Spring 1
English (Literacy Tree)
We start Spring 1 by hearing rumours of a crash landing in our school grounds from Mr Brown and all seek to explore what we can find. We soon realise that the creature that has landed is an alien called 'Beegu' and proceed to explore their story by Alexis Deacon, which tells the tale of a lost alien finding friendship and acceptance on Earth. Inspired by Beegu, each child will create and design their own sock puppet alien, and then practice their descriptive writing by crafting a character description of their creation.
Towards the end of Spring 1 we shift our focus onto writing to inform. This is achieved in the form of a booklet that the children create, using their knowledge of octopuses. Children acquire this knowledge from a variety of sources and we also study the book 'Leo & The Octopus' by Isabelle Marinov & Chris Nixon. This is a touching tale about a young boy named Leo who finds it difficult to connect with others until he meets an octopus at the aquarium. The octopus becomes his unique friend, teaching Leo about acceptance, understanding, and the beauty of forming connections despite differences. This heartwarming story beautifully portrays themes of friendship and empathy.
Maths
In the first half of our Spring term, children will explore addition and subtraction facts within 10. This area of learning develops fluency in addition and subtraction facts within 10, and relates them to everyday situations around us. Children learn to make connections between real-life contexts, involving quantities to 10, and the expressions and equations which can be used to represent them.
We then progress onto the numbers 11-19 where the children will develop an understanding that these numbers are made up of '10 and a bit'. They become confident in decomposing these numbers into their constituent tens and ones parts, and in combining tens and ones parts.
Phonics (Little Wandle)
In Spring 1, children build upon their knowledge of Phase 5 and explore many alternative sounds and also learn new 'tricky words'
*If you are unsure on how to pronounce some of these GPCs then please ask your child's class teacher and we can support you so that you can support your child.