Rowan Class

A warm welcome back to our Rowan Class!

Our school theme this half term is ‘I can change the world!’ With a strong focus in the media at the moment on the effects of plastics in the oceans, we will be looking at how we are contributing to this, the effect this is having on our oceans and marine wildlife, and what we can do to reduce our use of plastic, to help save our oceans. Our class text in English is the fantastically illustrated ‘One World’ by Michael Foreman, and we will be looking at clips from the WWF and Blue Planet II, to understand the impact humans are having on the Earth and what we can do to live more sustainably. Particularly in English, we will be looking at writing informational texts about the effects of plastics in the ocean and writing persuasive letters to our Prime Minister about what we can do as a country, to help reduce our plastic usage.

Our Maths and Geography will also focus on analysing population data and how the growing population has had an effect on how the UK has changed over time in terms of physical and human geography. Our study will then take us into looking at non-renewable and renewable energy sources, and how this is one way we can live more sustainably as a growing population.

In Science, we will be focussing this half term on forces. To link to our ‘I can change the world’ focus, we will be looking at influential scientists, in particular the work of Isaac Newton. We will be carrying out lots of experiments to test the effects of different forces such as gravity, air resistance and water resistance. We will even be making and testing our own parachutes!

In Art, we will be looking the work of Henri Matisse and his collage work, known as his ‘cut out’ collection. We will be looking at how he created his cut out pieces, and using these as inspiration to create our own abstract pieces based on inspiring others to save the planet. We will take our ideas from different ‘save the planet’ posters.

Our homework will remain as the ‘pick n mix’ style, but with a focus on ‘I can change the the world.’  Our school focus this half term is handwriting. We will be carefully focusing on handwriting across all subjects, and each morning the children will have handwriting practice, based on writing in their neatest handwriting, sentences around our topic. We will have a strong focus on using the letter join style letters, that each child will have stuck in their handwriting book as a clear guide for forming their letters.