Spring 1

Writing

This half term, we will be building on our fiction writing skills by writing our second narrative. We will be exploring the wonderful book 'Stone Age Boy' by Satoshi Kitamura in which a young boy travels back and discovers a whole new way of living. We will be building on our knowledge of how to use paragraphs, creative effective, descriptive scene setting, speech and narrative structures. 

We will be using our Rainbow Grammar card to build in sentence structures such as non-finite clauses and three predicate sentences. 

Reading

This term, our reading will focus on true or false statements and asking questions. These are essential skills which will help our children apply their previous reading skills, such as skimming and scanning.

We will be using the following texts during our writing and reading lessons:

Stone Age Boy and The non fiction book 'Stone Age'.

For our class reader we will be enjoying 'The Wild Way Home' by Sophie Kirtley. 

When Charlie’s longed-for brother is born with a serious heart condition, Charlie’s world is turned upside down. Upset and afraid, Charlie flees the hospital and makes for the ancient forest on the edge of town. There Charlie finds a boy floating face-down in the stream, injured, but alive. But when Charlie sets off back to the hospital to fetch help, it seems the forest has changed. It’s become a place as strange and wild as the boy dressed in deerskins. For Charlie has unwittingly fled into the Stone Age, with no way to help the boy or return to the present day. Or is there?

What follows is a wild, big-hearted adventure as Charlie and the Stone Age boy set out together to find what they have lost – their courage, their hope, their family and their way home.

Writing.

In English this half term, we will firstly be writing a biography of the African emperor Septimius Severus. We will research facts about his life during our history lessons and use these to write paragraphs about the different aspects of his life.

Our second unit will complement our art project 'what is art?'. In this unit we will write a persuasive text to persuade our audience that text can be art! 

In Rainbow Grammar sessions, we will use subordinating conjunctions and fronted adverbials to enhance our biographies and our persuasive writing.

Reading

Our reading skill this half term is 'matching'. We will build on skills learned during Autumn 1 to skim, scan and close read texts to enable us to match information correctly. We will use information from our history topic of The Romans during our reading lessons.