Welcome back after the Christmas holiday and Happy New Year to everyone.

This term our topic is ‘The Unsinkable Ship’. We will be finding out when, where and how the Titanic was built and learning about her maiden voyage. Pupils will have the opportunity to further develop research skills using reference books and web-sites, work cooperatively to create informative posters and make a large model of the ship for display in the class, highlighting her amazing features. Through the topic, pupils will develop skills in functional and imaginative writing. They will create personal fact-files as they explore this great disaster. As a home project they will get the chance to  design cabin interiors.

It’s that time of year again when we think about celebrating the works of our National Bard, Robert Burns. Our poem for The Scottish Poetry Competition is ‘A Dug, A Dug’ by Bill Keyes. The children have already started practising this and are working hard. Please encourage them to continue  learning a couple of verses a night. We look forward to the final!

In literacy this term we will be reading novels and continuing to read books from our Story Street programme. Please encourage your child to read a little every evening and chat about the story at home. We will continue using a phoneme approach for spelling. Each new phoneme is covered over a two week period during which time the pupils are given the opportunity to explore the use of a wide range of  strategies. Common and tricky words will also be provided. Listening and Talking skills will be developed through group discussion and pupils will be asked to prepare talks to share with others on their hobbies. We will also prepare talks about an aspect of the Titanic.

In maths and numeracy we will continue to focus on our multiplication tables, the 3’s, 6’s and 9’s and related division facts. We will develop our understanding of finding fractions of a quantity. Money will also be covered, where the pupils will work with coins and notes up to £50.00 and practise calculating change from £20.00. In measurement we will be developing the concept of area and learning to use standard units of measure. We will also cover time and explore the use of a compass to locate positions.

In our health and wellbeing programme we will focus on feeling included, safe and achieving.

This term we will explore the use of ‘Scratch Junior’ using the school’s I-pads to develop skills in programming. We will continue using the internet for research on topics and presentation using power -point. We will MS word to create documents and insert images.