Dear Parents and Carers,

Happy New Year to you all . Welcome back to the Spring term. It’s lovely to see all the students looking refreshed and excited to be with their friends. Outlined below is a brief description of the subjects and concepts we will be covering this term.

Geography

This term’s Geography topic is ‘Our Local Area’. We will study the local area, looking at the physical features. We will also look at aerial maps of the area and attempt to draw maps of our classroom and the local area. We will also work on labelling key features.

English 

In English we are going to be using our senses and poetry to explore the world around us. There will be a particular focus on the weather.  We will begin to use our senses to create writing that explores and expresses our emotions and feelings. We will look at some poetic writing skills and apply them to our own work. 

We will continue improving our phonetic skills daily for 10 minutes. We will read books related to our weekly letter sounds.

Homework for English will link into the phonic work covered during the week as well as reading simple poems.

Maths  

Within Maths this term we will be returning to time, number & place value, addition & subtraction and measuring capacity and mass. The students will be practising telling the time (hour, half past, quarter past/to and 5 minute intervals).

PSHE 

Our focus for PSHEwill be Managing Strong Feelings. Through stories, role play and watching clips, we will explore what it is like to feel sadness, jealousy, frustration, anger, anxiety and joy and learn different ways to identify and deal with these emotions.

Science  

We will learn about  Living things and their habitats. We will learn how animals are classified and try our hands at sorting different animals into categories by their attributes. 

The second half term we will study Light. We will explore and experiment how light travels. A lot of the activities will be practical so the students get plenty of opportunities to learn by doing. They will look at a range of different materials to see if light can go through them as well as create and understand how shadows are made.

ICT

This Term we will work on Online Safety.  We will focus on understanding the term- Online safety as well as look at how we can protect ourselves whilst looking at the differences between acceptable and unacceptable information we share with others.

RE

Friendship is our focus where we will look at what is a friend, know who are friends are at school and what it is to be a good friend.

Art/ Design and Technology

In art and design, our focus will be on Prehistoric Art. Using British animals the students will look at basic shapes and proportions. They will attempt line drawings and think about adding details into their drawings. They will then add colour to define their art work.

Employability Skills

This term is all about having responsibility and problem solving. Students will be asked to do specific jobs. We will ask the students to complete the units ‘Carry Out a Practical Task in the Workplace’ (the classroom) and ‘Follow Instructions in the Workplace’.

If you have any questions regarding this information, please do not hesitate to ask.

Yours sincerely,

Pamela Palanyandi