Welcome to our final curriculum update blog post of the session. Primary 2/3 have been very busy during our third term with lots of new learning, concepts and strategies to develop and understand.
Literacy
In literacy our skills of sequencing and summarising have been covered on a weekly basis and children have worked hard to discuss and write about beginning, middle and end as well as talking about what happened first, next and then. We orally discussed our predictions and continued to give evidence to support whether a text was fiction or non-fiction. We spent some time talking about the author and illustrator, as well as looking at how a contents page or index can help us find information. We looked at headings and sub- headings and why labels and captions are important when understanding diagrams or pictures too. Our focus in term 4 will be to scan and select relevant facts or information, summarising and note taking to create a bank of facts that will support us in creating our own pieces of writing or scientific research.
As in previous terms, our reading and spelling activities are continuing at various times throughout the week. Children are using a mixture of practical, hands-on activities such as play dough, scrabble tiles, stencils and chalk boards to practise their spelling words but are also employing strategies such as ‘diacritical marking’ to reinforce their spelling knowledge and identify the phonemes and letters that make up our spelling words. We are using the Active Literacy phoneme stories and word building applications to help us recognise our spelling sound and words in texts we are accessing.
Our focus in writing has been narrative writing. Children developed their own character and setting, using their description skills to build their own stories whilst focusing on structure and sequencing of events to create a flow to tell a story using their own ideas. By using the 5 senses children created vivid settings which then had an exciting event, before reaching a conclusion in their ending. In term 4, we will continue to work on descriptive and narrative writing but will also include instructional writing as we write about experiments, we have carried out through our new topic.
Maths
Our focus in maths this term will be division and fact families to make sure children have a solid foundation of this concept, as well as regularly revisiting multiplication skills to retain this knowledge and develop further their understanding of how both concepts are interlinked.
In other areas of maths, measurement such as length, weight and area will be a focus as children use non-standard and standard units of measure to understand height, length, width, and weight. We will also look at data handling and how we interpret information, as well as creating graphs and bar charts of our own based on information we have collected.
Health & Wellbeing
Our Paths Pupil of the Day is still being received well with pupils and our Pupil of the Day continues to receive lots of compliments and special jobs around the classroom. We are continuing to explore emotions, comfortable and uncomfortable and how we recognise these emotions within ourselves and in others. We are also looking at problem solving strategies through discussion, deciding what steps to take if we should experience uncomfortable emotions and prevent escalation when we are angry or frustrated. Using our traffic light system, which is displayed in the classroom, we hope to give children the tools to self-regulate these emotions or seek help to co-regulate.
In P.E, our sessions will happen inside (Tuesday) once per week, and outside (Thursday) once per week and our focus will be athletics and fielding games. This will help us with the skills we need for sports day activities and how to operate as a team to build the skills to play rounders or other fielding games.
R.E
Our focus during R.E sessions will be the preparation required for our Sacrament of Reconciliation for our P3 pupils. This will take place in early June and children will have discussions and lessons in class as well as follow up home activities that will be completed with their parents. We will also have Mary, Mother of Jesus as a focus during May as we look at how we honour her as the Mother of Jesus. Throughout this term we will be accessing and completing discussions and tasks from God’s Loving Plan.
Topic
Our topic over the next term will be ‘Materials’. This topic has already been well received by the children, who have already begun to look at the different man-made and natural materials in our environment. Children already knew many materials we have in our everyday lives and could correctly identify which are natural and those that are man-made. The children will experiment with different materials to gain a better understanding of their limitations and why different materials are used for different areas of our lives (concrete for building and fabric for clothing and warmth). As part of this topic we will also look at Charles Rennie Macintosh and how he used different materials to bring his designs to life in jewellery and window designs.
As always, we hope this is the start of successful final term as we begin to prepare our children for transition to their next stage of learning.
Take care,
Mrs Travers
