St Michael's Primary School And Nursery

Autumn 1

English

In Talk for Writing this term we've been inspired by the book Big Blue Whale by Nicola Davies. We used this fascinating book about blue whales to teach us how how to write a non- chronological report about a sea creature. As a class we learnt about The Brilliant Blue Whale adapted from Nicola Davies's book. We looked at the structure of the text and found that our reports needed a title, an introductory paragraph and information with these headings: Features, Habitat, Diet and Did you know? We also used this unit to help us consolidate how to write simple sentences and how to use our Everyday Toolkit: capital letters, full stops, finger spaces and letters on the line. Finally, we innovated The Brilliant Blue Whale and wrote our own reports about sharks, sea horses or octopuses.

Maths

In Maths this term we're learning all about Place Value. We began by consolidating how to accurately count to and from 20, 50 and 100. Then we learnt how we could represent numbers in different ways using lots of physical resources. Next, we looked at using Tens and ones. After this, we explored how we could compare and order objects and numbers using greater, less than and equal to. Finally, we deepened our counting skills by focusing on counting in 2s,5s, 10s and 3s.

Autumn 

English

In English this half term our focus story is Meerkat Mail by Emily Garrett. We have spent lots of time learning about Sunny and his adventures across the Kalahari Desert. We have particularly focused on the use of repetition, adjectives and effective verbs and we will be using these in our own story writing after Christmas. We have done lots of role play and text mapping to enhance our understanding and we have planned our own versions of Sunny's adventures. 

Maths

Our focus in maths has been addition and subtraction. We have used a variety of different strategies and resources in our learning to support us, including dienes, part whole models, tens frames and number lines. We are beginning to understand which strategies are more effective and which ones we are more confident in using. We have worked a lot on exchanging and using tens and ones and we will be continuing to work on this after  Christmas as we begin column addition. 

Topic

Our topic for the term has been Wacky Races and we have loved it! We have learned about Henry Ford and the mass production of the model T car, as well as designing and creating our own cars in D&T. This has been the most exciting part of our topic and the children have created the most fantastic cars which they couldn't wait to take for a test run!

Handwriting

 Please select one of the letter formation families e.g. one armed robot and practice these on each sheet. Now try writing words from the weekly spellings focusing on the letters from that family.

Extra Activities:

Mathletics - Work through tasks set by the teacher on Mathletics using their logins. https://www.mathletics.com/uk/

Times Tables Rockstars - Play gigs and festivals using their logins (Follow the link, hover over login and click 'school pupils', then type in the school postcode 'CO2 9RA' and use the children's login details. ---> https://ttrockstars.com/

Creative Writing – Remind children of the traditional tales they know and make alternative versions. These could be orally retold, acted out or written down. It could be as simple as The Three Sheep and the Big Bad Fox or The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig.

Children's University Bumper Challenge - Open the link to find a range of projects to complete while at home. These are part of a University Challenge, but can be completed as enrichment activities by everyone. ---> Enrichment Activities