Spring Term 1
General
Another lovely term in Phase 3! We are all feeling well into the swing of our new routines now, including our Shine group and the children coming straight into the classroom to start their morning work each day. We would like to say a big well done to the children for their adjustment to this, as we know those January mornings felt cold and dark at times, but your positivity as you came into the classroom each day was a welcome sight! In Spring 1, as well as continuing with our normal curriculum subjects, we also enjoyed some extra opportunities to learn about internet safety on Tuesday 6th February and how to keep our minds healthy during Children’s Mental Health Week in the last week of term. Now that the days are feeling a little brighter, we are looking forward to another fruitful new term.
English
We started our English this term with adventure stories, which the children were particularly hooked by! They produced some fantastic narratives describing the events of a wildfire, and expanded their grasp of balancing description and action with engaging dialogue to help tell the story. We then moved on to explanatory texts, in which the children applied their knowledge of forces from our science lessons to produce some brilliantly scientific pieces of writing about gravity, friction and air resistance. Finally, we began to learn about news reports in preparation for writing our own in Spring 2. The children looked at a variety of different newspaper articles and managed to observantly identify their features, which we continued to learn about throughout the week. We can’t wait to see how the children’s news reports turn out next term!
Reading
In Spring Term 1, we read the book ‘All Aboard the Empire Windrush’. The book is set in 1948 and we meet Preston, the character who is telling us the story, and he is about to set sail on a journey that will change his life forever. He and his parents travelled on The Empire Windrush from Jamaica to start a new life in Britain. We joined Preston on board and discovered who was on this famous ship; how the passengers entertained themselves on the long journey;and what they thought of England when they arrived! We also read about how the legacy of their arrival lives on in Britain today. We developed our skills in reading by learning to summarise and understand authorial intent, compare and to give personal opinions about what we were reading.
Maths
In maths we used our knowledge of repeated addition to help us solve problems multiplying whole numbers to fractions. We learnt all about equivalent fractions. We extended our knowledge of fractions even further by looking at decimal equivalents.
Before half term, we practised multiplication of three-digit numbers by two-digit numbers using the formal method.
Science
We have been studying forces. We learnt that a force is a push or a pull and a force can make an object start, stop, move and change direction. We learnt that resistance is a force that slows down a moving object and friction is the sliding or rolling of one object over another. We really enjoyed learning about friction through scientific experiments such as the jelly challenge. This was great fun as we used chopsticks to pick up cubes of jelly.
The image below shows us investigating air resistance.
The image above shows learning about how levers and pulleys work
History
Our history topic this term was the Windrush Generation. The children learned about the history of the Caribbean islands, and how the people of the Caribbean helped Britain during World War 1 and 2. We then discussed the journey of the Empire Windrush and what life was like in London for the Windrush pioneers, as well as learning about some individuals who particularly contributed to society. The children were so engaged during this topic and very eloquently discussed the inequalities experienced by many of the Windrush generation. In our last lesson, they wrote about how the Windrush migration changed Britain for the better, considering the valuable cultural and economic contributions which particularly enriched our society here in Brixton!
Art and design
In spring 1, we looked at the artist Lesley Richmond. She is a contemporary British artist who now lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Lesley is a textile artist who finds inspiration in the natural word. Focusing on the intricacy of the branching structures of trees, Lesley takes photographs which are then printed onto cloth using a medium that creates a dimensional surface. Her work can be seen the world over in galleries such as the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Central Museum of Textiles in Poland, and Cheongju International Craft Biennale in Korea.
Pupils took inspiration from natural objects to create textile art. They combined collage and appliqué techniques to create work that depicts textured surfaces. Children used a variety of materials including items from nature.
PSHE
In PSHE we thought about our Dreams and Goals. First, we considered what our dream lifestyle would look like. We investigated different jobs and careers including the salaries of each of them. We decided on our dream job and thought about the steps to get there. We considered how our culture impacts our dreams and goals and how children from a different culture might have different goals to us.
