This term the children will be exploring the theme “Growing and Changing”.
In Literacy, the children will explore two texts around this theme, “How to Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Jasper’s Beanstalk”, in depth. They will be identifying and describing the characters and setting and sequencing the beginning, middle and end of the story. The children will use character props and story maps to develop their retelling skills further. They will use their growing knowledge of sounds to help them write their own sentences to describe features, write stories, write instructions and to label diagrams.
In our daily Sounds Write phonics sessions we will build on the sounds we learnt last term to develop and expand our ever growing reading and writing skills. Each session will focus on “saying the sounds” (segmenting) and “reading the word” or “writing the word” (blending). This term we will focus on:
Unit 7 – ss,zz
Unit 8 – using all our sounds that we have learnt so far to read and write VCC (Vowel, Consonant, Consonant) words, for example “ant” and “ink”, and CVCC (Consonant, Vowel, Consonant, Consonant) words, for example “sand” and “camp”.
Unit 9 – using all our sounds that we have learnt so far to read and write CCVC (Consonant, Consonant, Vowel, Consonant) words, for example “frog” and “stop”.
In Maths we will be learning how to count, recognise and add numbers from 8 to 10. The children will start to use language such as “add”, “equals” and “total” as they add 2 groups of objects together and learn how to use both the “part-part-whole” model and “+” and “=” to support their understanding of addition further. We will use our growing addition skills to find and practice our number bonds to 10 through games, sorting activities and rhymes.
The children will be exploring length, height and time. The children will start to use the language of height and length to describe objects, before moving on to using more specific vocabulary relating to length (“longer”, “shorter”), height (“taller”, “shorter”) and breadth (“wider”, “narrower”). We will be learning how to tell the time, using the vocabulary “o’clock” and reading clock times to help us order our day, and playing games to challenge each other to see how many things we can do in 1 and 5 minutes. We will be building on our knowledge of 2D shapes and looking at how these are used to build 3D shapes, as well as learning the names of shapes such as "cube", "cuboid", "sphere", "cylinder", "cone" and "triangular prism".
We have added further home learning maths bags that support these maths concepts to our collection. If you would like to borrow one of these, please let us know and we will book it out for you. Please upload any photographs of you and your child completing these onto their Tapestry account.
In Understanding the World the children will explore seasons, growing plants, how animals grow and change, food and farming and how we grow and change. We have planned for the children to have lots of exciting hands on experience with growing plants and animals. We have a trip planned to Jimmy’s Farm in Ipswich where we will be exploring the A-Z of animals on the farm, ranging from anteaters to zebras!
The children will learn different animal and offspring names and how humans grow and change. We will be starting our Chestnut growing garden and will be planting a whole range of flowers, herbs and vegetables to help us learn how seeds and plants grow and change over time.
Children will learn that we have four seasons on earth. They will recall that the earth orbits the sun (knowledge they learned in Reception: Space) and will know that when our part of the earth tilts towards the sun we experience summer. Then continuing to think about the idea of change, children will think about the past and how places change over time. We will be looking at how school life in Weeting has changed in the last 250 years and have planned for some of our older friends in the community to come and share their memories of school when they were 5.
You will see on the Knowledge Organiser some of the key facts and vocabulary that the children will be learning.
In RE the children will explore the question “Why do Christians put a cross in an Easter garden?”. We will build on our learning from last half term of heroes and helping others and start by thinking about why a bridge might save or help someone. We will then move onto exploring why the cross is a special symbol for Christians and explore how we include this special symbol in our class and school. This includes making our own crosses and baking hot cross buns! The cross is used as a way of introducing the Easter story to the children and we will be acting out each of the key parts of the story. The children will have an opportunity to create their own Easter garden to help them with the retelling of the Easter story.
Our Spring Term homework challenges are shown below and you will also find a copy of these in your child’s homework book.
