Spring Term 1
General
After the Christmas holidays, the children came back refreshed and ready to get stuck into their learning! We had a great half term introducing new topics and linking them to previous topics learnt.
English
In Spring 1, we started by looking at writing in the third person perspective. We used a story about a Blue Tit in winter to aid our writing. Throughout this unit we explored metaphors and linked them to pictures around the classroom. We showed great teamwork in this and enjoyed thinking outside of the box. When it came to writing our stories, we used our imagination and created our own third person stories about an animal of our choice. We had great fun in creating our characters in a descriptive way using expanded noun phrases, adjectives and adverbs and linking what we know and creating metaphors for them, for example putting ourselves into an Ant in the backgarden’s perspective which became us walking through a terrifying jungle of lost toys. We then let our imaginations fly and started by looking at two different settings; Little Snorehampton, a boring market town - like where Ms Patton grew up and ZipZapZop, an alien planet where nothing was ordinary and no one was the same. We used our imagination to create our own creative stories and looked at different creative writing techniques over the 2 weeks with Ms Patton.
Quotes:
“I liked how we could be creative and pick our own setting.” Arin
“I enjoyed English because we did lots of fun things and lots of writing.” Jahan
“I thought it was fun comparing ZipZapZop to Blandford.” Scarlett
“I really liked when we were writing our own creative stories” Zara.
“I liked using all of our creativity to make our own stories” Jasmine.
Guided Reading
After the winter break, we finished The Dancing Bear. The children completed a variety of performance pieces to understand what is ‘not being said’. This allowed children to understand the more subtle points of the stories and allowed us to delve into the vocabulary that was being used and how that made us act/perceive the story.
Once we completed The Dancing Bear, we moved on to a narrative poem called The Raven by Edgar Allen-Poe. This was a very challenging poem as it used a lot of archaic language. The children really enjoyed using dictionaries to explore the meaning of challenging language which after a week allowed the children to understand the poem in detail and lead to some great discussions regarding symbolism and metaphors.
Quotes:
“The dancing bear was fun but had a sad ending.” Kayona
“I enjoyed the lesson, on the dancing bear, where we looked at the pictures and had to work out how the characters felt.” Rae
“The dancing bear was one of my favourite books because there were exciting parts and plot twists.” Kyran
“I liked it when we started to understand the Raven” Rhea.
Maths
This term, we continued our mastering place value increasing our numbers up to 10,000. The children have been applying their knowledge of methods learnt in the first term to larger and more challenging numbers. They have been practising rounding numbers to the nearest 10, 100 and 1,000, remembering that if it is 5 and above we round up and below 5 we round down! We have applied all the learning from term 1 to larger numbers and are now confident in bridging 10, 100 and 1000!
The children have also continued timetable fluency, we have made a massive improvement in our practises for the multiplication check. We are so impressed with how hard they have worked! We now feel secure in our 2,5 and square numbers and are ready to move onto are 3, 6 and 9 times tables next term!
Science
Over the last half term we have examined forces such as friction and magnetism as well as looking at different classifications of forces like contact and non-contact. During our lessons, we completed a lot of predictions and data collection. We looked at how far a tennis ball rolls on a variety of surfaces and followed them up with discussions on why materials are used in different locations. The children enjoyed using magnets and exploring their relationship between each other using topic specific vocabulary such as repel, attract and poles.
Quotes:
“When we were rolling the ball on the sand, I liked that the ball slowed down when there was more sand to stop it.” Caleb
“I really liked science because we did so many experiments!” Ezra
History
In History we started by recapping our prior knowledge of the Stone Age. We recapped the 3 Stone Age periods, what weapons they used, key animals from the age and cavemen drawings. We then went through time and came to the Bronze Age; 2300 BCE to 800 BCE. We looked at their new way of life and how the technology of how to make metal (copper + tin = bronze) came into effect quickly! The Beaker people arrived and migrated from mainland Europe and metal production took off quickly. We then delved deeper into Stonehenge and went on a tour using Google Earth to see the shapes, size and area of Stonehenge. We thought Stonehenge looked unfinished to begin with, however after more digging we found out why it looked as it did. To finish off our topic we then used a venn diagram to compare the Stone Age times to the Bronze Age times; we found lots of similarities and lots of differences.
Quotes:
“I find it interesting looking back in history because in the holidays when you’re driving around you notice parts of history” Imgoen.
“I liked when we started looking at the Bronze Age because I didn’t know about it before and now I do” Pablo.
“I liked when we got to recap what we were learning and figure out what the Bronze Age and Stone Age did for us” Jasmine.
Art and design
In art this term we have been focused on collage and textiles. We had fun dying pieces of material and seeing how the pigments interacted with each other and drawing a mandala, seeing how watercolour reacted to different paper on our collage background!
“I loved drawing the mandela, I found it so calming!” Tanisha
“I liked the different patterns in the mandalas and I enjoyed learning about Faith Ringold” Imogen.
Design Technology
This term we have been looking at mechanisms. We made catapults using lolly pop sticks and masking tape, we have used split pins to create different types of levers and can’t wait to use these when making the toy we have designed this term!
Quotes:
“In DT I loved making catapults and making them work” Stanley.
RE
This half term we have been looking at the life of Abraham and why he is important to jewish people. We also explored the Torah and learnt a bit more about why it is important to Jewish people.
PSHE
In PSHE, we looked at our dreams and goals. Over multiple weeks we identified what we would like to achieve in our life as well as possible obstacles that may prevent us from achieving them. We then looked at creating a park and managing a budget to find a compromise between what our target audience would like and an affordable park that would be possible to create.
Events or trips
Children’s Mental Health Week
We discussed how to look after our mental health and talked about what matters to us and why.
Safer internet day
We took a deeper look into how to stay safe online! We discussed the importance of keeping our information secure and how companies use persuasive design to entice us into clicking on things, spending money or watching things we didn’t intend to watch.
Quotes:
“I really liked this day because it taught me lots and taught me how to be safe when I game” Noah.