Autumn 1

What will your child be learning this half term?

Religious Education (R.E.) – We will start the year by learning about our school patron saint – St. Joseph and go on to learn about our class saint– St. Anthony of Padua. Our first RE unit focusses on ‘Belonging – We gather as God’s family’. We will consider the different groups we belong to, learn about Baptism as the Sacrament of belonging to the church, identify the signs and symbols of baptism and what happens during the rite of Baptism and then discuss the celebration of the Mass as a gathering for the family of God.

Guided Reading –This half term we will be reading ‘Cat Tales: Ice Cat’ by Linda Newbury and ‘The Twits’ by Roald Dahl together in class. We will work on developing our comprehension skills by focusing on Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation and Summarising.

Some children who are still working on the Read, Write Inc. Phonics programme will continue to work on their phonics skills during these lessons.

Writing –

The focus book for our writing this half term is Cave Baby by Julia Donaldson and Emily Gravett.

Fiction: Genre adventure story.

We will look at the the description within the text, which will supports the children’s learning to write a descriptive setting and character.

Our grammar focus will be:

Conjunctions, expanded noun phrases/adjectives, similes, fronted adverbials

Non-Fiction focus : Genre: Instructions how to look after a woolly mammoth

Spelling, Punctuation & Grammar – This half term, we will be looking at different sentences - We will be looking at simple, compound and complex sentences. We will also explore different word classes: nouns, verbs, adverbs and expanded noun phrases.

We will have a spelling test each Wednesday; the spellings for each week will be glued in your child’s planner ready for the week ahead.

Maths –

This half term we will focus on:

• Numbers up to 1000 and the value of each digit: place value.
• The children will learn how to compose and decompose numbers, compare, order and look for patterns.
• Once pupils master addition and subtraction, they will start to look at problem solving questions and practice using bar models.

The children will cover the multiplication and division of 3, 4 and 8. They will then get to use their experience of multiplication and division to solve word problems.

Mental Maths -

This half term we will looking at:

• mental addition and subtraction within 20 and up to 100.
• multiplication and division facts linked to the 2, 5, 10 and 3 times tables.

Our focus is on knowing and calculating these facts with speed and accuracy. Please help your child to practise these at home.

Geography -  For the first few weeks of term we will be learning about Mountains, Volcanoes and Earthquakes. Later in the half term we will learn about Europe – finding out about the countries in Europe and some of the physical and human features of the countries.

Science –

Our Science unit for this half term is ‘Practical skills’.

The children will learn:

• What is a variable?
• How to draw a scientific diagram?
• Why is a method important?
• What we can do with data we collect?
• How we can communicate our results?

How we can record an entire investigation?

Physical Education (P.E.) On Mondays this half term the children will be developing their skills in invasion games, concentrating on football and basketball.

Children will need their PE kit in school on Mondays – as most of these lessons will take place outdoors you may wish to provide navy jogging trousers, sweatshirt and trainers for the children to wear if the weather starts to get colder.

On Tuesdays, the children will continue to develop their swimming skills at Darlaston Swimming pool – please ensure your child brings their swimming kit on Tuesday each week.

French – Using their detective skills to spot cognates and working out meaning, the children will learn new transport-related vocabulary and construct sentences using parts of the verb ‘aller’ – to go, and prepositions to express going on holiday to a different country or going to school by a particular mode of transport. The children will discover that French is spoken in many countries around the world other than France.

Personal,  Social & Health Education (PSHE) – Our focus in PSHE this term is looking at class rules andresponsibilities and rights. We will also be exploring: our school mission statement, looking at British values, democracy and elections, being safe online and how to have a growth mind-set and look after our wellbeing.

Computing – We will remind ourselves about the importance of keeping safe online – keeping our passwords safe and learning how the internet can be used in different ways for communication such as blogs. We will also build on our Coding skills learnt in Year 2, creating timers, using repeating commands and learning to debug a simple program.

DT – Linked to our Geography work, the children will be making an ‘erupting volcano’ later this half term. The children will plan, make and evaluate their designs

Music – In our music lessons with Miss Scoines, we will be listening to recorded music and will decide which instruments are our favourites. We will also continue to develop our Ensemble skills through practical performance using a range of instruments including: keyboards, glockenspiels, drums and steel pans.