Mars class - Brabourne Church of England Primary School

Miss Stevens, Mrs Burnett, Mrs Riggs and Mrs Hopkins are Mars’ teaching team. We are also fortunate to work with PE coaches – Coach Hayley and Coach Ben.

Welcome to the Summer term! We hope you all had a restful and enjoyable Easter holidays and are ready for some learning and fun in the sunshine.

Our Topic for term 3 and 4 is ‘Into the Woods.’ This explores the key concept of Change and Continuity, investigating the key question: ‘Why is woodland so important to life?’. For English, we will be reading the core texts ‘The Tin Forest’ by Helen Ward and ‘Into the Forest’ by Anthony Browne to help us to explore this question.

In Science, we will be studying plants. We will be comparing plants, to notice how they are the same or different and we will be dissecting and labeling the parts of plants. We will be looking at the life cycle of plants, which will link well with our previous learning on life cycles of animals including humans. We will be studying Judaism in R.E and we will be answering the question ‘Who is Jewish and what do they believe?’. We will be learning to create media using Stop Motion for Computing.

The main focus for home learning in Mars class is daily reading. Please encourage your child to read each day at home; your support with this plays a huge part in your child’s progress. Please record in the reading record book when you hear your child read, we celebrate with children when they read regularly. For some extra Maths practice, you can encourage your Y1 child to count in steps of 2s, 5s and 10s and your Y2 child, to rehearse the x2, x5 and x10.

The spelling focus will be continuing to learn the common exception words. These are words that children should be using regularly in reading and writing. We will not be formally testing spellings each week, we would rather spelling to be learnt organically, encouraging the use of words in context, such as within dictated sentences.

We would appreciate Reading Records in school every day. They are checked in school each morning. It is the best way to keep in contact with us so please do use them. .

PE will continue to be on a Wednesday and Thursday this term. Children should come to school in smart, school PE kits on these days. We are also very fortunate to have Tom for outdoor learning on Thursday. This will be in addition to PE. Please ensure your child has a change of clothes including long trousers/puddle-suit and wellies. Even if the sun is shining, children need a change of clothes for forest learning and stream dipping.

Please ensure that your children have named water bottles in school every day and also a spring lightweight jacket. Please apply sun cream in the morning before school.

If you need to talk to one of us, we are always happy to help. You can catch us on the gate at pick up or email us (directly or through the office).

Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to another happy, successful term.

Mars Team