Unit 3 – Spring 2 Newsletter

Apologies for the delay. Please find the details of our current learning experience for the second half of the Spring term. Our new Learning Experience is entitled ‘Jurassic Park’ and is based around creating short stories that include dinosaurs.

Learning Experience Rationale

Children will learn what historians tell us prehistoric life was like. They will write narrative adventure stories based around dinosaurs. Children will also discover the techniques used by archaeologists to undercover the past. Pupils will create a high quality written outcome and parents will be invited in to read them.

School value focus: Independence and Creativity

Learning Experience Outcome

Children will produce a high quality and creative narrative, which will be displayed in a folder along with other dinosaur related work completed both at school and at home. The children will read their story to their parents during an outcome event held in the woodland area of the school. Date TBC (but will be after Easter).

Maths

During this half term, year 4 children will develop further their knowledge and understanding of fractions, whilst year 3 pupils will continue their learning on multiplicative reasoning (multiplication and division). They will be using resources and pictures to help their conceptual understanding. We are continuing to develop a mastery approach to our teaching, where the children are required to justify the reasoning for their answers. We will also be developing the children’s ability to write about their understanding of what they notice, we call this journaling. We ask that all children practice their times tables at home as often as possible.

Home Learning: All children will have weekly spelling and maths tasks. In addition to this, we are also aiming to set up ‘Read Theory’, which is an online reading program, and send out on a fortnightly basis.

In addition to this, as part of this learning experience, we are asking the children to create extra pages for their outcome folder. Children will be producing their writing in an A4 folder. Ideas for this could include:

Facts/information about dinosaurs/prehistoric times/2D artwork relating to dinosaurs.

This homework is due in on: Tuesday 17^th April 2018

Literacy

Throughout the six-week learning experience (we will continue until two weeks after Easter), the children will be expected to write a short story based on the topic of Dinosaurs. There will be an emphasis on using a high level of description. We will also be focusing on including dialogue (speech) and punctuating it currently. The children will be basing their writing on a high quality text that will set the standard for the quality of writing we expect.

Reading at home – We expect the children to read books at home as often as possible. We encourage the idea of questioning your children about what they have read and asking them to find the evidence in the text – we have found that this process increases their comprehension skills. We are soon to introduce a new library system which will help the children select appropriate books.

Science

This term will see the children learning about animals including humans, with a particular focus on ‘Digestion’.

Computing / Spanish / PE / RE

Our focus for computing will be based around coding using an online program called ‘Scratch’. Tag Rugby and Archery are the PE activities for this half term. Spanish lessons will be based on family and simple conversations and RE will be based on the Easter Story.

Thanks, Unit 3 team