Learning experience

Please find the details of our intended learning experience for the next 6 weeks: ‘#PrestonRocks'

Following the success of our ‘No Limits? No Future?’ Learning Experience, children will build on their knowledge of marine life and take a more in-depth look at the impact of plastic pollution on our oceans. As a hook, the children of Unit 4 will meet with staff from the Devon Wildlife Trust who will challenge the children to help Torbay rethink the use of single-use plastics. To do this, the children will write to persuade the public of Torbay through the use of open-letters, which will be published online. To publicise the work of the children, we will use the power of social media by painting rocks with useful hints on how to address the issue of single-use plastic. These rocks, which will feature the hashtag #PrestonRocks, will be hidden around Torbay in the hope that the public will find them and share them on social media.

Maths

During this half term, children will develop their knowledge of fractions, decimals, percentages and properties of shapes. The children will be expected to use their prior understanding of mathematical concepts to assist them in solving a range of mathematical problems. The children will be challenged to become more fluent with their skills, which include multiplication tables and related division facts. There will be a particular focus on ensuring the children reason with their responses.

Literacy

Through the six week learning experience, the children will be expected to write a persuasive letter with the purpose of persuading the people of Torbay to rethink their use of single-use plastic. As always, the children will be encouraged to read a range of quality texts as these experiences broaden their vocabulary and develop their awareness of more complex punctuation and sentence structures.

Home Learning

As an ongoing task for this half term, the children will be given a stone which they are to paint at home and hide somewhere in Torbay. We ask that children take a photo of their work and note where it is hidden to share in school. We will be monitoring on social media any that are found. Weekly homework tasks are to be completed on Sumdog, TT Rockstars, MyMaths and Read Theory. In addition to this, spellings will be set weekly.

Our Value Focus: Teamwork

Throughout all our work this half term, children will use and apply the value of Teamwork.

Science

This unit of work is based on classifying living things in an environment. During this term, children will be able to sort and group animals based on their features, using examples as a guide. They will learn about Carl Linnaeus and his development of his classification system. The children will place animals into given groups based on certain characteristics and will design a creature with a specific set of characteristics. Within the unit, we will learn about types of microorganisms- which ones are good and which ones are harmful to humans.

PE / Art / Spanish / RE

In PE, this half term, children will explore gymnastics. At the end of this half term children will perform both as a group and individual in a small gymnastic performance to the rest of their class.

In Spanish, the children will be learning how to talk about everyday items they might carry in their back packs. We shall also look at how Easter is celebrated in Spain and how it is a culturally important religious festival for Spain and many other Spanish speaking countries.

In RE, we will continue to explore creation stories across several different religions. This will enable us to compare and contrast the similarities and differences across different belief systems,

We have a child in school with a peanut allergy. We kindly request that children do not bring peanut products into school. Thank you.

Dates for your diary

26^th February – Visit from Devon Wildlife Trust.

29^th March – Evidence of homework to be shared in school.

1^st April – Open-letters to be shared online.