Our topic this term focuses on the question:

Did any good come from The Great Fire of London?

We are really looking forward to start this history based topic where we will be investigating the events that lead up to The Great Fire of London. Turtle Class will be learning about the landmarks surrounding London whilst locating it on a map. We will be firstly exploring how the plague started prior to The Great Fire, how it affected people and how it ended. We will be investigating and ordering the events of The Great Fire of London and make direct comparisons between London then and now.  

In our English lessons we are exploring The Gingerbread Man as a fictional text. We will be building our vocabulary surrounding this story and make changes to the original text in order to write our own versions. As part of out Rainbow Grammar lessons we will be continuing to write simple sentence and then compound sentences too. We will maintain using capital letters, finger spaces, full stop and build our knowledge and adjectives and conjunctions to make our writing exciting!

We will also be reading Vlad and The Great Fire Of London. This text will help us internalise a story, so that we can write our own story of the fire, as though we are one of the stories characters. We will also be writing a Diary entry like Samuel Pepys did in 1666 and writing a fire poem. 

Maths lessons during the Spring term will have the focus of  place value. Turtles will be learning about 2d and 3 d shapes, we will learn their names and how to sort and recognise shapes according to their properties.  Then we will be continuing with place value up to twenty in the first half term and learning how we can add and subtract these numbers using abstract, concrete and pictorial representations to help us understand number line and fact families associated with numbers.

During the second half term, we will continue to work with place value and will be learning how we can add and subtract numbers using concrete, abstract and pictorial representations.

Our Science lessons are titled:

 Sensing Seasons, Looking at Animals and Plants.

In our Science lessons we are going to be exploring the Seasons, how they change and what impact they have on the environment and what clothes we wear during each season. In our work on animals, we will be exploring different animal groups, which animals are nocturnal and how birds are different. Hopefully we will be able to make our own bird feeders and observe different birds around our school grounds. 

Manta Rays will become plant detectives exploring what plants are, how and where they grow and how plants and trees can change over time.

E safety is a top priority and Turtles will be learning how to keep themselves safe when using a computer or electronic device. We will learn how to log in and log out of websites, how to create pictures and documents and how to save these to work on at a later date. We will be using Scratch to help us understand algorithms and create our own avatar.

Our art and design and technology lessons involve researching a famous artist and taking inspiration from their artwork to recreate our own. Turtle Class will be creating a piece of art work inspired by Anthony Van Dyke, who was a famous portrait painter, after looking at his work we will be drawing our own self portraits and a portrait of Samuel Pepys in his style.

As well as creating our own portrait in art Turtles will be understanding the techniques of colour washing and silhouettes to make our own version of the London skyline.

Our R.E lessons give Turtles the opportunity to explore religions and begin to understand, "Myself and Caring For Others" and how this impacts on a community. During the second half of the Spring term we will learn what Christians believe and their teachings. We will be reading stories from the Bible and exploring how and why Christians celebrate Easter.

Turtles will learn all about caring and responsibility, who our special people are and how they help us in our R.S.H.E lessons. We will embrace diversity and recognise the ways in which we are all different and understand what it is to be respectful, kind and use strategies to promote inclusion and kindness.

Music in the Autumn Term is a time for the children to recognise the pulse of a song and understand it is the songs heartbeat. We will be using our voices, glockenspiels and recorders to develop our understanding of music.

In PE, Turtles will be using moving to a beat and rhythm to create a sequence of dance moves. They will be putting them together to create a dance routine. We will focus on movement, turns and rolls. We will be continuing to develop our team work skills, attacking and defending skills, accuracy and precision throughout a variety of team games.