Happy New Year and welcome to the Spring term 2022!

Happy New Year,

We trust this update finds you safe and well after a Christmas break. We have had an incredibly busy three days back in school and the children have focused very well considering.

English
We have begun a new text, ‘Stuff You Should Know, which is a fun, interesting and colourful explanation about the fascinating stories behind activities and machines that we take so often for gained such as what happens when you use a toaster, press a light switch, send a text on a mobile phone and post a letter!



​Maths
We have focused our attention on a short unit of work on position, direction and movement. Within this the children have learnt about the four quadrants, translations and reflections. They have used vocabulary such as coordinates, plot, grid, and quadrant, positive, negative, x axis, y axis, translate, and reflect, vertex and vertices. All children have completed this well and have felt very proud of themselves because they have been able to talk with confidence about this new knowledge. Next week we will turn our focus back to fractions.

Science
Heat - In this unit children will learn about heat and particles, heat and expansion, thermal equilibrium and thermal insulators and conductors.
 
History
We have a very important and exciting unit of study this half term about the civil rights movement in America in the 1950s.  This will form a topic based homework project this half term too.  The unit will culminate in a challenging essay.  This unit fits well with our PSHE unit which is all about valuing diversity and Martin Luther King Day on 17th January. 
 
RE
In Religious Education we will be learning about Hinduism and why Hindus try to be good.  The children will learn about Hindhu beliefs such as Dharma, Karma, Samsara and Moksha.
 
Art
The children will be learning about the contemporary artist Sandra Silberzweig. Contemporary means that she is still living and has been painting all her life. She is inspired by primitive figurative images, sacred powerful goddesses and animals, and both tribal and spiritual symbolism which form the basis of her subjects. We will begin this week by planning portraits before designing their own.

DT
In a few weeks time we will undertake a DT project based on creating a simple electronic circuit to create a game.
 
Computing
We will be evaluating what makes a good website and then creating our own webpage.
 
PE
This will be swimming and gymnastics.
 
Homework
As previously mentioned, the children will be asked to produce a project based on our History topic but they will also be set regular revision homework this term to prepare for the SATs tests in May.  The homework will be set next week but in the meantime please encourage children to read every day and do some reading response from the menu in last terms topic web; practise timetables and review spellings they have been learning last term

Thank you. Mrs Ware and Miss Ruby.

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