Term 2

Dear parents and carers, I hope you all enjoyed a well deserved rest over the half term and are now ready to steam through Term 2. We have a very busy and exciting term ahead of us as we explore authors and the varying range of genre they bring us. I hope the children will be inspired to go off and seek out new and exciting authors and writing styles to stretch their own style, creativity and imagination.

Throughout this term we will be exploring the work of many authors in order to compare and contrast writing genres and styles. We will work through texts to support our grammar, punctuation and spelling skills and creatively weave our own writing styles into our everyday writing. As a starting point, we will look at the work of Roald Dahl, Mini Grey, Shel Silverstein and Anthony Brown but this list will be expanded as we travel through the term. By the end of the term, we need to have enough skills to plan, draft, edit and then write our own story confidently drawing on the influences from the authors we have studied. We will explore how language changes depending on what we are writing and develop the skill of using tight specific language to get a point across to a reader.

Our maths this term will see us working on division, multiplication, angles, shapes and measure. We will start the term looking at division and multiplication together to allow us to build on our inverse links and understanding. We will also start to look at multiples of 3, 4 and 8. These will take quite a time for us to master so we plan to use these as much as possible over this term. Where possible, we will

combine the skills we are working on to further embed learning. For example, we will include money or measure within multiplication or division calculations.

We are still working through our historical investigation about the Stone Age. We will continue to explore this throughout this term then travel through the Bronze and Iron Age in order to understand how one era finished and another started. We will also continue to build on our geography skills as we learn about Europe in a little more detail. We are also learning how we fit into the larger picture of the world. We started looking at the 7 continents and 5 oceans towards the end of Term 1 and will now look at our place within Europe then within the UK until we are able to pinpoint our location on local maps. Our Geographical knowledge will also be linked to the authors we study as we learn about their place of origin.

Kestrels

Here are your home learning tasks for this Term. We share homework when there is time within the school week. We will not necessarily share homework on the same day it is brought into class so please do not worry if they do not share it straight

away. Please return all completed activities to school by Friday 7th December so we have

time to share it with the rest of the class before the end of term

Create your own word problems linked to multiplication

and division without using the words multiply or divide.

E.g. I cut my cake into 16 pieces to share with my friends. There are 4 of us in total. How many slices can we each enjoy?

Study a European country that interests you. What can you find out about it? You may want to consider: What are the neighbouring countries? What is the population ? What currency do they use? How does it compare to the UK?

Find, then read your favourite picture book as many times

as you can. Once you are feeling confident, bring it in to read it to the class during our shared reading time.

Create something linked to the Bronze or Iron Age. This

can be anything you like so long as you are able to talk to others about what it is.

There is no set criteria for presenting your homework so please feel free to

present your work however you want to.

In RE, we will be learning about Sikhism. We will be using the big question ‘What is important for Sikh people?’ as our guide for learning. As we learn more about their religion we also hope to compare their faith with our own.

A huge thank you to those of you that man-aged to complete some or all of the home learning tasks. We had some lovely Stone Age creations, book reviews and some very inter-esting information on sources of light. We spent lots of time talking about these and not only gave us a chance to discuss questions, they also inspired others to go off and create something themselves.