Welcome to the second half of the summer term in Swans!
English
This half-term in English we will be exploring the book ' Iggy Peck, Architect’ by Andrea Beaty, where children will have many opportunities to develop a love of different kinds of buildings and learn some of the key connected vocabulary. Children will enjoy using different materials to create their own towers and use a range of adjectives, superlatives (-est suffix) and comparatives (-er suffix) to describe and compare structures. Children will describe Iggy’s character and make comparisons with Miss Lila Greer’s character, using conjunctions. Children will draw their dream home, label this using phoneme frames, and write sentences to describe their drawing. Children will go on to create posters using different sentence types to advertise an architectural drawing competition across the school – The Iggy Peck Dream Home Awards. They will consolidate their learning by creating a fact file about different buildings.
In the second half of the term we will explore the book ‘Julian is a Mermaid’ by Jessica Love. In this sequence of learning children think about being true to yourself and their dreams and wishes. Children will explore verbs and use these to write commands that form instructions for being a mermaid. As the story unfolds, they predict, write in role and sort inferential statements. They create and advertise carnival costumes before moving to music as the creature they’ve decided to become. Finally, they look at the features of a poem before writing their own poems based on the idea of movement, being who you want to be and using verbs in their infinitive and progressive forms.
Maths
In maths, we will build upon our number knowledge by working up to and within 100. We will make sure our place value knowledge is secure before moving on to explore unitising within money. We will use our knowledge of counting in 2’s, 5’s and 10’s from last half-term to support our ability to count multiples of these coins. Finally, in year one we will learn all about time, including days of the week, months of the year and sequencing events in chronological order. We will also learn how to tell the time to the hour and to half past the hour.
Science
Science focusses on 'Materials and magnets'. We will be learning about material properties, like waterproof and absorbent, bendy and stiff and hard and soft. We will explore transparent and opaque and learn that using materials with different properties influences the purpose that we use them for. We will explore magnets and learn what happens with negative and positive attraction. We will find out that opposite poles attract and that negative poles repel.
History
History includes learning more about parliament and prime ministers. We learn about King James the second and how he viewed parliament. We will learn about the creating of the Bill of Rights and how parliament was given its power by King William and Queen Mary. We will learn about democracy and the UK’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole, and our current prime minister.
DT
In DT, we will be learning about food technology and food traditions. In our practical, we will be making our own pastry from scratch and adding this to jam to make delicious jam tarts.
Life Skills
Life Skills' focus is relationships when we ask 'What can we do with money?' We will think about types of money, spending and saving and making sure that we think carefully about what we buy.
Computing
In computing, we will be learning more about e-safety, and then learning about programming using a visual programme called Scratch Jr.
PE
PE will cover net and wall games like tennis and the use of a racquet. We will also be learning about striking and fielding games where two teams compete and take turns with a bat and with fielding.
RE
In RE, we focus again on Judaism and ask ' Does celebrating Chanukah make Jewish children feel closer to God?' We will build on our knowledge of Jewish life from last half-term, and our exploration of Shabbat by learning about the festival of Channukah. Chanukah is the Jewish eight-day festival of lights.
Music
Music lessons will focus on ‘Let's Perform Together!’, and we think about the question; ' How does music teach us about looking after our planet?' We will be using glockenspiels to practice the notes C, D, E, F, F♯, and G.