In English we will begin a new text for both our whole class reading and our writing sessions: ‘Tom’s Midnight Garden’ by Philippa Pearce. The story is about a twelve-year-old Tom who, while staying with his aunt and uncle, slips out at midnight and discovers a magical, mysterious Victorian garden where he befriends a young girl named Hatty. In our whole class reading, we will work on our fluency as well as continuing to develop our ability to retrieve information from a text. We will continue to learn how to make inferences to help us understand a character’s actions and how to ask questions to improve our understanding of texts. We will make predictions about what might happen from details the author has given, learning how to justify these predictions with evidence from the text. In our writing, we will explore a range of grammatical devices, including: dashes, hyphens, conjunctions, complex and compound sentences, expanded noun phrases, relative clauses, paragraphing, subjunctive form and passive voice. We will then apply this knowledge to both instructional writing and narrative writing linked to the text.

In Maths we will be continuing to develop our understanding of place value and the four operations, as well as extending our knowledge of fractions and their decimal equivalents. We will continue to cycle back and review our work on addition, subtraction, multiplication and division while building on this prior knowledge to extend our written methods. We will develop our fraction work by looking at how to multiply and divide fractions, as well as recapping the methods for addition and subtractions. We will also spend some time looking at how to find fractions of amounts. We will begin to investigate ratio and how this links to our work on fractions and decimals. We will start to look at percentages, as well as spending some time on area, perimeter and volume and looking at statistics. To tie this all together, as we work through, we will be applying everything we learn to word based problems, which will help us develop our reasoning and problem-solving.

In History, we will be learning about the Industrial Revolution. This unit builds on from our work on the Transatlantic Slave Trade. During the ‘Transatlantic Slave Trade’ unit, the children learned how Britain imported and exported goods at this time. When the children learn about the significance of cotton during the Industrial Revolution, they will understand that much of the cotton used in Britain had been imported from America and India, and often grown by enslaved workers. During this unit, the children will look at the similarities and differences between the impact that the Industrial Revolution had on the lives of the rich and the poor and how it was during this period that the key inventions of the industrial revolution were first created: the cotton mill, the steam engine, and the train. The children will learn that through harnessing fossil fuels to power engines, factories and machines, the Industrial Revolution fundamentally changed the way that human beings live. During this unit, we will focus in on the role that the iron and textile industries played in the Industrial Revolution, as well as the development of the steam engine and steam train. The children will not only learn about the economic and technological benefits of the Industrial Revolution but will also explore the social context, with a focus on how life changed for those who began working in factories during this time.  We will finish our work on this unit by focusing in on the treatment of working children at this time. time. 

In Geography, we will be learning about East Anglia, Yorkshire and The Midlands. This will provide us with an excellent opportunity to look at some local geography and explore how our immediate area has changed over time. We will build on our understanding of UK geography and look at how local geographical issues link to national geographical issues. Throughout this unit children will look at how human activity can change and shape landscapes. We will learn how mining in the Midlands provided resources for industrial development and link our work to our study of the Industrial Revolution in History. The Ribblehead Viaduct and the Humber Bridge will also be studied as examples of how people have changed landscapes. This concept of interconnection is a strand running through the geography curriculum and children will understand more about how humans and the environment are connected as they move through the curriculum.

In Science, we will build on our work from Year 3 – Cycles in Nature. We willl look at the life cycles of plants and animals in our local area, working scientifically to observe the life cycle of a local tree and the animals that interact with it. Developing this knowledge, pupils will then look at the life cycles of mammals, amphibians, insects and birds in more detail. We will study the details of these life cycles and will consider the various stages, including metamorphosis in insects and amphibians and reproduction. Specifically, we will study chimpanzees, newts, bumblebees and cuckoos. When studying cuckoos, we will learn how the behaviour of the cuckoo differs from other animals, as it places its own egg inside a nest belonging to another bird rather than incubate and then care for the chick itself. This unit also covers reproduction of flowering plants. We will learn how a flower contains male and female reproductive organs and recognise the importance of pollination, which transfers pollen from the anther to a stigma within a flower, allowing fertilisation to take place. We will also investigate the importance of insects such as bees in the pollination process of flowering plants. In this unit children will find out about the life and work of Sir David Attenborough and Dame Jane Goodall. We will have the opportunity to undertake research into their work and how they studied and communicated their findings about the natural world. We will be able to link this research to our English work, when we will write short biographies outlining the interesting lives led by Attenborough and Goodall.

In Art, we will study The Impressionists - a group of painters in France who exhibited pictures together in the 1870s and 1880s. This unit introduces the Impressionists through the work of Monet, exploring how they broke from the norm by painting outside (en plein air), using rapid brushwork and painting landscapes showing the effects of the weather. By looking at the work of Renoir we will learn how the Impressionists used developing scientific knowledge to inform the way they painted. We will then look at the work of Cassatt who painted many pictures of domestic scenes of women and children, influenced by Japanese woodcuts. In response to this we will then paint en plein air, practise using broken brushstrokes and draw modern café scenes. 

We will then look at work of three important artists, seen as Post-Impressionists: Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin before replicating his patchy brushwork using collage to create our own picture of the mountain. 

Finally, in RE we will investigate how Brahman and atman influence the way a Hindu lives their life. We will learn that Brahman (the one Supreme Being or cosmic principle) and Atman (the true self in each human), is a bit like:

• God the fire giving out sparks 

• God as sunlight glinting off waves 

• God looking out through human eyes 

• The ultimate connection or unity behind all things



We will make links to what we have learnt about other religions and look for the similarities as well as the differences. We will discover that the word ‘Hindu’ comes from Sindhu, a river in Northwest India, which in Sanskrit means ‘a vast expanse of water’. Hinduism itself is vast, a collection of ancient traditions with more emphasis on doing the right thing than agreeing a particular creed. Many Hindus call their tradition Sanatana dharma, the eternal law, which governs all irrespective of belief, and which points to origins beyond human history. We will learn that Hinduism has no single founder or scripture, but is continually refreshed by living gurus, whose claim to experience God, drives others to seek them out as sources of guidance. We will look at how Hinduism is a wide variety of beliefs and practices that can be confusing but that some ideas are fairly constant. For example, Hindus believe that: there is one Supreme Being or life principle underlying the universe (BRAHMAN); all living beings are connected to this Supreme Being (ATMAN) and finally that time is cyclical, with humans living, dying and being re-incarnated