Welcome back to our final half term of the year! 

I hope you all had a lovely half term holiday and are ready to return, this half term is always a busy one. 

Swimming

Ash Class will be swimming on THURSDAY mornings and FRIDAY afternoons. This is for all Year 5s, and for the Year 4s on the Ash Class register, regardless of which class they are in for maths and literacy. The children will need to bring their swimming kits in a separate bag to hang on their pegs. They will need a swimming costume / shorts, a swimming hat, a towel, shoes to wear by the poolside (crocs or sliders are ideal) goggles are optional, but useful if your child is a confident under water swimmer. It is a good idea to provide a plastic bag for the wet things to go into before being placed back into swimming bags. 

Yr 4 Forest School

Forest Schools will be on Tuesday afternoons for all of Year 4 this half term. Please do remember to bring a bag of old clothes and shoes for the forest, including a waterproof jacket just in case the weather turns. 

Maths

Yr 4 - We are starting a new unit on Shape. We will be understanding angles as turns, identifying angles, comparing and ordering angles, finding out about different types of triangles and quadrilaterals.

Yr 5 - We will be finishing off our Decimal unit this week. We will be completing decimal sequences, multiplying and dividing by 10, 100 and 100 and then multiplying and diving decimals and finding mising values.

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. We will be focusing on ...

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.  

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.

RE

This week we wil be exploring the aspects of Tawhid in Muslim living. Our key questions are:

• How do you think it feels for a muslim to know all Muslims everywhere try to keep the five pillars?
• What do Muslims do on the Hajj and how does it make them feel?
• How does going for Hajj hep Muslims feel part of the ummah?
• Does being unable to go on Hajj exclude a Muslim from the ummah?

Computing

Yr 4 - We are going to be learning how to use data loggers. This week we will explore the different functions and decide how they can be useful in everyday life.

Yr 5 - We will be learning how to use spreadsheets this term. 

Art

We think need a few more weeks to get our set designs finished. An artist can not be rushed!!