Welcome to Pine Tree Class

Happy New Year! I hope you have all had a lovely Christmas break and are ready for an exciting term ahead. Once again, I would like to apologise for the disruption around FabLab dates – we still do not have a confirmed date, but I will be in touch regarding this as soon as I hear more.

On this page, you will find some useful information about the term ahead and any key messages that you need to be aware of.  If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see our class Twitter feed and instructions for Google Classroom. We love to use Twitter to share some of the excellent things going on in class and will use Google Classroom to support learning at home - spellings, homework and useful documents will be uploaded and made available on there.  If you are on Twitter, please follow @pinetreeclass to see regular updates.

We are set to have a great term and have some really exciting things planned and lots of new things to learn about.  If there are ever any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to get in touch, either by popping in or telephoning.  The support you give is essential for your child's progress and the closer we can work together the better it will be for them.

Kind regards

Mr Waters

Curriculum Overview:

Our Maths topics for this term will focus heavily on fractions, decimals and percentages, as well as more complex multiplication and division calculations. Therefore, it is imperative that children are supplementing this work with basic skills practise at home. Please encourage the children to use their log in for Times Table Rockstars regularly at home to ensure they know all the multiplication and division facts accurately and rapidly as this knowledge and recall will be hugely beneficial this year.

In our English lessons this term, we are continuing to work on our knowledge of punctuation and grammar from across KS2, with a particular focus on being able to extend our sentences through the use of different clauses. All of our writing across the year will be inspired by high quality texts and children's literature and we will be starting the term off with some writing linked to the story ‘Arthur and the Golden Rope’.  Where possible, we will try to link our spellings in class to our writing also. We will be completing daily whole class reading sessions to develop the children’s reading stamina, pace, understanding of vocabulary and comprehension skills alongside individual reading sessions where each child will be heard to read by an adult weekly. Alongside everything we do in school, it is incredibly important that children are reading a variety of texts both fiction and non-fiction regularly at home and recording their comments in the planners. The planners need to be in school daily and to be signed at by an adult regularly. Finally, the children will need to focus on using spelling strategies and rules consistently to ensure they spell a variety of common and uncommon words accurately. They need to be practising their spellings regularly at home. Please see the spelling strategies document to support your child learning their weekly word lists at home.

Science

We are scientists!

In our Science lessons this term, we look at Properties and Changed of Materials. In this unit we will consolidate our understanding of states of matter, finding out how to separate materials using scientific processes, learn how conductors and insulators work, as well finding out about reversible and irreversible changes.

History/Geography                                                                                      

In our History lessons, we will be studying the enquiry question 'How has Crime and Punishment changed through the years?'. We will look at punishment throughout the ages, including Anglo Saxons, The Tudors, The Victorians and how modern crimes are detected. We will also find out about famous historical people such as Dick Turpin and analysing how we know about events form the past.

Our Geography topic for this term is 'Water: friend or foe?'. where we will be thinking about all the different uses of water. We will be learning about the water cycle and how water is essential to all life on Earth; finding out how much water is used in daily life and how we can try and reduce the amount of water we use; finding out about how water is used to create electricity; as well as learning how dams are used to help control water flow.

Reading: 

Please make sure that you read for at least 10 minutes everyday.  This can be your school book, own book, newspapers, comics, shopping list etc and record in your planner.

Spellings:

Spellings will be added to Google Classroom on a Friday afternoon and the children will be tested the following Friday.  Spellings will focus on particular spelling rule/pattern each week and we will also be looking at words taken from the statutory word list.  These will be taught and practised throughout the week. 

PE:

The children will have indoor PE on a Wednesday and outdoor PE on a Friday.  The children should come to school wearing their PE kits.  PE kits should be a house colour t-shirt, plain black shorts/ joggers/leggings and a plain black jacket/jumper.  Please remember to tie long hair up and make sure no jewellery is worn.

Homework:

Homework will be set on a Friday and this should be returned by the following Friday.  Homework will consist of a maths activity and an English activity linked to the unit of work they are covering in class, so they should be able to complete the activity independently. 

Some useful websites, resources and links:

https://spellingframe.co.uk - Spelling Frame - A great, interactive website to give you chance to practise your spellings in a variety of different ways.

https://ttrockstars.com/ - Times Table Rockstars. Use this website to practise your times tables, battle with your band mates and keep your arithmetic skills up to scratch!