Kingfisher Class

Dear Parents and Carers,

How lovely to welcome our new Year 3 children and Year 4 children back after the Summer break! We are really excited about the academic year ahead and would like to share a little information about what we have planned for the Autumn term. Mrs Wiseman will continue to teach on Mondays and Mrs Evans will teach the rest of the week.

Our first topic is ‘Rainforests’. Learning will include looking at the layers of the rainforest, animals and plants; we will be exploring who lives in rainforests and finding out about why conservation is important. The second topic is  ‘Paris and London- what is the difference, what’s the same?‘. More details about these topics and specific subjects will be available in the topic knowledge organisers on the school website. (Link to knowledge organisers: https://www.wilbyprimary.org.uk/Knowledge-organisers/)

In RE, under the overarching Big Question, ‘What makes some people an inspiration to others? How does believing Jesus is their saviour inspire Christians to save and serve others?’, we will look at how Christians see Jesus as their Saviour and investigate what this means. In the second half of the Autumn term, we will look at why Muslims call Muhammad the ‘seal of the prophets’.

Our learning in Science is about electricity and circuits followed by discovering more about sound. In Music with Mr Haynes, the children will be continuing to play recorders and learning more about notation and rhythm.  For ICT, they will be furthering their coding skills and word processing.

In Literacy, we will begin the term using the book: ‘The Secret of Black Rock’ to inspire our Write Stuff lessons. Children will work towards writing part of a narrative. There will also be a big focus on Wilby’s ‘non-negotiables’ and on handwriting over the coming term. We will be focusing on the correct pencil grip, letter formation and revising the joins. A love of reading will continue to be promoted by having a class reader (called ‘Pugs of The Frozen North’) and also by doing guided group reading sessions each week. The guided sessions will also focus on the  ‘VIPERS’ comprehension skills: Vocabulary knowledge, Inference, Prediction, Explaining what you have read, Retrieval, Summarising & sequencing. Please can we ask that you also continue to read regularly with your child, discuss what they have read, and sign their orange reading log book with any comments. Although we can’t always listen to each child read individually on a daily basis in LKS2, we do check the log books frequently, chat to pupils and help them to choose new books often. We also closely monitor how they are doing, hear them read in group reading sessions or incidentally in lessons and will discuss with you any issues that we may pick up.

In Maths, we will continue to follow the  ‘Power Maths’ scheme and initially will be re-visiting number & place value, money, addition & subtraction, multiplication & division and times tables. Children will be able to make use of manipulatives in lessons and will be encouraged to draw and use formal written methods to work out maths problems.

In Art & Design this term, with Mrs Berkley, the children will be drawing with charcoal and chalks (big scale trees!), learning about tints and shades to paint - and then combining the skills learnt, children will create mixed media rainforest collages. We will look at the work of Suffolk artist Jelly Green who combines conservation with art, and also the work of Henri Rousseau. Design & Technology in the second half of the Autumn term will be Textiles: practising the skills of stitching, sewing buttons, decoration and applique in order to design and make Christmas themed items.

HOMEWORK:

On Mondays, spellings, sentence and times tables homework will be set. This must be completed every week and handed in on the following Monday. Regular, weekly spellings and times tables tests will also take place on a Monday.

Spellings homework in Kingfisher Class

Please could your child learn their spellings at least four times each week. Spellings will be tested each Monday. Children must bring spelling books (containing their sentence homework for that week) into school every Monday

The following approach is a good way to practice their spellings:

1. Look at the spelling-what spelling blend do they recognise? Are there words within a word? etc.
2. Look, say and write the spelling,
3. Try to write the spelling without looking at how to spell it and finally,
4. Check and correct their spelling.

They will be given two Look, Cover, Write and Check sheets to practise their spellings on which are stuck in their spellings homework book. These sheets show the children the correct way to form and join their letters. Children should really try to make their handwriting on these sheets the best that it can be. They should complete these sheets on two different days and then further practice (on at least two more days) should be done on any other paper you have at home-in the same way.

Sentence homework:

Your child will also need to choose three spellings to write in a sentence. They must write in pencil (unless they have been told to write in pen-in which case, a school handwriting pen will have been given to your child) and underline the spelling that they learning within the sentence.  

TIMES TABLES: We will follow the times table system, where pupils move from colourband to colour band, learning new times tables as they go. (Please see the separate sheet we will send you about the Colour Band System.) Year 4 pupils will take the Government Multiplication Check next Summer, we will focus on doing timed tests on a Monday. Pupils will be allowed 6 seconds per question in line with the Govt. test. Although this might seem quite ‘scary’ at first, 6 seconds is in fact plenty of time to answer questions when facts are known securely. We’ll be teaching children and giving them lots of support and encouragement in lessons too. Each Monday, children will know which multiplication facts to learn / focus on for the following week. Please look in the children’s yellow books to see which they should be learning. (*More information / weblinks to help you support your child’s times tables learning, practice and testing will be sent home separately-this will give much more information about our approach to learning and testing progress in times tables.)

On Thursdays, an additional homework task will be set which should be handed in the following Wednesday. This could be a variety of different things over the term. Most often, it is linked to maths but may be linked to English, our topic, art or it may be to research something linked to another area of the curriculum.

PE: Please ensure children come to school in their PE kits on a Wednesday: blue or black shorts / joggers; a Wilby PE T shirt, trainers and a school jumper. Can all PE kit be clearly named - thank you!

MORNING SNACKS & WATER BOTTLES: Please can you send children to school with a fruit snack for morning break. Some have been hungry and we do not have much left over fruit from KS1 to go around. LKS2 and KS2 children should really bring in their own fruit snacks. Please can you send in your child with a named water bottle daily. Thank you.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any concerns about well-being or educational needs - and do continue to use Class Dojo to contact us or phone to make an appointment if you would prefer an opportunity to discuss anything further.

Kindest regards,

Mrs Evans and Mrs Wiseman

LINK TO SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE ORGANISERS:https://www.wilbyprimary.org.uk/Knowledge-organisers/)