Head Teacher: Miss Siobhan Leonard (BA Hons, QTS, NPQH)Address: Royds Lane, Rothwell, Leeds LS26 0BJTel: (0113) 2828182Website: www.rothwellstmarys.co.ukE-mail: head@rothwellstmarys.org.uk

Dear families,

Welcome back to school after a hopefully a lovely Christmas break – we hope you’ve all had a restful two weeks!

Continuing on from last term, we strongly encourage independence for the class, from taking responsibility for their own possessions to coming into class on their own. This includes all children ensuring that their reading book is put into our reading book box every morning and making sure that their spelling book is in school every Monday, ready for our spelling test. As well, please ensure that comprehension homework books are in school on Mondays.

With this in mind, let’s look at what we will be learning this half term.

Our topic for this half term will be ‘What a Wonderful World’. In this, we will be exploring the continents and oceans of the world, looking at how our world is made up, where we live and how we are affecting our world. Should any child want to

explore this topic more at home, we always encourage extra research and would love to share what they have found.

Our R.E topic for the half term is ‘The Good News’. In this topic, we will be looking at the miracles of Jesus and how they spread, how sadness can become joy, and saying thank you for the amazing blessings we have been given. Collective Worship will be led by the children every Thursday afternoon at 2:40pm. All families are invited to come along at this time to join us in our child-led collective worship.

As always, reading remains an important part of your child’s education and is an essential aid for developing your child’s word building, vocabulary and understanding of structure and composition. Reading at home is a great tool in helping to support your child’s understanding and interpretation of texts. Please indicate when you have read with your child in their reading record. Carrying on from last term, we will be continuing with our reading challenges for our home reading books. These must be completed

before we can move any child onto a new book. As a reminder to all parents, please make sure that your child is filling out their challenge themselves. As well, to further develop their reading skill, we are asking all children to read a few pages in depth each night rather than reading the whole book at once. Thank you for your support and positive attitude towards our reading challenges so far this year, we are already seeing great strides in children’s reading comprehension! This is also supported by the weekly comprehension homework sent home. As a reminder to all parents, please feel free to make any notes regarding questions that children may find more difficult, as we will then work on this style more during class comprehensions.

Our SPaG work will continue to look at using different tenses in our work, using both regular and irregular verbs in the past tense. As well, we will be focusing on homophones and contractions, which will benefit children’s spelling as we move to advancing written work. This will be supported by our writing in English where we will be focusing on planning, drafting, editing and publishing all our writing. To advance our writing, we will be continuing our weekly spelling test on a Monday. New spellings will be given out on a Monday for the test the following week and can be found in their spelling books.

In Maths, we are developing ‘Maths Mastery’ and mastering all mathematical concepts. In this term, we will be focusing on multiplication and division. Our main focus will be the 2, 3, 5 and 10 times tables. From there we will continue to build on our fact families and understanding how the best methods for multiplication and division. As well, we will continue to revise and revisit addition and subtraction. Should you want to give further support at home, focusing on adding and subtracting small amounts mentally would be a useful place to start. This includes asking for five more and less, two more and less, and ten more and less. Working in patterns of adding 2, 3, 5 and 10 will also help expand children’s pattern-recognising skills for multiplication and division. As well, we will be working with resources from White Rose Maths Hubs which are available online to support any further understanding at home or for your exploration.

Our topic in Science is ‘Food Chains’. In this topic, we will be exploring the difference between the diets of different animals, why they eat different types of food, what we call different diets, and how to express this information in a food chain. We will be developing our scientific understanding through carrying out scientific enquires and exploring the diets of different animals that we see in our environment.

P.E will remain on a Monday and Wednesday morning and taught by Premier Sports. As we have now completed a term of changing into PE kits, we would like to say thank you for remembering to send your children to school in their school uniform on these days.

Lastly, please ensure children have an identifiable water bottle with

them in school. These will be sent home on a Friday.

We are very much looking forward to the next half term and are excited for the six weeks ahead of us!

Kindest thanks,Miss Nicholson and Mrs Mace