Literacy – The children have continued to work through our reading programme which challenges them with longer, trickier texts that demand more focus and application of reading and comprehension strategies. Please ensure that your child is given the opportunity to read their book aloud each night as this really helps with their fluency and discussing what happened will help them to develop greater understanding.
In class, in addition to reading our book we have been working on a media study using the film ‘Zootopia’ which was inspired by the pupils. We had been learning the song ‘Try everything’ as part of our Health and Wellbeing focus where we had discussed being resilient, and not giving up when we found something tricky or hard. We learned that we all make mistakes and how we can use these experiences to help us as we learn. We then watched the film and discussed the characters, the settings, the plot, the themes, and key messages from the film. The children were really engaged and enjoyed learning through exploring, discussing, answering questions and drawing inferences from the film.
At home children can use these skills to discuss what they are watching, reading, is it fiction or nonfiction, why do they find it enjoyable, what is the purpose, aim, or message in story/film/clip/cartoon? This all helps the children to become more engaged in their activities and start to use critical thinking skills.
Numeracy and Maths – We have been busy learning all about Fractions and Time this month. The children have been learning about the numerator and denominator and can use the correct notation. They have a good understanding that a fraction is an equal part of a whole and really enjoyed participating in lots of games whilst learning. We are currently learning about time and can tell o’clock, half past, quarter past and some can even tell quarter to. Our recent work on Fractions really helps us with this. We loved getting to do our math’s outdoors, working in groups or pairs, playing lots of time related games.
IDL – Oceans and Continents – We have really enjoyed this topic so far as it has allowed for lots of independent learning and individual choice. Having learned a little bit about each Continent we have chosen a few that we want to learn more about. We have been investigating the different cultures such as music, food, and animals. We have used our ICT skills to research the Continents and have all created a PowerPoint on Glow which we will share with the class over the next few weeks. When exploring Africa, we used musical instruments to make different sounds and rhythms which would match our dance that we had learned, we also drew some African animals and used oil pastels to create an African safari themed backdrop. These look amazing and are proudly displayed in the class for everyone to see. This week we have been learning all about Australasia, and looked at Australia and all the islands that make up the continent. We can name some – why don’t you ask us? We also made Didgeridoo’s and are going to create our own sounds using these. We can’t wait to find out which Continent we are going to look at each week and are going to end our topic with a food tasting session, trying a variety of foods from all the Continents.
RE – Our focus for May is ‘The Month of Mary’ and we have decorated our altar in class to reflect this, one pupil brought in a lovely bunch of flowers and others have contributed flowers and beautiful drawings and prayers for Mary. We also did a great job learning a new hymn to sing to Mary ‘Bring Flowers of the Rarest’. With Mrs Gilfedder we are learning about Islam and love learning about other religions.
Homework – As we approach the end of the term there will be no homework given out in diaries to be returned each week. I will give the children their diaries this week to be kept at home so that the children can access their GLOW logins. The children will be given another personal project to work on for the next 3 weeks, details will be discussed and decided with children this week. Most of the children have now completed their spelling programme and the next few weeks will be targeted revision and consolidation of phonemes and common words. Children should continue to practise these and to read the book that they are given home each night. They should continue to practise counting forwards and backwards in 2s, 3s, 5s and 10s, and learning the 2,3,5,10 x tables.
Children could use this time to develop other skills such as learning to tie their shoelaces, school tie, shirt buttons. This will all help them to become more independent in preparation for next session. Thank you.
