Spring 2019
Welcome to the Spring Term! We have lots of exciting things planned for this term, including our class assembly on 25th January! Our main topic for the first half term is Space and in the second half we begin our local history and geography topic with a special focus on Egglestone Abbey.
Literacy
Our class book is Cosmic by Frank Cottrell Boyce.
This is a very amusing book, as the main character (Liam) gets himself into all sorts of amusing but also slightly worrying situations! He even ends up completely doomed in space after pretending to be the dad of his friend Florida!
We are writing emails, diary entries, leaflets, conversations and many other exciting things!
In the second half of the spring term we will be writing our own book about Egglestone Abbey, which you will be able to purchase! As part of this we will be learning all about degrees of possibility, revising proper and common nouns and looking at the organisational features of non-chronological texts. We will also be writing our own ghost stories based around the abbey!
Maths
We will be covering formal methods for short and long multiplication and also for division. We will then move onto fractions and our final topic will be decimals and percentages.
Science
We are using our celestial buddies to help us to learn all about the different planets. We are also having a whole school ‘Space Camp’ on Thursday 31st and Friday 1st February. Each class will move round the school and find out lots of different things about space. It will be ‘out of this world!”
Our topic in the second half of the term is ‘animals including humans’
History and geography
We are so excited about our history project! Mr Min has challenged us to research Egglestone Abbey to create a book for other children to read. We will be visiting the abbey and planning our route to get there. Watch this space!
Art
In art we are combining the work of two abstract artists (Jackson Pollack and Peter Thorpe) with very different techniques. Jackson Pollack (1912 -1956) is who is credited with inventing a technique called ‘drip painting’ where he would use different tools to drip, pour and splatter paint onto a canvas and would spread his canvas on the floor so that he could feel much more part of the painting.
We are considering Peter Thorpe as he has created a number of spaced-themed abstract pieces of work using up paint that he would have thrown away.
Peter Thorpe
After our space topic, we will be studying the work of Turner. In 2020, he visited our region and was captivated by the local landcsape (including Egglestone Abbey). In 2020, his face and one of his paintings are being used for the new £20.00 note. We are going gto create our own ‘Bank Of Barnard Castle’ note with our faces and the abbey in the background.