Our Learning

​

Topic

During our topic ‘European Time Traveller’ the children will be finding out the answers to some important questions about Ancient Greece. These will include:

• Where was Ancient Greece?

• Who were the Ancient Greeks?

• When in history were they important and why?

• How did they influence the world today?

• Who were the major Greek gods?

• When were the Olympic games founded and how have they changed?

The children will use maps to locate Ancient Greece and the countries that made up their empire and match ancient place names to modern ones. They will explore how we know so much about Ancient  Greece and what the greatest achievements to come from the Ancient Greeks were. They will undertake research to discover facts about famous figures in Ancient Greek history. The children will also be competing in the Olympics, replicating a Greek masterpiece and will be preparing a banquet  fit for a Greek god!

 

English

The children will initially be familiarising themselves with Greek myths and we will be using ‘The Orchard Book of Greek Myths’ by Geraldine Mc Caughrean to do so. As they immerse themselves in the teachings of Greek myths they will learn that myths are fictional and usually about gods andgoddesses, sometimes with fantasy creatures in them. The children will begin to understand that Greek myths often explain how the world, animals and people came to be. The children will then retell an exciting myth scene from a different perspective, thinking about dialogue, use of inference and show not tell to create suspense. The children will then move on to drama. Staying with the Greek myths theme, they will have the opportunity to work in small groups to act out scenes from their favourite myths before writing and performing their own playscript based on a character from an ancient Greek myth. The non-fiction focus will include instructional writing. The children will be looking at a wide variety of instructional texts to help them develop their understanding of what a good set of instructions looks like. They will be following verbal and written instructions to carry out tasks and will be evaluating the instructions provided based upon their outcome. The children will be learning about bossy verbs, adverbs for clarity and time adverbials for order so they can write a set of instructions to inform the reader on how to successfully defeat a minotaur, should they ever encounter one!

 

Maths

We will begin the term by continuing our work on multiplication and division. The children will practise recalling and using multiplication tables and related division facts to aid fluency, practise mental methods and develop their fluency in the formal written method of short multiplication and short division. We will then move on to look at measurement, focusing on length & perimeter. We will be thinking about equivalent lengths (m/cm & mm/cm) as well as adding & subtracting these, perimeter of 2D shapes and of rectilinear shapes (shapes where all sides meet at right. We will then spend some time looking at fractions and decimals. The children will learn to count in fractions, add and subtract in fractions and recognise tenths and hundredths in various representations and be able to write these as a decimal. Problem solving and reasoning will continue to be an important part of all our maths when the children are encouraged to apply their knowledge and skills independently and to persevere when they are stuck.

​