My name is Mr McKenna and I am very much looking forward to teaching P4/5 again this year. I am also very fortunate to have Mrs Emma Graham as a classroom assistant from 9am until 1pm from now until mid November and then from 9am until 3pm after that.

In Literacy, we will be working on lots of different genres of writing, although we will mainly be focussing on Instructional, Report and Recount texts this year, having looked at Persuasive, Narrative and Explanation in depth last year. Within our writing, we will also be focussing on handwriting, punctuation & grammar. We will be kept very busy with our spelling programme (Soundswrite) and we are excited to complete the different activities within it. We will look at a variety of narrative and non-narrative texts and read a variety of fiction and non fiction books by lots of different authors, like Roald Dahl and Julia Donaldson. We will also participate in the Accelerated Reading Programme.

In Numeracy, we will be learning lots about Processes in Maths, Number, Handling Data, Measures and Shape and Space. We will have opportunities to use ICT in Numeracy, including the use of laptops and iPads to access a range of Numeracy Apps, including Mathletics.

In World Around Us this year, we will be concentrating on three main areas. The first topic we will be studying from September until Christmas will be - Liquid Gold- Water. We will complete lots of cross curricular activities that will incorporate Art, ICT, Literacy, Maths and PDMU, while learning about The Water Cycle; local rivers; some rivers of Ireland as well as around the world; how water gets to our homes; how water is cleaned and how we can reduce our use of water and much more besides. In our second topic titled 'The Vikings' we will develop an understanding of how people lived in Viking times and explore their legacy and this will be done using the game of  Minecraft. Finally our third topic will be titled 'Wind', where we will be exploring the energy of the wind, how air vibrations can make sound, designing and making wind instruments and look at how we are using wind farms to generate electricity.

For religion, we follow the Grow in Love scheme of work and of course P4 will make the First Confession and First Holy Communion. For PDMU, we will be following the Living and Learning Together scheme and we will aim to do PE every Wednesday and Thursday. 

We are always very proud of all the work that goes on in our class - so please keep an eye on this page or on Seesaw to see what we are getting up to!

Finally, if you have any queries, wish to meet with me or discuss any concerns please contact the school office and I will do my utmost to respond to you as soon as possible. Alternatively, you may wish to email me or send a message via Seesaw and again I will try my best to respond to you as soon as possible. My email address is gmckenna707@c2kni.net  

Here's to a great year ahead!