English

This term, our text is The Snowman by Raymond Briggs and our focus is writing our own version of this wordless story. We started off by immersing ourselves in the text, using drama and making stick puppets to act out the story. We practised using phonics, capital letters, full stops and fingers spaces to write captions for parts of the story. We also learned about when to use question marks and exclamation marks. After breaking down the story into beginning, middle and end, we all made up our own adventure for the snowman and James to have together. Finally, we wrote our story!

Maths

This term, we started off by consolidating our knowledge of place value. We then moved on to addition and subtraction, using counters and ten frames and cubes to represent numbers. We have been using ten frames to add and subtract and to find all eight number sentences in number fact families. It is really important to know our number bonds to 10, to help us with all the other Maths learning we will be doing in the future. For this reason, we have been playing lots of number bond games. Our favourite game is when we each have a post-it note with a number to 10 on it and we have to find our partner to make a number bond to 10!

This term, we have also been learning all about 2-D and 3-D shapes. We have revised the names of shapes and we have carried out an investigation to see which 3-D shapes stack and which 3-D shapes roll. We discovered that some shapes can stack and roll, depending on which way up they are. We have also created shape patterns.

RE

We have been doing lots of different learning in RE this term! We started off learning about people who help us - first, people who help us at home and school, and then people who help in the Church. We learned about all the different important roles people have in the Church and we used role play to act out those roles.

In November, we had a whole day of RE, looking at the world faith, Hinduism, and an important Hindu festival called Diwali. We watched some videos about Diwali and read the story of Rama and Sita. We then wrote and illustrated the story. In the afternoon, we made paper lanterns and clay candle holders to celebrate Diwali!

In December, we have been learning all about Advent, a time for waiting. We thought about what we are waiting for and how waiting makes us feel. As a class, we made an Advent calendar of kindness, and we open a door each day to find out how we can show kindness today.

Project

In project, our topic this term in 'What do people celebrate?' We started off by creating a mind map of all the celebrations we could think of. Our leaning has been focused on Guy Fawkes Night, Remembrance Day, Black History Month, Advent and Christmas. For a Remembrance project, we followed a war-time recipe for an egg-less sponge cake. We discovered that people could not get many ingredients and we had to use the jam sparingly. We thought our cake was yummy and delicious! Recently, we have been comparing Christmas toys of the past and present. We have realised that the materials that have been used to make toys can often give us a clue about when they were made.

Art

In Art, we have been focusing on textiles this term. We looked at two famous collage artists, Eric Carle and Kurt Schwitters, and we watched a video of how Eric Carle created his collages. We thought his studio was very messy! We used some of his techniques to create collages of poppies for Remembrance Day - we cut paper, tissue paper and fabric, layered it up and even drew over the top using pens! We also made collages of the snowman. In order to make a scarf for the snowman, we also had a go at weaving paper. We found it very tricky to remember whether the paper needed to go under or over!