Welcome to our class page! My name is Miss Tamsyn Mann and I am the class teacher based in Razorbills full time. We also have Mrs Kerry South who is the teaching assistant; she is shared with Puffins – Year 6. We also have Miss Carrie Strutt who covers my teacher time out of class.

On this page, I will outline what our Spring Term curriculum looks like. If you have any questions about this or anything else, please do not hesitate to contact me; my door is always open. Alternatively, you can use the Razorbills email address: razorbills@starcross-primary.devon.sch.uk

Our over-arching topic this term is: Ancient Mayans

Literacy

In Literacy, we start by developing travel brochures. This links to our topic as we base the travel brochures on Mexico. The children complete their own research on Mexico and develop their brochures from there after practising the taught elements.

Our second topic is graphic novels. This is based on the Mayan myth of the Hero Twins against the Lords of Death. The children will develop their own versions of this story in groups.

Next we will look at poetry using the poem ‘Where my Wellies take me.’ This will link to our topic as we will base it around where the Mayans were.

Maths

Our first topic for maths is: short multiplication and division. Following this, we will move onto ‘area and scaling’ and ‘using decimals with counting.’ For each area we will be discussing place value as this is important in many areas of maths.

Also, the children continuing to learn their times tables is key. If the children know them by year 5, all these areas of maths are much easier to learn as that knowledge is already secure.

Science

Our science for this half term is finishing our unit of ‘forces’ started in the Autumn Term. The next unit will be ‘materials.’ We are lucky to have a visit from South West Water to remind the children of the water cycle learnt in Year 4 and to talk about filtration which comes in this unit of science.

Geography

Our geography is linked to our Mayans topic as we will be comparing that region to our own. Our over-arching question is: Why did the Ancient Mayans settle in this area? We will revisit key vocabulary such as: the tropics, hemispheres, equator, Arctic and Antarctic circles. We will be moving onto climate zones, biomes and vegetation belts. We will also look at features of the land.

History

As previously mentioned, our overarching topic is the Ancient Mayans. Each lesson we will be asking a question and answering it as we go along. It is an in-depth study of the history of this civilisation.

Art

We are doing printing, which is linked to our topic again. Our focus artist is Andrea Lauren who uses lino to print animals and plants. We used her as inspiration to create our own prints using animals and plants from the Mexico area. We also created some printing based on the Ancient Mayan art.

PE

Our topics for this term are: cricket, dance, gymnastics and handball.

ICT:

We are always using the Internet to complete research in different subjects, learning how to search for information safely and efficiently. We have been researching Mexico initially. We will use Publisher to create our own brochures.  Following this, we are creating graphs on Excel to show our science results in a different format.

French

We have a specialist language teacher coming in from Dawlish Community College to do our French currently.

Music

We are following a scheme on Music Angels currently looking at harmonising and singing in a round.

RE

The RE looked at so far has been in Christianity and Hinduism.