This term our class text will continue to be 'The Jungle Book' by Rudyard Kipling. The children will also be studying the story in our Whole Class Reading sessions. Our focus this term will be on using the text to create a letter from Mowgli to Baloo explaining why he went to live in the village after he was rejected from the wolf pack. We will be looking at the structure of a letter, continuing to explore paragraphs as well as learning about formal and informal language. 

The children will be deepening their understanding of how a sentence is constructed, building on their knowledge of how a simple sentence contains a subject and verb. They will use conjunctions to join sentences and understand how this turns a sentence into a clause. They will begin to differentiate between compound sentences which use ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘but’, and complex sentences using ‘because’, ‘when’, ‘if’, and ‘that’. 

In Maths this term Beech Class will be first learning about fractions, building on our learning of multiplication and division last term. They will find out how to find half of a shape and an amount, applying this to then finding quarters and thirds. Pupils will then look into how fractions can be equivalent, for example, 2 quarters are equal to one half. 

In a neat link with the end of the school year, we will finish with the study of Time, with children in Year1 learning to tell the time to the hour and half hour, while Year 2 will explore further and develop their skill to tell the time to quarter to and quarter past, before moving on to tell the time to the nearest 5 minutes. 

Our Science topic this term is Astronomy, which will prepare the children for their future study in Year 5. They will learn that scientists learn from each other to make new discoveries, building on the ideas of those who came before them. The children will learn the names of the planets in the solar system and begin to understand orbit and rotation. We will investigate why there is life on Earth, but not on other known plants. The children will be introduced to how rotation of the Earth gives us night and day. They will also study the phases of the moon and understand that, though our view of the moon changes through the phases, the moon itself does not change shape. 

The children will also learn about the constellations and how people long ago saw them in the skies and used them to create stories to help them understand the world. The class will finish their study of Astronomy by learning about space exploration, focusing on the International Space Station. 

Our History unit this term is called ‘Powerful Voices’, focussing on how significant people have changed the world. Our study so far has been on kings and queens, as well as important leaders. This unit helps the children learn about individuals who were not born to wield power, but who used their beliefs to try and enact change. We will investigate Rosa Parks and Dr Martin Luther King and their roles within the Civil Rights movement in the United States. We will also learn about Gandhi, who fought for political freedom and opposed British rule in India. Other figures the children will study are Malala Yousafzai, who stood up for all children to have a right to education, and Greta Thunberg, a Swedish environmental activist who raised awareness of the issue of climate change. The children will examine primary sources and analyse them. 

Our Art topic this term is Murals and Tapestries. The children will look at murals, learning what they are and how they have been painting throughout history. We will look at cave paintings, murals in churches of the Italian renaissance, as well as more modern works by Rivera and Banksy. We will study famous examples of frescoes including Michelangelo’s painting in the Sistine Chapel and Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.

The unit will finish with the children learning about tapestries, what they are and how weaving is different from embroidery. The children will learn that tapestries can tell stories and convey messages, but also have practical uses in insulating cold, draughty castles. The final piece will be a collaborative piece of work, though it will not be a mural as it will not be painted on the wall. The children will develop their skills in printing and weaving, and learn the importance of composition. 

Finally, in RE, we will be looking at the question:‘Is there a right way to worship?’ This unit brings together pupils’ learning about different organised worldviews with a focus on the ways in which people express their beliefs through worship. Through the sequence of lessons, pupils will use philosophical questioning to scrutinize what we might mean by ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, developing their critical thinking skills. Using what they have learned, pupils will reflect on the ways in which context might affect people’s approach to worship.