In the run up to Christmas, P5 will build on the work done since August focusing on:

 

Topic (Expressive Arts): The whole school theme for Term 2 is Expressive Arts and we have a   number of organisations coming into the school to help the children to develop performance art. In P5 we will be working with the Barrowland Ballet and so we are also going to learn about the story of The Nutcracker. The story was turned into a child-friendly, Christmas ballet with music by Tchaikovsky. The Nutcracker story is a children’s fantasy about toys coming to life and travelling to the Land of Sweets. It is a lovely winter fairytale. We will be listening to the music from the ballet, talking about how the music represents the characters, watching some sections from Disney’s Fantasia which has animated cartoons to the music and using this as a theme for our class stall at the Christmas Fair and our assembly on December 8^th.

 

Reading: This term we are reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl which links nicely with the Land of Sweets in The Nutcracker. The children will complete reading related tasks on this text in our morning reading workshops. The focus for this term is descriptive vocabulary and how writers choose their words.

 

Writing: We will be doing some creative writing this term working on our own descriptive vocabulary. This will include learning about adjectives, adverbs, similes and metaphors in grammar. We will also talk about finding synonyms (alternative words) to improve our writing. The children will be creating and writing recipes for new chocolates for Willy Wonka’s Factory and writing from the point of view of a character linked to our topic work.

 Talking and Listening: We will be linking our topic work to expressing opinions and feelings in response to the music and performances we are looking at in our topic work. We will be building vocabulary for feelings and emotions.

Mathematics: This term we will apply our work on the four operations to problems involving money. In the run up to our Christmas Fair, we will understand the idea of profit and use our maths to make decisions on how to run our stall. The weekly times tables challenge will now be on recalling division facts e.g. 56 = 7 x 8. This is to help the children to improve their division skills. Money is also a familiar way to introduce the concept of decimals and we will be able to use our operations using a decimal point.

 Health and Wellbeing: We will be revisiting healthy eating and ensuring that the children are aware of the presence of sugar in foods that might seem healthy.

In addition this term, the children will be enjoying French lessons with Mrs Brightman and writing to children in the primary school La Rédemption in Lyon.