Welcome back! I hope you all had a great break and Happy New Year! This letter will give you an insight into all the fantastic learning that will be happening in Chestnut class during the spring term.
This term our theme is ‘Are we now free?’ which is based on learning about World War II and the children are already showing great interest in this fascinating topic. In English, we are focusing on a text called ‘Rose Blanche’, which is a fictional story with some links to history. The children will be learning about the war through the perspective of a child in this text. We also have an exciting trip upcoming to the D-Day Story Museum in Portsmouth – details to follow.
In history, we will be specifically looking at the outbreak of war, evacuation, rationing, the roles that women and men had within the war, as well as looking at key events including the Holocaust, the Blitz and VE Day.
In reading, we will continue to focus on comprehension of texts weekly, looking at Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Summarising (VIPERS). The children will be learning about texts related to our topic, as well as looking at a variety of different texts.
Spelling, punctuation and grammar will be taught, which will then be linked to our theme and the English lessons, where children can use their learning in context.
We will be looking at a different group of spellings each week that follow the National Curriculum and these will be on the homework for the children to practise.
In maths, we are continuing to learn about multiplication and division, followed by some more work on fractions, learning about decimals, area, perimeter and volume and converting between fractions, decimals and percentages. We are also looking at different mental maths questions during starters in the week, which ensures the children are looking at a variety of maths questions and challenging themselves.
In R.E, we will be continuing to look at Islam and revelation. We will be looking at extracts from the Qur’an and discussing how this impacts daily life for Muslims.
In science, we are learning all about the human body and looking at the different stages of life. We will be comparing the life of humans with animals and discussing the changes that they go through, including being able to reproduce and growing into an adult.
Just a reminder that our PE day is Monday, with swimming for Year 5’s on Friday afternoons.
If there are any questions, please feel free to ask after school.
Thank you,
Miss Coote (Class Teacher)
Miss Hawkes (Teaching Assistant)