Class Plan | PDF

Welcome to the Oystercatchers class page. I am Mr Collett and I teach the class all week, with help from Mrs White on a Thursday morning. Please feel free to speak to us at the classroom door at drop-off or pick up times, or send an email to admin@starcross-primary.devon.sch.uk.

Literacy
Our first literacy topic this term will be Grimm’s Fairy Tales. We have started by talking about familiar fairy tales and will move on to read some more obscure stories, before writing our own versions.

Our Class Story is The Sheep Pig by Dick King-Smith, a heart-warming tale of a piglet who dreams of becoming a sheepdog and proves that determination and courage can defy expectations.

Every day we will develop our reading skills through Guided Reading where we will explore lots of different types of texts – we are starting with some Roald Dahl poetry but will also work our way through View From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and other great texts.

We will also work on handwriting and spelling every day – you might even earn a pen licence! SpellingFrame is the website we will be practicing our spellings on weekly.

Maths
We follow the White Rose Maths programme, as well as daily flashbacks to ensure that previous learning in embedded. We are starting with numbers to 100 and then 1000, counting in different increments, and practicing our place value.

The children need to keep working on their times tables. All areas of maths are much easier to learn when that knowledge is already secure – Doodlemaths and Times Tables Rock Stars are excellent ways of supporting this at home.

Science
We are starting to learn about Forces and Magnets. The children will learn about contact and non-contact forces, including friction and magnetism. We will investigate frictional and magnetic forces, and identify parts of a magnet and magnetic materials.

History
In history we are learning about early humans, from the Stone Age to the Iron Age and all the eras in between. We will place these time periods on numberlines, look at the developments in technology in each time, and learn how people lived, hunted and gathered, and eventually farmed. We will also take a detailed look at Stonehenge and Skara Brae.

Art
This term our theme is “people and places”, with an artist study on L.S. Lowry and his industrial landscapes full of people. We will be focusing on sketching and painting the human form in different ways.

Geography
This term we will locate countries and cities, and use grid references, compass points and latitude and longitude. We will learn about the layers of the Earth and plate tectonics and discover the five major climate zones.

PE
In PE we will be learning to play Tag Rugby and Cricket. We are hoping to be outside on the playground as much as possible in the autumn term, but as the weather gets colder please make sure you have PE kit available for both inside and outside PE, just in case! PE days are Tuesdays and Thursdays for Oystercatchers.

ICT
In ICT, as well as familiarising ourselves with Times Tables Rock Stars and SpellingFrame, we will be learning how to touch type, create folders to save our work into, refresh our knowledge of how to stay safe online, and start learning some coding skills.

RE
We will be learning about “Ganesh Chaturthi”. Hindus celebrate the birthday of Lord Ganesh during Ganesh Chaturthi. They pray to Ganesh to remove obstacles when starting something new and mention his name first when they perform puja to make sure nothing will get in the way of their worship and prayer.