Oak Class Year 5 and 6
Miss Woodison, Miss Shaw and Mrs Stubbins
In Whole Class Reading lessons, we will be continuing our work on the book “Floodland” by Marcus Sedgwick. In our English lessons, we will start to look at the book “The Lost Thing” by Shaun Tan. We will explore the text, with the children building their skills over the term to allow them to write non-chronological reports, reports to provide recount, as well as some smaller narrative based pieces that cover both character and setting descriptions. This range of text types will allow the children to explore their writing skills and think about the appropriate information to include in a variety of different pieces of writing. We will be using the text to develop and improve our grammar skills by focusing on identifying imaginative vocabulary and techniques, as well as thinking about how we can construct complex sentences that create interest for the reader. We will look carefully at the use of adverbials within our writing, as well as the importance of identifying main clauses and subordinate clauses within a sentence in order to add more detail. We will explore modal verbs, persuasive verbs and conjunctions, as well as the more technical vocabulary and structural devices used in non-fiction writing. The children will think carefully about creating cohesion within their writing, and we will also be ensuring we develop our accurate use of a wide range of punctuation.
Children will continue to participate in a weekly spelling test with the expectation that they will practice their spellings at home. These will start from the second week and will continue throughout the term.
In Maths we will continue to embed our work on our place value skills, which will include reading, writing and comparing numbers and rounding. We will be continuing to develop our understanding of multiplication and division, addition and subtraction. We will extend this work by starting to look at fractions, particularly focusing on equivalence and simplification of given fractions. This will utilise our work on multiples and factors from last term, so it is important that the children continue to work on their multiplication tables at home. We will also be looking at how we can convert between different units of metric measure and how we can apply what we have learnt to look at money. To tie this all together, as we work through, we will be applying everything we learn to word based problems, which will help us develop our reasoning and deeper understanding of the concepts we cover.
Our Science for this term will be focused on exploring materials. We will look at the different states of matter, exploring how each of them behaves in different situations before moving on to look at reversible and irreversible changes. We will then explore how we can separate mixtures and whether this is possible for all combinations of materials. We will carry out a range of experiments to consolidate our understanding of the scientific process and how new discoveries are made and corroborated with scientific evidence.
In History the children will explore the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This is a topic that can raise a lot of questions and can be quite harrowing to explore. As such, we will handle the topic material sensitively. We will start by looking at what it meant to be an enslaved person and how the rise of trade between countries within the British Empire resulted in the introduction of the trade of people. We will look at the journey enslaved people were forced to make across the Atlantic Passage, explore what life would have been like on plantations and then look at how the slave trade came to be abolished. We will pay particular attention to the role Britain played in the process of the slave trade and also the abolition of it.
In Art we will be learning developing our understanding about styles in Art by looking specifically at Islamic art and architecture. We will focus specifically on the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal, looking at how both were put together and exploring how pattern and structural integrity were central to the creation them. Through our studies, we will develop our control and use of materials, focusing especially on drawing and sculpture techniques. We will continue to develop our use of sketch books to record observations and use them to review and revisit ideas.
In Design Technology, we will be exploring different types of cams and ways to make moving toys. We will look at existing products that use a cam mechanism before designing and making a moving toy of our own. To test them out, we will visit another class and get them to play with our toys so that we can formulate some evaluations and determine whether our product was successful or not.
Finally, in RE, we will be building on our learning from last term, exploring in greater depth the experience of women in Christianity. We will investigate the Christian worldview in more detail and consider how different denominations within Christianity view things in different ways. We will use questions and methods drawn from the human and social sciences and philosophy in order to develop our understanding of both the continuity and changes in Christian worldviews over time.
