Welcome back to the second half of the Autumn Term.
This half term is always busy and exciting with the lead up to Christmas.
Year 1 will be beginning a new unit of work in English based around Fairy Tales. By the end of the unit, we hope that they will be able to write a series of simple sentences accurately using correct punctuation and good phonics. Year 2 will be looking at instructional texts, focussing on the use of time adverbials and imperative verbs. Both groups will have a new set of Tier Two words: ‘impolite’, ‘honour’ and ‘framed’ for Year 1 and ‘succulent’, ‘scatter’, ‘camouflage’ for Year 2
In Maths, Year 1 will be working on shape, focussing on both 2D and 3D shape whilst Year 2 will be working hard to master multiplication and division. Ideally, we would like the children to be able to recall multiplication and division facts for 2,5, and 10 times tables at speed by the end of the year- any help at home with this would be greatly appreciated.
In other curriculum areas they will be continuing where they left off before half term. In History, they will be finding out about what people felt about Fen Drainage. In Geography they will start to think about how the land is used in the Fens. They will continue their work on Festivals of Light in RE by looking at Hannukah and Advent. By the end of term, they will have produced some superb art work inspired by Angie Lewin and enjoyed a number of the dances from The Nutcracker Suite by Tchaikovsky
Year 3 will be starting a unit of work on Non- Chronological Reports, focussing particularly on the use of co-ordinating conjunctions. Their new vocabulary for this half term will be ‘emerge’, ‘detect’ and ‘solitary’.
In Maths they will be returning to addition and subtraction, looking at regrouping.
Their Science work continues with looking at the digestive system. In History they will explore the changes to society in the Iron Age and they will complete their Geography work by explaining what mountains are and how they are formed. They will continue to work with Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ and will be writing their own compositions over the coming weeks. In DT they will be making their own beakers and in Art they will recreate the work of Frida Kahlo.
Year 1/2 are just beginning to rehearse their Christmas Production. You should be receiving a letter with details regarding this very soon. If you haven’t had this by Monday 9th November, please let your child’s teacher know!
It was great to see so many of you at our Parent Consultation Evenings. If you did not attend, please speak to your child’s class teacher, who will try to arrange an appointment for you.
Homework
We continue to ask children to use either TTRS or Numbots to complete their maths homework where possible. We would like the children to spend 5- 10 minutes a day working on TTRS in Garage Mode (Year 2 and 3) or on Numbots in Story Mode (Year 1 and 2). We will be setting this as an assignment in these programmes, and you will be able to see it at the start of each week. Year 3 children will be set a ‘gig’ shortly after half term, which will help to ensure they are accessing appropriate times tables and making steady progress. In TTRS, children will be unable to access other areas of the site unless they have completed their assignment.
Warm Clothes
As the weather is getting colder, please ensure that your child has a coat to wear. We go out in all but the most inclement weather and are very limited on spares for those children who have come with out one. Please also ensure that your child has a jumper and jogging bottoms in their PE kit, as well as a spare pair of socks. PE kits should be in school all week please!
Labelling clothes
A reminder please that all clothes, particularly PE kits and jumpers, should be labelled so that we can return lost items to their owners.
Start of the School Day
Please ensure that your child is not playing on the equipment on the field at the start of the school day. This extends to pre-school siblings as well (at both the start and end of the school day)! We would request that you leave your child in the line once the whistle has blown and your child’s teacher has arrived so that they can enter the building independently.
Dates for your diary
Friday 6th November: CPS PTCA Firework Display
Monday 16th November: Year 3 Trip to Flag Fen
Wednesday 2nd & Thursday 3rd December: Year 1/2 Christmas Production (2:15pm)
Thursday 10th December: CPS PTCA Winter Fair
Friday 11th December: Christmas Jumper Day
Friday 18th December: Term ends (2pm)
Wednesday 6th January: Children back to school