Spring Term 1:  Curriculum Overview

Celebrating Spring Term 1

As another busy half term draws to a close we took the time as a class to reflect on our highlights.

Without doubt we all agreed that having the opportunity to contact a past pupil, Liddy, who is volunteering in Socrates Primary School in Tanzania as part of her gap year, was a great opportunity.  We were able to bring our geography learning to life in terms of comparing Tanzania (a non-European country) with where we live in the UK.  We were able to do our own research into the native animals of Tanzania but also ask Liddy many questions about the climate, physical and human features and school life.  We were so struck by the lack of resources in Socrates Primary that we held our own bake sale and raised an amazing £300. We received many photos of all the library books and stationery that Liddy was able to purchase for the school as a result of our donation!

Our overarching topic, upon which our English was based, was fairy-tales. We had great fun learning the tales, re-enacting them and then ‘twisting’ them into our own version.  Towards the end of term, we learnt about debating and practiced our skills in a number of class debates, including whether the ‘Big Bad Wolf’ was really just misunderstood and whether half term homework was really necessary!

In maths we covered a unit all about money, from recognising coins and notes to calculating our change if we were to go shopping with our pocket money.  We have also started to learn about multiplication and division and have fully embraced the Numbots program to help continue improve our mental maths.

Science this half term focused on animals (including humans) where we spent time thinking about surviving and thriving and methods of classification.  A particular highlight was the dissection of ‘poo’ to establish whether a creature was a carnivore, herbivore or omnivore!

We were fortunate enough to have a sports coach to support our gymnastics learning where we had great fun learning new skills and demonstrating our courage on the wall bars!

Looking forward to the next half tem:

We are always enthusiastic about book week(s) and are looking forward to two weeks of activities focussing on the environment. 

We will be continuing our topic of fairy-tales but focussing on castles to expand our understanding of life in years gone by plus learning about significant historical figures. Whilst in science we will be looking at influential scientist and inventors.

Plus, much much more!

Celebrating Spring Term 2

As we look back over the last half term it is wonderful to be able to celebrate the progress that each and every one of us have made over what has been a challenging half term.

We have thoroughly enjoyed learning about ‘Super Scientists’ from Isaac Newton to Thomas Edison and conducting our own investigations to help us better understand their discoveries.

Our studying of castles and castle life has provided us with not only an insight into what life was like living in a castle, including the differing roles that people undertook, but also an understanding of how and why castles were built.  Our research also provided us with a fantastic stimulus for exploring different types of poems and trying our hand at writing our own.

Our maths this term has seen us exploring both fractions and shape- the use of practical resources including marshmallows made the topics all the more fun!

Food has also played a part in our DT topic as we have enjoyed evaluating ‘dips and dippers’ before creating our own dip.  The tasting process allowed us to experiment with new flavours and exercise our creative sides!

Creativity was a theme continued both in our RE hot-seating exercise as part of our exploration into forgiveness through the parable of The Lost Son, as well as in our computing module of digit art which saw us develop our IT skills to recreate the works of famous artists, including Picasso.

A final highlight of the half term was our whole school ‘Think! Project’ where we focused on ways in which we could play a part in saving the planet.  In Silver Birch Class we looked specifically at the textile industry and tried our hand at creating decorative flowers using recycled material and natural dyes.  We are particularly proud that as a result of our persuasive letter writing skills we will shortly be taking delivery of a clothing recycling bank, to both reduce the amount of textile waste at the same time as raising money for the Wiltshire Air Ambulance.

Looking forward to the Summer Term

We are looking forward to our ‘Green fingers’ topic which we will be based around ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and exploring different perspectives.  Our own green fingers will be needed for our science investigation into the growth of plants where we plan to explore the different parts of plants and the conditions in which they thrive.

We are also very excited for our forthcoming trip to Portchester Castle where we hope to be able see first-hand the different of parts of a castle and bring our research to life.  In addition, we are looking forward to Science week which promises to be a fun and exciting week!