on our entries for the Credit Union competition. Our theme is ‘The Future is…’ and we have had to interpret this in our own way. Can’t wait to see the finished pieces. We also worked on a piece linked to our Irish song, where we had to complete a picture about Grainne Mheal’s ship.

On Wednesday we took part in the ‘Start a Heart’ campaign.

In Literacy this week we have been working hard on our Recount writing. We have chosen a Diary Entry linked to our WAU topic ‘An Gorta Mora’. We have to write the entry as if we are a 12-year-old child living through a day in the Famine times. We began by examining sample diary entries and got together in groups to do some Shared Writing on a diary entry. We then presented these to our peers. Great job everyone😊

In Numeracy we began work on Time. We were telling time to the nearest minute on analogue and digital clocks, making conversions between seconds, minutes and hours, and solving simple problems involving duration or start and finish times.

In WAU we have been looking at the history of the Famine and. We have been linking our topic work closely with our literacy work so we can get much more completed. We completed our literacy target work on Visualisation with a piece of text from ‘Under the Hawthorn Tree’. We also linked Art, as we were asked to draw the image as we could see it in our Mind’s Eye. We had great fun with a group peer assessment and had the opportunity to write positive little notes to our peers, praising their efforts.

During our Irish session, we were reviewing some of our previous learning on colours, names, ages etc. We then had some fun with all the animal toy and played some fun games.

We have had a session with Matthew from REACH, who was here to talk to us about friendships and the transition to our new schools. We had fun chatting with him and sharing our views on life in general.

As always, we had fun times with Mr Hardy, where we honed our Fundamental skills and played lots of group games.

On Thursday we had the pleasure of raising money for Mourne First Responders, which is such a good cause and we had a fun time out of school as well on our Sponsored Walk 😊

We had a visit from Dave at Sustrans, to discuss all the ways we can travel to school. He will be back to work with us throughout the year.

Have a look at our School Council Speeches

Congratulations to Callan, who won Star of the Week award for his brilliant leadership skills whilst on Buddy duty in the younger children’s yard during break and lunch time.

Congratulations also to the children who received Mathletics certificates. Well done for completing your homework tasks.

This week in Numeracy we have been working hard on our Times Tables. We have been learning our multiplication and corresponding division facts. We also worked on very large numbers. We discussed when you would need to use very large numbers e.g. distance, space, solar system etc. After watching a couple of videos on large numbers, we then worked on ordering very large numbers from largest to smallest or vice versa. We looked at the position of the digits and practices writing large numbers neatly in our books.

In Literacy we began by discussing the various genres of non-fiction texts and looked at the writing forms for Recount texts, which is our focus at the minute. We then examined a selection of Recount texts and had to identify appropriate features. We looked a letter, a diary entry and a newspaper article. We are going to try to link out topic work in WAU with our Recount writing in the next week or so.

We worked very hard to write a speech to help us get elected on to the school council. We all have to create a video of our speech and the whole school will have the opportunity to vote for four of us to make up our new School Council.

Jobs up for grabs are as follows: Chairperson, Vice Chairperson, Secretary and Treasurer.

In WAU, we continued to learn more about the Great Irish Famine. We have been learning about political influences and decisions that were taken which were not necessarily good decisions. These affected the Irish people greatly and the repercussions still affect us to this day in terms of population etc.

We tied up our Art lessons with our WAU topic and our literacy topic, to create Famine images. We were able to peer assess each other’s work and were allowed to choose a personal favourite. We then wrote a little congratulatory note to the owners of each piece. We also completed a ‘beginning of new year’ hoodie activity, sharing information about our likes and interests. Have a look at our display below.

We had a visit from Matthew at REACH, who spoke to us about the importance of good friendships.

In our ICT lessons, we have been using Adobe Express to create action figures of ourselves as superheroes.

Friendship

Hello Autumn 🍂 

In Numeracy this week, we worked on Palindromic Numbers. We all got the opportunity to share Palindromic numbers orally and then we were set a task where we had to create as many as we could between 100 and 500 in a set time. We moved on to work on one and three step Palindromic numbers and linked our knowledge of dates and times to try and find them there. By the end of the session everyone was confident 😊

In our ICT session, we worked on Adobe Express and created an Infographic on the Titanic. We had to use AI to generate images, add a background and use our Research and editing skills to show case numeric information about the Titanic e.g. it took 20 horses to move the anchor. The task took us about 2 hours to complete but we touched on a range of cross curricular skills, namely ICT, Literacy, WAU – Place, Numeracy, and the Arts. Great job everyone 😊     

We also had great fun using AI to create our own personal self-portraits. The children had to specify exactly what they wanted to generate.

In Literacy, we have begun working on our new Handwriting scheme. It will take us a while to get used to joined writing but when we do, our work will be so beautifully presented. The hard part will be transferring our new skills throughout all our curriculum work. We also began work on our target writing area – Recount texts. We watched a video of Michael Rosen explaining all the features of a good recount text and we went on to examine some samples of recount texts where we had to identify the features.

We began work on our WAU topic – An Gorta Mora. We have a lot of background work to do with this topic in order to fully understand why the great Irish Famine came about.

On Monday we worked our way through the Class Code and we have all agreed to follow it as best as we can so that we can have a peaceful and productive year.

We worked on a Friendship session and discussed how we can be good friends to each other. The word of the day was COMPROMISE. We were able to discuss some of the little video clips we watched and agree on how to resolve some of the friendship problems we may face throughout the year. We continued our Friendship theme by working on our display, where we had to draw portraits of our friends.

We got our reading groups sorted and reviewed the rules for Reciprocal reading. It gave us a chance to start on our new texts ready for next week. We also made a start on our new Handwriting scheme. We are learning how to form our letters correctly and will be transferring these learned skills across all our writing activities.

We spent a session working on our Thinking Skills target for this term. We will be focusing on Self-Management skills. The children got together to read and discuss our Thinking Skills cards and to report back on what they had learned in our session.

We had great fun playing happily together in our PE session. We chose to play a football match – boys against girls – followed by a friendly game of Dodge Ball and we look forward to many fun PE sessions.