The Wallace High School Preparatory Department
Prep Post
January-February 2017
Creating Confident Children
Welcome
Dear all,
Welcome to our third edition of our Prep Post for
this short half-term block. I trust you will find it an
enjoyable read as you explore all the many things
that the children have been learning about so far in
2017.
I wish you all an enjoyable and restful week off next
week and we look forward to seeing all our families (and a couple of new
ones!) back in school again on Monday 20 February 2017.
As always, if you have any thoughts, ideas or inclusions for Prep Post please
email [email protected].
R Lawther
It’s a Boy!
Joshua Richard Lawther
Mr Lawther would like to thank you all for your well
wishes and gifts on the birth of Joshua.
Prep’s Got Talent
Well done to Charlotte (P3) who has been
cast in Fusion's production of Les Miserables
as Little Eponine. The show runs from
1st-4th March in the Island Hall. Good luck,
Charlotte!
Well done to Harriet (P2) who was
awarded a certificate for 10 meters
Backcrawl by David White School of
Swimming.
Elliott (P3) received his 50m swimming
badge too - well done Elliott!
Well done to all our school teams
including hockey, athletics, netball and
cross country on recent success, Here is
our P7 indoor athletics team:
Well done to Josh from P4 (and his dad!)
on recent success in taekwondo
championships - we now know who not to
mess with!
Well done to Jessica (P2) and her GB in Lisburn
Congregational who came first in the District
Finals of the GB Explorer Choral Speaking
competition. They will now participate in the N Ireland finals
being held in our very own WHS on Saturday
25th Feb.
Jessica’s older sister Grace’s (P5) Juniors
section are also through to the NI final on 25th
Feb.
GOOD LUCK GIRLS!
Pre-Prep News
We have enjoyed reading lots of fairy stories in Pre Prep including, Jack
and the Beanstalk, The Gingerbread Man, The Three Billy Goats Gruff and
Little Red Riding Hood. We have had so much fun using props to retell and
sequence the stories. We planted our own magic beans and made our very
own gingerbread men. We even had a go at milking cows! So many
learning opportunities have come out of these wonderful stories that
children love to hear.
Primary 1
Miss Payne & Shirley
We have been learning about The Polar
Regions
We had an igloo in our classroom and we
got to dress up in winter clothes.
Numeracy
We have been looking at 2D and 3D shapes
We sorted different shapes based on their
properties and created a shape monster
We have also been learning about RESPECT.
We made snow vehicles from junk materials. We used different 3D
shapes such as spheres, cubes and cuboids.
Primary 2
What a perfect topic to start after Christmas – Toys! P2 loved
showing off their new toys from Santa and seeing everyone
else’s. Show & Tell has been very popular this term! Even Mrs
Conroy brought in some of her old toys from home.
P2 had great fun playing with our outdoor toys, thinking about
some toys that boys and girls played with in the past.
In numeracy we have been looking at the
number bonds of 5,6,7 and 8. P2 did lots
of practical maths to work out all of their
number stories.
This term we have been focusing on sentence
writing. We had so much fun playing with our Silly
Sentences game.
P2 really enjoyed their visit from Genevieve the
Goat. Genevieve helped P2 to think about
staying healthy, keeping fit and eating well. She
also gave out some great hugs!
Primary 3
Our topic this term is ‘Houses and Homes’. The children
have been learning about different types of houses,
what they are made of and have even created their own
dream home!
Topic afternoons have been spent designing houses,
painting favourite homes and creating houses using paper
and card.
We have listened and written a recount of the
story ‘The Three Little Pigs’ from the
perspective of one of the little pigs.
The children have
identified the
differences between
home in the 1900s
and home today.
To bring our topic to life we organised a trip to
the Folk Museum. We all thoroughly enjoyed
the trip!
See our class blog for trip pictures!!
Primary 4
Pupils have been working exceptionally hard so far in 2017. In numeracy we have been looking at fractions.
We investigated a box of Smarties to discover what fraction were a certain colour and we did it so well Mr
Lawther let us eat them when we were finished. We have moved on to using our times tables knowledge to
find fractions of quantities.
In Literacy we have been revising punctuation and speech marks. Our class novel is Friend or Foe and we
are really enjoying finding out about the adventures of the two main characters, David and Tucky.
In PDMU we have been looking at Healthy Eating and had a visit from Cancer Focus who helped us learn
about the importance of a balanced diet. We were excited to find out that we do in fact need to eat fats and
sugars - just not as much as we would like!
Our World Around Us topic is Life in World War Two and we are thoroughly enjoyed it. After many questions
to Mr Lawther about what life was like in the war for him, we studied timelines to discover just how long ago it
actually was. We have been studying evacuation, shelters, rationing and much more. We found out about
the life of Anne Frank. We visited the Irish Linen Centre to find out a little more about WW2 but our favourite
trip was a trip back in time to Castleward to discover what life was like for two evacuees, John and Margaret
who had been evacuated to the countryside.
Mr Lawther is really proud of us for working hard on our End of Key Stage Assessments. So far we have
competed tasks in reading, writing and maths. Up next is talking and listening - something which Mr Lawther
thinks we won’t have any trouble with!
Our ‘Evacuation’ to Castleward
Making Gas Masks
Primary 5
This half term P5 children have been working on different aspects of measure in Numeracy.
They have estimated and measured the length and weight of various classroom objects.
Working with others is an important skill for inside and outside the classroom. The boys and
girls have had opportunity to work together on paired and group tasks in a number of areas of
learning.
In Literacy the children have
worked on punctuation with
particular emphasis on the use of
ownership apostrophes. We have
written letters in response to our
reading material and to request
information for topic work. Two
girls were particularly pleased
when they received an answer to
their letters in the post.
We have been learning about keeping ourselves fit and healthy. We have also used the
Heartstart programme to learn what to do in certain emergency situations. We can now put one
another in the recovery position.
To show our learning in our
'Going Green' topic we
produced a trifold information
leaflet about how different
materials are recycled.
What’sbeenhappeninginP6?
It seems like the +me has flown in since Christmas and here we are at another half
term.Intermsoftheclassroomwe’veworkedreallyhardatareaandperimeter,angles
and lines and 2D and 3D shapes in our numeracy. Our literacy work has focused on
explana+on wri+ng, using commas and apostrophes, antonyms and iden+fying
pronounsandpreposi+ons.
We have launched in to a new topic on space, with the children already having
composedapieceofexplana+onwri+ngonwhywehaveseasons,exploredtheplanets
inoursolarsystemandcreatedtheirveryownplanetsusingpapermache.Wealsotook
atriptotheIslandArtsCentretocheckoutanexhibi+onofastrophotography,which
reallycapturedourimagina+on.
Somemembersofourclasshavebeenbusyrepresen+ngtheschoolinvariousteams.BenjaminDavis
tookpartinarecentcrosscountryevent.EllaHindsandIsobelLamontcompetedinthenetballleague,
whilst Ella and Tegan Long took part in the hockey league. William McMullan, William Geary, Owain
Williams, Finlay SlaPery and Benjamin all took part in the boys hockey league and I know Finlay is
looking forward to represen+ng the school at the All Ireland Swimming Championships at the
weekend.
I’ll leave you with a couple of images from the recent antonym
memory championship which we held in P6 last week. The children
were paired up with different sets of antonyms and had to compete
against each other to find the correct pairs. The competition was
fierce and in the end we worked our way down until there were only
two competitors remaining, Owain Williams and Benjamin Davis.
After a tense final, Owain was crowned the antonym memory
champion!
Ihopeyouallenjoyyourhalftermbreakandcome
backrefreshedandreadytoworkhardagain.
MrHarper
Primary 7
After School
Adventures
Please keep supporting our after school service. Open daily from
2.10pm-5.45pm
No, we have no idea
what happened the left
over chocolate,
honestly!
Peeler Pants!
To mark Safer Internet Day 2017 we teamed up with a PSNI officer in a
unique experiment. The challenge was to see how far and how quickly
a photo of the officer’s pants could spread around the Internet. Within
seconds of being posted on Facebook the photo had been shared
across the globe including Australia, USA, France and Romania.
Whilst the pupils had fun with this challenge there was a very important
message behind it. The Internet today is almost powered by images
and videos and we wanted to demonstrate how quickly something can
spread online and that, once posted, you cannot get it back again. Thank you to the mysterious Constable ‘M’ from PSNI and to Miss
Payne, ICT Co-ordinator for organising.