Our Learning

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Topic

 

 

‘Explore Romans’

 

     

      During this History led topic and the children will be finding the answer to lots of key questions and finding out lots of interesting facts about The Roman Empire. These will include:

 

➢ How the Roman Empire was founded.

➢ What jobs did the Romans do?

➢ The kind of food and drink that Romans liked.

➢ What did family life look like for the Romans?

➢ The Roman Army and how and why they invaded other parts of the world.

 

As always, the topic focus will provide varied writing opportunities, including: a diary entry where the children will get to put themselves in the shoes of a Roman slave and really understand how that must have felt and what their lives must have looked like.

 

 

English

We are going to continue with some work around poetry as we think about poems that create images in the mind. We will begin with ‘The Reader of This Poem’ by Roger Mc Gough and ‘Rainbows’ by Moira Andrews as we think about how similes and metaphors are used to create powerful images in the reader’s mind. This will continue to be our focus over the next few weeks as we move towards writing our own descriptive poem inspired by ‘Window’ a wordless picture book, by Jeannie Baker, that provides children with an understanding of how growth affects the world we live in. We will then be moving on to explore an exciting narrative ‘The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore’ by W.E. Joyce which the children will use as inspiration and as a guide for creating their own mini book ‘The Fantastic Flying Book of (name).’ The children will be exploring the language and structure of the story and comparing it to other similar stories they may have come across in their reading. They will be encouraged to think about noun phrases and superlatives in terms of character and setting contexts. They will have the opportunity to develop their understanding of the term ‘show not tell’ the reader.

 

 

 

Maths

We will begin the term with a focus on place value, representing, partitioning and exploring numbers over 1,000. During this topic, we will also look at rounding numbers to the nearest 10, 100 and 1,000. This topic will consolidate children’s previous learning and knowledge of place value whilst also developing their understanding as we start to look at bigger numbers. We will then move on to addition and subtraction where children will have the opportunity to add and subtract 4-digit numbers using the column addition and column subtraction methods they have used in previous years. Children will become more familiar with exchanging whilst adding and subtracting and the understanding of this concept will be bolstered by using maths manipulatives to support their learning. Following on from this, children will cover shape measurement. We will begin by looking at area and consolidating the children’s understanding of area. We will then continue with drawing shapes accurately and comparing the areas of 2D shapes. Finally, leading up to Christmas, we will begin looking at multiplication and division. The children will consolidate their understanding of some of the previously learnt times-tables and will begin looking at x6, x7, x11 and x12. Throughout the year, the children will have multiple opportunities every week to practise and consolidate their times-table knowledge to aid with their fluency.

 

 

 

Science

 

The children will be focusing on sound during the first half term. Our initial focus will be on what sound is and how we can hear. The children will learn about sound waves, vibrations, pitch and volume, as well as how our ears allow us to hear sound. Throughout the topic we will be making use of lots of musical instruments and other medians of sound to bolster the children’s learning and aid their understanding. During the second half term, the children will be finding out all about electricity in the second half of the term. They will be identifying the dangers associated with electricity in the home, finding out which materials are good conductors and those which aren’t through investigation and then using this information to construct simple circuits.