Swarcliffe Primary School

Our Staff

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Summer 2: How was the World discovered?

Welcome back to Swarcliffe Primary. We hope you all had a fantastic Easter and are excited to start our new topic. Our topic this half term revolves all around famous explorers with an in-depth study of Ernest Shackleton and his expedition to the Antarctic. This half term is also incredibly exciting as in the final week we will be taking part in our school camp with the Outdoors People.

English 

Our book this half term is Ice Trap: a historical recount of Ernest Shackleton’s famous journey aboard the Endurance and the challenges he and his crew faced. The first piece of writing we will do will be a letter home from the stowaway on board the Endurance (Perce Blackburrow). We will aim to first build our ideas through using the FANTASTICs. We will then use the ideas to build a range of different sentence types to create our informal letter. After this, we will be writing a historical recount text all about the historic expedition. We will challenge ourselves to use parenthesis and adverbials to create a suitable informative recount. 

Spellings Focus we are continuing to use Spelling Shed to deliver spellings.

Maths

Our maths this half term starts with time. We will build on our knowledge from year 2 to eventually tell time to the minute. We know this will be tricky, but we are more than confident that we will succeed. Once we have cracked time we will start to look at fractions and decimals. Our first step will be to identify tenths as fractions and decimals before moving on to hundredths. We will then continue looking at decimals and by the end of the half term we will be able to compare and order different decimals and round to the nearest whole number.

History:

Our history over the coming weeks is based around the golden age of exploration. We will study four significant explorers and look in detail at what they discovered and when. This will then lead us to look at the Spanish Armada and the role that some of these explorers had to play in this. Our final history session is all about our important person this half term Ernest Shackleton.

Science:

Our science topic will last the whole of our summer term and is animals and living things. We will learn how to classify different animals based on their characteristics, identify the difference between vertebrates and invertebrates and create our own classification key. Once this is complete it will be time to learn about the different environments that living things exist in and discuss the human impact on these locations.

DT:

In DT, we will be creating a moving mechanism book based on the journey of the Endurance and its crew. First, we will look at the different linkages and then identify which we will need to complete specific jobs. Finally, in a small group we will create our final piece.