Welcome back. I hope you had a lovely week off together. I enjoyed some busy days with my family, as well as some very lazy and restful days. I hope you are ready for this last half term together before the summer break. It is quite a long half term, but it will be filled with many fun things including forest schools, sports day, swimming lessons, a trip to Champs Hill and many, many sunny playtimes on the field. 

Literacy in Maple Class

We are starting a new text for this half term called, 'Kai and the Monkey King', written by Joe Todd- Stanton. Using this text, our grammar focus will be identifying main and subordinate clauses, our punctuation focus will be the use of commas to separate clauses and the use of inverted commas for direct speech. Our composition focus will be how to write narrative stories with paragraphs. This week, we are familiarising ourselves with the text, predicting what we think will happen using the illustrations and the blurb, and completing a reading comprehension based on what we know so far. 

As always, it would be really useful if all children had their own copy of the text to use in class and to follow along with, but it is not compulsory. 

Geography

Y3 - 'Land Use'. Year 3s will be using and drawing simple sketch maps to show how land is used. 

Y4 - 'Water'. Year 4s will be explaining the three states of matter.

Y5 - 'Marvellous Maps'. Year 5s will be using atlases, finding countries in Europe and North and South America, as well as finding cities in the UK and using simple co-ordinates.  

RE

This half term we will be focussing on Islam and Inspirational People. Our Big Question for this half term is 'Why do Muslims call Muhammad the 'Seal of the Prophets'? In week one, we will be engaging with the idea of prophethood, understanding what a messenger is and why they might be sent. 

Maths - Shape

Y3 - We will be learning about turns and angles, right angles, comparing angles, learning how to draw and measure accurately and learning about horizontal and vertical. 

Y4 - We will be understanding angles as turns, identifying angles, comparing and ordering angles, finding out about different types of triangles and quadrilaterals. 

Computing

We will be learning hot o use PowerPoint this half term to use throughout many different subject areas. The children will be given short projects to complete later in the half term and will be able to use PowerPoint to present their research. We will also be learning more about online safety and kindness and how this applies to us, not only when using the internet but when we are online gaming and messaging using texts and emails. 

DT day

Because swimming will be taking place on MONDAY mornings as well as THURSDAY afternoons, we will not be having weekly DT lessons, but will instead plan a DT day for our cooking unit later in the half term. More details to follow. 

Literacy in Ash Class

Due to a few changes in the final week before half term, we are a little behind with our diary writing. We will pick up where we left off writing a diary by the old man in our story. 

Science

Yr 3 - Before half term, we planned our investigation to see if the numbers of seeds in one plant pot affects the growth of the plants. We all made a prediction and thought about how we would make it a fair test. This week we will be setting up the investigation to then observe over the next 4 weeks.

Yr 4 - After learning about teeth, we are going to plan and set up an investigation to observe the effects different liquids have on the eggshell to see how different acids affect enamel.

Yr 5 - We will be learning about the reproductive parts of plants. We will have some flowers to disect and identify the different parts.